I stumbled onto this blog of a mother at home with four children out in OK or some such place that I’ve been reading for the last two days. It is very funny, sometimes gross, but I identify with her a lot. Not the frontier part of her life – raising cattle and having a cowboy for a husband – but the rest of it I can relate to. My husband is an accountant. And although I live in the country, I do actually live in a suburban type neighborhood with neighbors on either side. Anyway, the reason you might be interested in her is that she takes some stunning pictures. And you get some good laughs along the way. If you’re a mom of young children – or if you remember being a mom to young children – or if you’re married to a mom of young children – you might want to visit at least once. I’ll keep visiting because she always evokes some emotion from me – laughter, admiration or disgust. Still, she’s real and doesn’t hide what or who she is. I like it. Maybe you will too.
http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/confessions_of_a_pioneer_/
My parents are coming into town for the weekend. In fact, they will be here in about 8 hours. That means I have 8 hours to attempt to recover from the current state of neglect that my house is in before they arrive. Like I said, I’ve been enjoying the Pioneer Woman’s blog for a couple days now…
My point here is this… you may not hear from me again until Monday. Have a great weekend!
Well, there you have it. 75% gives you the whole horizontal picture in the post. 
First, I want to send a big fat "thank you" to Carla from TypePad who clarified some stuff for me today. I was so confused… All this weblog stuff is brand spankin’ new to me so when people use two descriptions and they are actually talking about one thing, I tend to get lost. Anyhow… she told me that I could put BIG pictures in my blog that you could actually see without having to click on each one to make ‘em big. WooHoo! I’m going to try it now.
Sweet! It worked! This is a favorite picture of my daughter at the beach last summer. I love kids in white out on the beach. Now, I know someone is going to call it cliche but I think it’s classic. I bet you in 50 years I’m still going to think this is beautiful while a lot of other "current trends" in photography will look out of date. So there. That’s my thought and I’m holding on to it.
So, would you like to know how I did it? Thanks to Carla – naturally… When you click on the little "Insert Photograph" button while composing your post you will see a pop up window where you can select the picture you want to put in there. Before you click on the "Insert Image" button, be sure to click on the "Use Custom Settings" button. This will give you another pop-up window where you will see a little box that says "100" and next to it is a box that says "pixels" with a drop down option. Click the drop down option and change it to "Percent" instead and voila! Your picture is now big!
**Edit** One thing you need to know is that about 1/4 of the picture is missing. The reeds on the right are cut off the picture when it’s uploaded. Apparently, 100% is not what I should have used. Maybe 75% for horizontal pictures? Don’t know. I’ll have to experiment with it until I get it just right. For now, I’ve learned something new today and I’m happy.
Last time, I mentioned Chris Humphrey’s blog. In particular, his post called Create Depth. You can find it here. (But come back after you read it…)
http://chrishumphreys.typepad.com/chris_humphreys/2007/04/create_depth.html
I liked the idea of using lines to create depth in a photograph so I decided to play with this idea a little bit today. I looked around my house for a test subject and decided that the gazillion easter eggs from yesterday would work out nicely for this experiment. I set up my shot in the foyer of my house. I used natural light and played with angles. Here are my results.
For the first shot, I went with a traditional "straight on" type of approach. I focused on the front egg and let the basket in the background go blurry.
For the next one, I used the whole basket in the frame, focused on the basket and let the eggs in front go blurry. Boring.
Third shot, same as the last with the focus again on the lead egg and blurry basket. Another boring shot.
This time, I physically moved to the side and shot on an angle. I like this much more. Decided to continue playing though.
So, I started to climb the stairs and shoot down on the eggs and the basket.
For my final shot, I climbed the staircase to be directly above the basket and did another version of the straight forward shot. I was trying to keep the rule of thirds in mind when I left so much white space around it all. If I were to print only one shot, I believe it would be the fourth shot. But I think the last three are acceptable. I guess that’s why it’s good to not be satisfied with your very first shot and continue trying to improve with different angles and positions. My photo examples are not nearly as cool as Chris’s but I used what I had on hand to experiment. After I was finished, my toddler had a glorious time throwing the eggs all around the foyer and kicking them and chasing them like they were soccer balls! Win/win situation for both of us!
Before you think my boy is all mischief, I should tell you that he is one of the most well-behaved sweetest boys on the planet. Still, he is a three year old boy so on occasion, he gets in trouble.
Okay, onto why I’m here. Recently I read Me Ra Koh’s blog post on depth of field and when my boy was sitting on the stairs in time out, I thought it might be a nice chance to practice. My goal was to have something in the foreground that was blurred out with my subject being in clear focus. Here is what I got.
I like the way the banister is slightly blurred in the first four shots. The last shot is just cute so I had to include it. I cropped them all to a square photo which really made them look better than 4×6 or whatever.
