A Picture a Day...Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Sometimes an image just captures you when you take it, this one did that to me once I got it on my computer & edited!

We took the kiddos to a local park yesterday, and when they were all done on the swings I jumped at the chance to get a pic of the swing en motion!

Foster Puppies ~ Billie & Hurley!

Foster Puppies! My favorites the get in front of the camera! My husband and I do a lot of foster work for a local rescue group, and with every new foster is a chance to work on my skills as a photographer, to get the pictures that will make someone look at the pic and go 'AWWWWWWWWWWW' and will want to take them home!

We took on two new foster pups on Friday, Sisters who were found abandoned at a Gas Station in Columbus County by someone transporting animals for the Columbus Humane Society and found them when she stopped for gas.  The poor dears had been there for several days, starving, hot, no water.  They were taken in, fed, given water a cool place to sleep and some much needed love!  They are the sweetest little things I could ever imagine!

So please, if you can find it in your heart to adopt one of these babies, please contact me and I'll get you over to Miss Pat Lambert!

Enjoy their photo session from yesterday!

Editing Pictures, May 25, 2011

Another day with nothing truly important to say, but I do want to brag a bit, my purple tea roses are blooming FINALLY and I went out in the heat and had some fun with the camera and editing software.

Ok so maybe I lied - editing pictures can sometimes be the hardest thing to do, deciding which ones to make Black & White or Sepia tones and which levels of those tones.  You have to look at the picture and play - that's usually the optimal way to decide how to edit your pictures.

With cropping though, its best to just remove any overt background 'noise' or things in the picture you do not want...ex your taking a picture of your friends standing on a busy street, or in front of a nice building and when you get it back to your online studio you discover there's an ad for a hot dog stand right off to the side of your friend...cropping will allow you to remove this.  Use cropping also to create effect, get close-in to your subject, or focus on one aspect of the subject.  Use your imagination!

Below are some pics that I've edited using www.picnik.com as a basic editor.  I don't have photoshop, don't know how to use it, so I stick with the basics!

Enjoy!

This is a 1960s editing style done in Picnik.com's editing software

And this is their Lomoish Technique!  Awesome huh?

A Picture a Day...Tuesday, May 24, 2011

No wonderful words of wisdom tonight, other than never letting that camera down, or even just putting it away momentarily...Enjoy the below, these beauties are in my garden!

Capturing Animals...

Yesterday I posted about photographing children and how hard they are to catch with a camera...they are difficult yes...BUT I think that Animals are by far the hardest.  They are unpredictable, and tend not to do as instructed.  But at times those pictures of your companions can come out positively beautiful!  That is if you are patient and allow the animal to dictate how the photo shoot is going to go.  Some say that using treats and someone else to help you will get you the best pictures, but in my opinion I think that letting them guide you sometimes is the best way to capture their personality and then some!

See what I mean here:

With each of these pictures I just caught the dog or cat doing what they enjoy doing, or what they were doing, I didn't interfere, I just let it go and sifted through the pictures after the fact.

Nixon Chilling at the Campsite

Capturing Children...

Never an easy task, they move a hundred miles and hour and have about a million expressions to their little faces, so how does one even begin to know which moments to capture...me neither...so my solution, capture them ALL! LOL!! And, then when your home sift through what you've taken and make edits on the best of the best.  But the kicker comes when your child or children as the case may be for some, doesn't want their picture taken for the umpteenth time in the last month.  Mine have gotten this way, so to work around that, I tend to grab them when they aren't paying attention, and are busy doing something else.

Enjoy what I caught while camping this weekend!

Capturing Those Moments...

Have you ever been somewhere and thought 'Man, I wish I had my camera?' - well for me that just simply isn't ever the case, as that thing is always with me...for most it's a secondary thought, then again if you're an amateur and/or hobby photographer you hardly ever leave home without it.  Why? The answer is simple, you just never know when that perfect moment will be upon you - and if you have your camera ready to roll then you will catch it, and think to yourself 'well hot damn!'

That happens a LOT with me, the camera goes where I go - perfect example, a simple walk on the Riverfront in Downtown Wilmington to unwind after a long week (perfect thing to do on a Thursday/Friday evening when its still relatively cool and quiet, ain't nothing better) - getting off topic - we do this quite frequently and I always manage to come home with over (100) pictures, LOL!!!  But, in that (100) pictures are some moments one wouldn't normally think to capture.  See below for the prime examples:



My Kids just Hanging Out - This is a Prime Example of Catching that Moment

And my hubby - just relaxin' on the boardwalk

Hands Down...

Personally I think the easiest items to photograph are those things that don't move...inanimate objects, buildings, and yes the occasional flower.  However, they can also be difficult if the lighting is wrong, say it's noon on a clear summer day, and there's this awesome white building you want to photograph, well guess what? Nine chances out of a hundred the light is going to bounce right off of that building and right smack into your lens.  Everything, I read says the best times to photograph anything outdoors is within that (1) hr time frame right around sunrise and sunset when the light is soft and won't bounce back into your camera's lens.  I don't know about most of ya'll, but I'm not up with the sun, so most of my work comes at that peak time during the (1) hr surrounding sunset...love the capture the world around me, as I call it - buildings, items that catch my attention and yes flowers.

Though today I'll share some of my item work! Enjoy!

Snow on a Porch Railing

The Riverfront

Blue Lantern

Red Lantern

Let's get this party rolling...

So it would seem that blogs are the way to get the word out these days, and ironically it works.  I am going to try my hardest to post everyday, can't guarantee anything, even if its just a picture a day.  I have literally hundreds of pictures that I've taken of just about anything, so here I am to share with the world!

While the concept of starting my own photography business is wonderful, I am thinking that the stock photos will probably be the route I'll take, so we'll see where this leads.

So let's just begin where we did - I started taking pictures a couple of years ago as a means to share the flowers I had purchased, and well it just went from there...so here's some of my very first pictures.

Flower Arrangement 1 - From 2008

And below is one of my newer shots...amazing how time can make a difference!

I call this Capturing the Shadow - May 2011