My Instagram Mother's Day

 I love Instagram . It's a really neat app for your phone that allows you to snap a photo and then you can instantly change the feel of the picture by selecting a different filter (like a preset or an action), then you can upload it and share with family and friends. I only use Instagram here and there, and often forget I have it on my phone. Well, for Mother's Day, I thought it would be fun to take pictures throughout the day using this app and post what I came up with. We had a fun day that included church, Arby's, the zoo, the play zone on base, Subway and a long drive home. The kids had a great time, and it was so nice to have my mom here for Mother's Day too.

What a great day! I hope you take advantage of Instagram too and have fun with your photos! To my fellow mommies out there, I pray you had a wonderful weekend filled with lots of love, hugs and kisses and appreciation; because there is no other job in the world like being a MOM! :)

7 down, 1 to go!

So, I don't really have a photo for this post, and it has nothing to do with photography. But, it's a big deal {to me} so I thought I'd write about it.

My husband has been gone {for training} for 7 weeks now, and will be coming home in 1 short week! Some days it seems like it has gone by fast and other days it feels like he has been gone for forever. It's always hard to be away from each other for an extended amount of time; especially with 3 kids, a dog and a house to take care of, but these breaks from our normal-every-day-married-life are what I feel makes our marriage stronger. We get to experience that excitement of seeing each other, those butterflies when we embrace for the first time in months, and that silly grin I can't get off my face when I'm on the way to pick him up. It's also really neat watching the excitement on our children's faces when they get to see daddy for the first time in what seems like forever to them.

Other exciting news...during these last months I have been participating in a "Biggest Looser" challenge on Facebook with some friends, and with all the hard work and dedication I won first place! It was my first time participating, so I was pretty hard on myself to do my best. I can't exactly say how much I've lost; my husband knows I was doing the contest, but I haven't told him how many pounds I shed, let's just say it's in the double digits.

My friend and I are planning on going shopping this week...good thing because my clothes are now too big, AND hubby and I are going to HAWAII when he gets back! The sun, the sand, the warmth, my man....I can't wait! We are luckily able to go without the kids since my mom is here visiting and very graciously will be watching them for us. I guess this will be a {year and a half} early 10 year anniversary get away :)

Well, so much excitement going on here lately, I just had to share....

I have had a few photo shoots lately and am coming up with some fun ideas in the area of prints and products I {will} offer.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

~Susan

M's Cake Shoot

This last weekend my friend came over with her {almost} one year old and we set up to take pictures of her little girl getting all messy in her very own pink polka dot cake. Except, that didn't exactly happen.  You see, the thing about cake smash shoots is that you never know what to expect from the little one!
  
We started by taking pics of just M, then set out the cake and put her down to see what she would do. She did crawl over to the cake with curiosity, but once she touched the icing, she was a bit confused. She then wanted nothing to do with the cake, and wanted mommy to get her out of there. So, we took a break, calmed her down and tried to ease her into having some interest in the cake, but that didn't seem to work much; and that's ok. We still got some cute pictures that tell a story, and that's what it's all about. The great thing about photography is it doesn't have to be perfect...in fact, often times those unplanned pictures are the ones that turn out best! 

A Good Friend, A Good Project

Last weekend, my good friend, A and I were downtown celebrating a friend's birthday at a cake shop, of course it just so happened to be at the same time of the running of the reindeer. I gotta tell ya, it was quite the site to see! You would have thought it was Halloween time with all the many costumes people were wearing. Definitely entertaining!
Well, after the get together we split our ways, A and I were riding home together so we decided to walk the streets downtown and I thought it would be fun to try and find interesting backgrounds to take pictures. And, downtown is, well, interesting to say the least! People never cease to amaze me! With all that said, we found a few places and took some pics. Now, A does not like to have her picture taken, so, when I showed her the final photos, and when she said she loved them, I was very pleased.
Here are a few of her favorites :)

Isn't she pretty?!?!


It's always fun to try something new. I am not too familiar with the downtown area, and I wasn't 100% sure how they would turn out, but it's great to be thrown into a situation and see how you do, especially with a friend, that way the pressure isn't too great; I mean if it didn't turn out, I knew she'd forgive me, right, A?!? ;)

Next up is my son's 5th birthday pictures!

~Susan

Let's Talk About...

Presets!

