A few from the beach today

A black and white of Chloe

More to come...

Chloe turned one!

Well, I guess this has become more of a weekly blog. We were gone all weekend again so I've just constantly been playing catch up this week. My little Chloe turned one year old on the 25th! Happy birthday, sweet baby!!!

Wow, sorry I'm a week behind!

How do the days keep flying by so fast??? Here are some from the past week. Sorry I got so behind again. Such is life, I guess.
Here are a few from today. I have others to post but I'll have to do it tomorrow sometime. I will though, I promise! :-)

First is a picture of Cassidy that I just love. I'm going to work on converting this to black and white, but I also love the color. This may be one I get a canvas of.


And a couple of Cassidy holding flowers. I was just trying something different for myself. I hate that part of her white dress is so blown out behind the flower. I need to work on exposing properly when photographing white clothing!



I don't normally do the selective color thing, but I wanted to accentuate the bright pink of this flower. I ran a black & color action on it and thought it was sort of cool. I'll probably play with it some more, but I thought I'd share what I had so far.


More to come...

Found some good light today

My house is a cave, but my parents have lots of lovely windows. I found some nice light in my sister's room today and snapped some shots of my niece Haylie. Isn't she beautiful?

My Butterfly Girl

We went away for the weekend again and I've been playing catch up all week. Here are a few pictures of Cassidy after she got her face painted at a craft show. She was absolutely amazed when she looked in the mirror. I will always remember how huge her eyes got and the look on her face when she saw herself painted like a butterfly. She looked so beautiful!

So I guess I'm not doing that great with this "every day" thing.

But I'm not going to beat myself up. Cassidy is sick AGAIN and there's just been a lot going on lately. I don't have a problem taking pictures every day, but I don't get much uninterupted time to sit down and resize, edit, and post them. I will do my best to keep up, but I'm going to fight the urge I have to get all irritated with myself for missing a few days here and there. Anyway, here are a few from the past couple days. The first one is this week's assignment to photograph something you've never photographed before. Oh, and it's also another "circle"! The others are just Chloe.



I was practicing focus and exposure while she was confined to the highchair. This is about as "tack" sharp as I've gotten and I *think* my exposure was right on too. This needed very little post processing. It is so much easier to get sharp pics when the subject isn't moving around like a maniac!



We were outside and Chloe just wanted to crawl towards me.



Did I mention before that my baby is now a full fledged toddler??? She walks all over the place now. I'm not ready! Here's a shot of her toddling.

Whirlwind week, soooo sorry I am so behind!

Ok, ok, I was gone all last weekend and then I had a crazy week here, so I did not have time to sit down at the computer and post anything. I've still been snapping shots here and there, but the computer time just wasn't there. So, without further ado...here's what I've been up to.

I took this one for the 365 theme for last week "circles"


A self portrait



Cassidy by the Withlacoochie river...we spent the weekend with my inlaws in Northern Florida.


My niece



We bought a new car, which occupied a ton of time this week. We love it and are so happy to be rid of our old minivan which had become a constant headache! Here it is:

I'm out of town, so no pictures right now!

I just wanted to check in here because I'm out of town and can't post pictures, but I'm still taking them! I'll put a bunch up on Sunday night. Thanks for looking, and thank you so much for the comments!

Several shots today

I took a little bit of time today to take some pictures while I was at my parents' house today.

Here's one of my sister. I promised her I wouldn't post the one of her pretending to be a horse. ;-P


A pretty flower that was blooming.


Cassidy


And some cool seed pods that Cassidy calls "eyeballs".

Cassidy is feeling a bit better

And she let me take her picture today!!! Her Nonnie sent her this hat and scarves and I convinced her that Nonnie would like a picture of her wearing them. Worked like a charm, HA!

It's amazing how much easier it is to take pictures of willing subjects!


I love her eyelashes...they are awesome. Poor Chloe has light blonde lashes, so they don't photograph as well.


Another in color, although this one is screaming "vintage" to me...I think it's that single lock of hair curling around her face. I'll have to play and see what I come up with.

Kids still sick, so here's a tomato

Only one today. A tomato that is growing in our very pathetic garden.

I hate cold and flu season!

The kids and I keep getting sick. Cassidy's got it this time. Poor thing has a terrible, terrible cough, runny nose, and fever. Now Chloe is starting to get it too. That means I'm next. Darnit! So, as much as I would love to go somewhere interesting and take pictures, we are homebound this weekend. I am getting pretty bored with all the pictures of Chloe sitting in my front yard, but I don't have many options at home. I don't have much natural light inside and my house is tiny, so I'm very limited with what I can do here. Once everyone is well, we will venture out to some different places and I'll try to get some more interesting shots. For now, here are a few I took today when we went outside to get some fresh air. Cassidy was feeling pretty yucky, but she actually let me take a couple pictures of her, amazingly enough. Here's one where she gave me a cute smile. Her face and nose are so red from her being sick and wiping her runny nose constantly, that I had to make it B&W.



