More on Textures

Funny how I post yesterday's post with a couple textures applied to a photo and then look what is featured on Digital Photography School's blog? None other than this: How to Use Textures to Enhance Your Photographs

I find that the technique is quite easy to do, technically speaking, but creatively speaking it's tough (for me anyway...) to get it right. I've taken photos of textures (rocks, bricks, bark, grass) but find them hard to apply well. After reading this, I'm going to try and take photos of softer textures and see what happens. I'll also search for free ones on-line. Of course, there is always the option to purchase, I happened to find this cool site yesterday: Florabella which has some beautiful photos that can be printed and used as artwork, and you can purchase the textures the artist used.

I'd love to see what you can come up with using textures...

Tuesday Musings

Again a big break in blogging for me! I'm now at 38 weeks minus a day!! I have two newborn shoots to proof, but can't muster any energy at night to do them...so I'm falling behind a little. Oh well! I am just trying to survive the 3 weeks at home with the kids at this point in my pregnancy, and so far so good. I find that I'm relatively sane most of the day, but then I get super tired and impatient with the girls and things go downhill! I know it's because I'm tired, but it's so tough sometimes, especially when they like to take off on me when we go out shopping. But it's life and it's temporary, in a couple of weeks I'll be even more sleep deprived but cuddling my new baby girl each night!

Nothing like some pictures to pick up the energy and spirits:

Another one taken with my 100 mm Macro - I'm loving this lens!
Settings, just for fun!: f 5.0, 125, ISO 200

And these that I've added textures to... I want to print these for wall art, I'm so happy with how they turned out!

Same image from above, with texture added.

I also found a fun creative blog to follow (my list is getting so long - 70 subscriptions on my Google Reader, I think it's time to review it and remove blogs I don't really read!!). It's called The Creative Mama And as per usual when you find a new blog, it tends to lead to other blogs, one that caught my particular attention was 503 Photography, she has some great shots and does a "Photography Friday" piece that features some kind of photography tip.

And finally as I close off this post, this is what happens when you finally have a hot sunny day, and your mom is 38 weeks pregnant - can't go to the beach so the next best thing:

Wow.. had to share this...

I just saw this amazing set of photos!! I see a challenge here... I'll have to try this. Well I'll have to try taking sharp photos of bubbles first.. then the popping part!

http://stacyclaireboyd.blogspot.com/2009/07/popping-bubbles.html

Macro Fun

So today my morning started like this:

Followed by a rather annoying trip to Walmart with the girls. Luckily, the afternoon got better after a little early b'day shopping for me. The weather was fantastic so I had fun playing with the girls and my new toy... Macro lens 100mm. I wanted it for taking close up shots during newborn sessions, and also for taking nature photos such as these:





Now, I can barely sit up, since my belly is tight, my back is sore and the baby is moving around like crazy - her time to dance is between 8-10 pm every night. It's like "So you think you can dance?" in my belly! So I'm off to bed!

All of a sudden...

It's July 18th and I haven't updated this since the 9th. I'm going to loose all my loyal readers (hahahah!). There is no time for blogging... well with work done and watching the kids, it's pretty nutty. Last night, I had virtually hit the wall, Eric was at hockey, the kids were quite crazy yesterday, the Door Doctor came 2 min after I got the kids in the bath to fix our garage door that was fried by last weeks storm that fried out electrical AGAIN! Then Grandpa came to pick up his cooler, so the girls were yelling at him from their window... needless to say they were a little wound up to try and sleep and it required a good dose of "close the gate and ignore" therapy, to get them to finally sleep. And also needlessly to say, I was tired and needing space. But really, overall the week was fun, I'd much rather bust my butt watching the kids than what I was doing before. It's fun to see how they have changed, and how they change everyday, Gillian is cuter than ever, talking more and more everyday - and surprisingly settling down from hitting the terrible twos wall a couple of months ago. She is still determined, but responds much faster when I shut it down than Abby ever did. Abigial is becoming quite the big sister, and little mommy to her babies. She is beyond excited about the baby coming and likes to announce it to everyone. She hugs my belly and tells the baby to come out. She puts her ear up to my belly and tries to listen to her. Very cute!

Here are some highlight photos from our first week on holiday:

We went to the local park

Abby did a little dancing

Gillian did some sliding

Then I managed to catch the girls together!! and got some really cute photos:

My favourite of them all! I just love their expressions

Now it's Saturday, and it's pouring rain, no big surprise as it seems to rain every weekend this summer. But it's looking up for next week! Enjoy the weekend everyone!

