Self Portrait

I have a giant mirror hanging in my living room so after one photo shoot I was doing I snapped a few pictures of myself in the mirror.  I like the idea of a portrait of me with my camera because it's very environmental, natural and describes me well.

I took a risk on this one and did a major 45 degree tilt when I took the image. I know some of my photo students and other fellow photographers would describe massive tilting or tilting of the horizon line as a sort of faux pas - however, what's the point of rules if you don't break them every now and then?  I liked the geometric lines, angles and framing that tilt gave the image.  I like how the camera is lined up straight with the edge of the photo so it seems like the one thing in the image that isn't tilted.  I tried a black and white tutorial edit that I pinned on my photography pinterest page - I liked it, it was easy and was only a few steps!

Night Photography

Yep, just taking picture of my usual subject, the sky behind the sugar beet factory behind my house.  The colors, saturation of the sky, the clearness of the stars, the way the clouds and sun shine through, and the weather all make for a different subject each time.

This time I experimented with long exposures and making sure everything was in crisp focus and best quality with ISO 100.  I was surprised that on some of my images stars came through - I'll have to go out on another clear night and try just zooming in on the stars and seeing what kinds of pictures I can come up with.

I mostly just cropped these images - the colors were that saturated straight out of the camera!

Princess Post - Snow White

On this princess post, I decided to do some experiments with cropping, editing, photoshop actions, as well as a collage editor online to display multiple photographs.

The problems I encountered and lessons I learned:

• ISO 400 is way more grainy than I think it is - especially when cropping close up.  I really need to experiment more and get good at using my external flash instead of compromising quality when there is a lack of light.
• I need to figure out a way to edit a white background brighter (yet natural looking) while keeping light skin from looking too blown out.  Any ideas?
• I love some of the actions I created in photoshop that are speeding the editing process for me.  I took some ideas from here and there from my pinterest page and created some actions that I thought really brightened these up for me.  
• Cropping can do wonders for a boring composition.

Overall a darling princess and I love the way the dress looks!  The heavily saturated blues and yellows really enhance the fabric and the texture looks nice.  This darling model was SO cute and was a perfect little snow white for me!  These dresses are courtesy of A Princess & A Pea.

Princess Post - Cinderella

I had the fun opportunity to take the photos for the opening of my friend's etsy shop.  She is a superb seamstress and designs and creates princess dresses for little girls that are DARLING.  I only wish I had a girl so I had an excuse to purchase some for my kid!  The dresses are such good quality, machine washable (a big plus in my book) and can be made to any specification on length and size.  I also loved the fact that as we were helping the girl's get dressed, they could step into the top or put it on over their head because of the elastic top.

I had such fun taking these pictures that I thought it would be fun for me to edit and post my favorites from the shoots here as well as some of the ones selected for the etsy shop.  It took some of the cute little girls a few moments to warm up to me, but I tried really hard to get them to curtsy and twirl and laugh and say "I'm gorgeous!" so it was really good for me to get out of my comfort zone of shooting people that just sit and do what I tell them to and smile.  I love how these turned out!

So for my first princess...I give you darling Cinderella!

Dinosaur Museum

So this week's assignment for the photo club that I advise at OHSU/Mountain Heights Academy was "Location hunt: take pictures in a location you've never been to before".  On president's day, I went with my family to the Dinosaur museum at thanksgiving point.  We had a really fun time, even my two year old!  We saw a lot of fossils, interactive exhibits, learned a lot and watched "Beasts of the Ice Age" (or something like that) at the IMAX theater. 

I've actually never shot pictures with my nice camera at a museum like this, unless you count seaworld but I don't because those animals were alive.  On some of my images, I put a cool vintage edit just for fun to emphasize that these are photos of old things.

I had to really pump up my ISO because the lighting was very cool but very dim.  The bones of dinosaurs make really cool shadows with lighting.

This top one (below) is a picture of petrified lighting.  I liked the geometric rhythm that I was able to get from a lot of these old fossils.





Bones like this have really interesting repetition and harmony.



I liked the perspective of this shot and the line of the work hoe.



This squid was hanging in the air and it really dark all around it, I just bumped up the contrast and levels of the squid.  It turned out cooler than I thought it would look.

This was just a cool shot of the ceiling.  It was weird and I liked it!

Snowpocalypse!

I got my camera out a few days ago and was determined to take some winter photos.  I wanted to just experiment with settings on my camera and see what I came up with.

First, I set up my DSLR on a tripod inside the house, but opened the back door so that I could see out of it but not get my camera all wet in the snow.  Then I, opened up my aperture as wide as it would go because it is dark outside and I need all the help I could get!  I then played around with longer shutter speeds and higher ISOs (I would make the shutter open longer, so I could decrease the ISO, and so on) and then I figured I would see which expsoure I liked the best later.

Turns out I liked this one the best because of the way the snow was angled and the right amount of snow lines (as you leave your shutter open longer, the snow streaks get bigger).  Here are the settings for this image: f/2.8, .6 shutter, ISO 1600, 24-70mm

For this next image, I was taking some boring shots of my Christmas tree and instead decided to try the effect you see a lot around winter time where the lights are really out of focus and they turn into big circles.  I turned off all of the other lights in my house except the tree, and played around a bit until I got this image (settings were f/2.8 .5 shutter ISO 100 24-70mm):

Two Years

The title of this post has a double meaning because I now have a two year old and my brother is coming back from his LDS mission in 4 weeks from being gone for 2 years!  I am excited and can't wait to see him.

I took these photos of Dean on his actual birthday.  There is this walking trail in my neighborhood that has a creek running next to it and all sorts of lovely fall trees.  I really like living in a small-town-feeling place but still having a costco to go shop at (YAY for the new costco in spanish fork!).  Now that Dean is 2, it's pretty much impossible to get him to look at the camera, let alone smile for it.  Out of the 200+ photos I took, he was smiling in about 3 of them.  One was out of focus, one he looked stupid in (sorry Dean) and the other I have posted here as the last photo.

The environment on this day was perfect for picture taking.  It was total cloud cover so the lighting was perfect.  I used my fixed 50, but instead of manually focusing like I usually do, I have decided that even though I am morally opposed to all things auto, auto-focus is necessary in taking pictures of a toddler.  Here are some of my favorites of the shoot!