And I just fell in love with this shot. I know that the focus landed on her lips instead of her eyelashes, but I don't even care. I love it. If she ever allows me to take her picture again, I'm going to try to replicate this one, only get the focus right, and then I will blow it up because I love it. :-)



Oh, and of course I have to throw in the obligatory picture of Chloe in the grass! I couldn't get the crop quite right without amputating the tips of her toes. Oh well, it's not like I don't have 5,000 other shots just like this!

The only picture I took today...don't laugh.

I literally only took one picture today, and this is it. This was out of a Taco Bell kid's meal and Cassidy was so proud of it so I took a quick picture of it for her and then I never got the camera out again, so this is the image of the day.

Just one today

And it's just a snapshot, but I didn't have the camera out much today. I would like to experiment more with lighting like this though.

Something different...botanicals

This is a bromeliad that is blooming outside my parents' house and the color is so stunning, I thought I'd take a picture of it.

A sad baby and another try at "things"

I snapped this one this evening while Cassidy played on her scooter and Chloe and I were in the yard. Chloe was having a bit of a meltdown so I quickly snapped a picture before grabbing her. She was ready for a nap, for sure. Does this crop look too centered or anything? I am finding the whole cropping thing to be challenging. I can't get used to not cropping in camera like with film. I've ruined the chances of getting a nice 8x10 on quite a few shots because I haven't left any "breathing room" in the in camera image. So now I'm trying to step back a bit and allow myself to crop in post processing, but it's still hard to get used to. Another thing I'm working on.



And here's another lame attempt at photographing non-living things.



I just loved her expression in this one, so I had to share it. She is such a sweet and funny little girl.

Fixed the tutu angle

Ok, it was driving me crazy, so I asked at ILP and people were kind enough to give me advice on how to fix it. So, here's my fix. Does this look better?

Darn, I fell behind

Well, technically, I have been taking pictures every day, but I fell behind in posting them here over the weekend. So, I'll post the pics I've taken over the past couple days now. I have a headache today and I've been feeling rather uninspired and frustrated lately. I have this flaw in my personality where I get very frustrated when I'm not great at something right off the bat. My childhood piano teacher commented on this when I was little, and I still struggle with it today. I wanted to sit down at the piano and just know how to play it and it upset me when I couldn't. Same with photography. I have always loved taking pictures, but it's only been recently that I've really committed to learning the technical aspects of photography (and there is SO much to learn), learning to use my camera on manual mode instead of relying on the presets, etc. I've never been great at math or science, so that part of photography is downright scary for me. Again I find myself frustrated that I'm not producing consistently wonderful photos, yet this is really just the beginning of my learning journey and I'm going to have to just work through the feelings of inadequacy and continue trying to improve. Hopefully I can look back in a year or five years from now and see how far I've come. So, with that, here are my mediocre images from the weekend. First up, a mommy-goggles shot. Chloe's sweet little hand while she sleeps.



Another of Chloe in the red tutu. I like this one, but couldn't get the crop quite right. I would like to change the angle, but I haven't figured out how to do that correctly yet, so this will have to do for now.



Also, thank you to everyone for your comments. I'm not really sure how to reply to them, so I will just say thank you here. I really appreciate the feedback!!!!

Still playing with black & white...plus a red tutu

Friday at last! I was trying to get a good picture of my obese tabby, Tori-Kitty. She's not a great model, aside from her weight problem, because she kept charging at the camera to get me to pet her. Anyway, here is one of her in black & white.



And here's one of Chloe...again, giving black & white a go. I always worry about gray skintones with b&w. Someday I hope to achieve those gorgeous, creamy skintones that I long for. Ok, and I just noticed that her forehead is out of focus. Sorry 'bout that. :-P



Finally, one of Chloe in the red tutu I made for her. I hope the color is ok. I still haven't calibrated my monitor.

The nitty gritty

Taking pictures everyday and trying to keep them from getting monotonous is already getting tricky, and I'm only in the first week of this project! ;-) I downloaded a black and white action and played with it today. I have no idea what I'm doing in Photoshop, but I learned Paint Shop Pro by "doing", so I guess it will be the same with CS2. I haven't had time to really get into it yet, but there are tons of tutorials I have bookmarked and I also want to check out the Scott Kelby book. Here are a couple really gritty B&Ws that I was playing around with. Not perfect, or even good shots by any means, but it's what I did today so it's here on my blog!

Photographing "things"

Well, I took the plunge and attempted to photograph something other than people today. My camera battery was going dead, so I only took a few shots. I feel pretty blah about them, but I'll post one anyway. Objects are just not my bag. I'm working on it though.

Chloe's ouchie

My poor baby pulled a grocery bag full of cereal boxes down on herself and this was the result. The corner of a box hit her right under her eye. She was not happy. Mommy needs to stop leaving things within reaching distance. :-( I didn't have the camera out much today, so this is really all I've got. I'm going to try taking pictures of something other than my kids this week. I'm really not good at photographing objects, so I do need to work on that. For some reason, if something doesn't have eyes, it doesn't "grab" me...yet I see so many fantastic pictures of objects on other people's blogs that move me, so I need to work on seeing the beauty of "things", I think.
Here's my little one and you can see her beat-up eye. Please, no one call the authorities on me! ;-P