Photo Shoot Setup - Sharing trade secrets!

I promised my friend Jen that I'd post some pictures of my photo studio set up next time I did it. I set it up in my living room, by moving all the furniture out of the way... yes, a real pain, but it's the best space to do it! Put the floor down and set up the backdrop. I took these photos at a bad time of day, lighting wise, but by the time people show up the sun has moved a little, or I can just close the curtains to cut out that harsh sunlight that you see.





I would like it if the portable floor could be propped up about 3 ft, so I wouldn't have to crouch down so far to shoot (which is a real pain right now, considering I'm 8 months pregnant!!), the lighting in the room is amazing because of all the windows we have, but a more confined space would be nice for keeping the heat around for newborn shoots (hot = sleepy). And I would love not to have to set it up and take it down each time (but dedicated studio = $$$$). Other than that it's great, and I'm really lucky to have this resource so close at hand!

These are the resulting images:

What does your studio look like?? I'd love to know! :)

Happy 45th Anniversary!

We celebrated my in-law's 45th wedding anniversary on Sunday. Wow, 45 years is amazing. Eric and I will be celebrating our 5th wedding anniversary this year, so to think of 45 is just so abstract!! I hope we can celebrate it though one day, surrounded by our kids and grand-kids like we did this weekend... it would be so special!

45 years later!

Holly, helping me out. I was trying to get
good back lighting and sun flare... like the pros!

My two cuties!

Looking for fish!

Sadie and Holly

Raw Addiction

I think I'm addicted to photographing in RAW. I didn't exactly switch right away when I got my camera. I had to upgrade Photoshop because the version I had didn't recognize my version of RAW and when I finally did upgrade, I still shot .JPG and RAW at the same time, so I would have both versions of the same photo. I thought about why I would bother doing that, and couldn't figure out why anymore so I switched to RAW. I then shot exclusively in RAW for a while, but then I started to think about the huge amount of memory it consumes, so I decided that I would strickly shoot RAW for any photo shoots I do, but keep it to .jpg for my own family spontaneous shoots I do, and if the lighting conditions were tricky I would switch. Today, was such a day where all the photos I took were the usualy weekend fun, but I felt the whole time like I really should be switching to RAW. The conditions weren't terribly difficult, full sun, but nice shade to work with. But I still felt this nagging feeling like I should switch to RAW. So at the end the day when the sun was setting I switched, I just couldn't help it! So there we go another GIG of memory gone! But now I have some nice beautiful RAW to play with... ahhh I feel better already!! (Photos to follow... got to go to bed!!)

Sneak Peak...

I've been working on this for a few days now... still far from finished, but going along really well. I'll need a few proof readers when done!!

Circles!!

I did the challenge for this week - yippee!!! Here it is:

Happy Canada Day!

Today is Canada's 142nd birthday, and we have a day off to celebrate. Normally if we were teens we'd dawn our Canada T-Shirts, get drunk and party in the Market... but that is so 1996. Now we are responsible parents, who happen to be pregnant so now I'm too big to fit into my Canada T-Shirt, and I'll be drinking juice all day. It's the kids turn to party! We'll be heading to our friend's place this afternoon, and we're just hoping that the weather clears up as it's cloudy and rainy today. Seeing as it's 5:30 am right now (thanks to Gillian) I guess we still have hope that it will clear up by evening, but I doubt it, it's looking like the clouds are here to stay.

Ages ago, Beth and I were discussing how our digital scrapbooking has evolved over the 2 years that we've been doing it. After a number of tutorials and courses, mine has definitely gotten better. I'd say better supplies to more realistic drop shadows were the major improvements. I also suggested we post our very first digital pages and while Beth was a good girl and did it. I never did (or if I did, I don't recall doing it!). So here is the very first page I ever did... Yikes!

I say "yikes" for various reasons. 1. the bad attempt at creating "torn" paper 2. the terrible font used 3. no shadows to be seen, and 4. that frame - what was I thinking... But I still cherish the page, it's a photo of Abby and I walking down by the river in Wakefield in May 2007, I was 8 months pregnant with Gillian, kind of where I am today in this pregnancy.

To see all of my pages, just click on the link to the right... the whole history of my scrapbooking is there!

This week's Challenge #11 (?) is to do a page using circles. You can use circles for the photos or circles for embellishments. Have fun!