It's snowing and overcast today, so perfect time to relax at home and look through old photos that would be fun to edit. There are a gazillion presets (a lot of them are free:) out there for whatever editing software you use. I just got Lightroom 3 a few weeks ago and it's become my new obsession to search for the *perfect* preset! Presets will change your life! They are a fun, easy and quick way to completely change the mood of your photo. Of course there are times where manually editing a photo is the best choice, but when editing a slew of photos from a shoot, it's nice to choose a particular preset that matches what you were trying to capture, and then use them with each photo; this way the look and feel of your pictures are consistent.  Here are some photos I took a while ago that I thought would be fun to edit using presets. Now you can see what a difference a click of a button can do to a photo!


Original SOOC:

Preset: Color Creative: Direct Positive

These tulips were taken in Dover, DE when we lived there. Every spring the most beautiful flowers could be seen downtown. Really bright reds, yellows, oranges, white, purples...it was fun to take a stroll to see these gorgeous flowers (or even take a different route home so we could drive by them:) Anyways, this preset is called Color Creative-Direct Positive. This one already comes in the Lightroom library. I love how the reflection in the water has more definition!

Original SOOC:

Preset: PH Fashion Shoot III v

When my husband's family came to town for my brother in law's wedding, we took a quick one day trip to NYC. I was trying to get them to do that "walking toward the camera and looking like hot stuff", you know what I'm talking about, right?! Anyway, apparently they weren't catching on! But, I like the way the photo turned out anyway! I love how Em is like "Woah, look how tall that building is!" Yes, Em, we are in New York! I love the coloring of this preset, I did bump up the exposure just a little bit to brighten the photo, but doesn't the coloring make this photo so much more interesting?

Original SOOC:

Preset: Famous Hobo

Like I said above, my brother in law was getting married. His wife's grandpa owns this store in the very beautiful farm country of Pennsylvania. We went to check it out and see how they produce feed for horses all over the U.S., pretty neat! It was hard to decide which preset to use for this one. I went back and forth between black and white and vintage with a little color...in the end I chose this one; Famous Hobo. I like the browns and that old feeling it gives to the building. If you didn't know when this was taken and had only seen the edited version, how far back do you think you could date this? Neat, huh? (You might notice I cropped out the car, too.)

I hope you've enjoyed seeing the differences between an SOOC (straight out of the camera) photo and an edited one. Post processing is just as important as the shoot itself. An edit can make or break a photo, ruin it or make it gorgeous! 

For now,

Susan

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Last night my daughter had her "best friend" over for a sleepover. They are like two peas in a pod and really get along great! I'm so happy to see her have a close friend so soon after moving here. Being an Air Force family and moving every 3 or so years makes it hard to make good friends. Thankfully these two met in class and hit it off quick! It's crazy to see my little girl growing up so fast!
So, the fun night started off when I picked them up from school and we got steamers (warm milk with a shot of flavor and whipped cream) on the way home. They quickly discovered the goodie bags I made up for them with lots of fun girly stuff inside (lip gloss, color changing nail polish, candy, glow sticks, notebooks, pens, fizzy bath hearts, stickers etc...). I had written down a list of ideas on the white board to help avoid that saying "we're bored!", and it worked! They made a fort, painted each other's nails (so cute), played upstairs, ate chocolate chip cookie dough (I mean, made cookies:), had a tea party, ate pizza,  played the wii. Unfortunately, her friend didn't last all night over here, but irregardless they had a blast together. C was understanding and is already talking about next time:)

Did You Know?

Did you know you can move around the focus point on your camera?

This is a neat little thing I just learned from reading Pioneer Woman's (photography) page (LOVE her by the way!). She's got lots of great info and tidbits to help you learn more about your camera which results in better shots. So, instead of moving your camera to focus on your subject or cropping out parts of the picture later, you can adjust the focus point in your camera before you actually take the picture. This way you don't have to miss out on those really cool backgrounds, but still keep your main subject in focus. Every camera is different, so you might have to check your manual for how to change your focus point while in manual mode. Here are some shots I took just playing around with the focus point to show you as an example.


This first one the focal point was in the middle where it automatically is. See how his feet are in focus?

Here I was in the same spot but moved the focal point up two places so now his face and the bear are in focus, not his feet :)

Pretty cool huh? Ok, so you might have already known this, but I did not. So, chances are there might be others out there that didn't know this neat trick too (hopefully, right?!) Now, go grab your camera and your manual and try it out! Good luck getting your little ones to participate, I had to let this one play games on the wii if he would sit still for me for a few minutes :)

~Susan