I’m turning into quite a Me Ra Koh groupie! You can find the instruction blog here…
http://www.merakohblog.com/2007/04/02/depth-of-field-in-process/
This morning I discovered another blog that I think I’m going to be falling in love with.
http://chrishumphreys.typepad.com/chris_humphreys/
He has two posts in April about Depth of Field (Create Depth) and Showing Motion (Using Motion). They are both great inspirations. Also, if you visit his first post in April (Welcome to the new blog!) you can see a link to his old Blogger blog where he has some more history. I like his style a lot and I think he will be a great resource for me. I hope he is for you too!
For the greater part of my morning, I explored the blog of AC Ellis of Brookings, SD. She has two entries that I found of particular interest. The first is called Copyright vs. Reproduction Rights; Explained. I thought this was a great explanation of the difference in real layman’s terms. She also gives the aspiring photographer some food for thought to make an educated decision before offering disks and such to your clients. I think it’s particularly kind that she is willing to share her reproduction release with other photographers who wish to use it as a spring board for creating their own.
The next entry that I thought was so noteworthy was called Print Costs: Explained. In this one, not only does she cover why pictures cost more with a real photographer than through Costco, etc. but she gives aspiring photographers a side-by-side comparison of two photographs – one original and the other after it’s been edited. Another thing I like about this post is that she reaffirmed my thoughts that a good original photograph is the basis for a great portrait. (See my earlier post entitled What I know so far) However, this means I have a lot further to go! That means I need to learn to edit and retouch my images. I already knew that in reality, but this reaffirms the thoughts I was having.
And, beyond all that, there are some smokin’ good photographs on this blog. Be sure to click on the label/category called Photog. Stuff to see the two posts that I referenced above.
http://www.acellisblog.com/
I have a group of girlfriends who are near and dear to my heart. Today we took our kids to the park to help pass Spring Break. I took along my camera to capture our wonderful children and to practice – both at capturing children being themselves and using my new zoom lens. I had an unexpected lesson in there today… the power of the bright mid-day sun on your pictures. I’ve heard about the need for fill flash before but I’ve never really thought too deeply about it. Usually, snapshots worked for me and if I wanted something superb, I’d use better natural lighting effects. However, today I had hoped to get some super shots of children at play and I forgot about the mid-day sun lessons I’ve heard about. I have a lovely 430EX Speedlite flash that my husband gave me for my camera about a year ago, but I didn’t even take it out of the bag today. It would have been great to practice using that as a fill flash on those pictures where the bright mid-day sun was casting shadows all over my subjects. Since it was so bright out there, I couldn’t see my LCD screen to check my shots as the day progressed. I was very disappointed when I got home and found that in some of the shots that I thought would be so great you could barely tell who was in the picture because their face was so shadowed.
I didn’t venture off automatic mode at all today – and frankly, I’m okay with that. My goal was to try to capture some kids in motion and to play with the zoom. I still shot over 300 pictures in a two hour span of time – 10:30 AM until 12:30 PM. True to my earlier prediction, if you shoot enough shots of an event, you’ll likely stumble into having a few that are worth something. That was the case today. Since it’s almost bedtime for me, I won’t take the time to resize my "lesson" shots to show you tonight. I plan to do that tomorrow afternoon instead. Maybe I’ll even throw in a few of my favorites that ended up working out for me.
Another lesson here – make sure you have good friends who are willing to be your subjects for your practice sessions. I love this group of women and all their encouraging words. Surround yourself with goodness like that. If you don’t have it right now, ask for it in prayer and then seek it out. Sometimes it falls into your lap in such a beautiful way it just makes your heart sing. I love The Girlfriends!
When I visited Me Ra Koh’s blog the other day, one of the tips she had was to change your point-of-view when you are photographing something.
http://www.merakohblog.com/2007/01/09/point-of-view/
With the things I learned from her blog (details – see the van/sandals post below, shooting into the light, etc) I decided to try some of it today with my children. They got fresh bubbles and bubble blowers for the new season – is there anything better?! Naturally, I thought this was a detail worthy of remembering someday. I started by shooting the bubble "juice" (as we call it) and the blowers laying on the sidewalk. Then I let my kids get into the blowing of the bubbles. As they enjoyed their new toys, I started moving around them and even above them. For the shot where I’m shooting into the light, it doesn’t have any of the cool lighting effects that Me Ra’s photos exemplified, but I’m still glad I shot it. I like the way the lack of detail emphasizes the way my daughter is standing – a posture I see on her from time to time.
I am completely loving the one of my daughter as she is blowing the stream of bubbles. I like the one where it looks like I’m peering over my sons shoulder to get his perspective on blowing the bubbles. All of these were shot on auto focus because my point in this experiment was perspective, not technical skill. Also, in the 4PM sunshine, I know there are more shadows than I’d prefer – like if it were an overcast day but that’s what I got. I’m so happy to have warm spring weather, I don’t care about shadows! For the last shot of my son, the sun was behind me and I had to squat down to get the shot without having my shadow in the picture. Just as Me Ra promised, their attention lasted about 10 minutes!
