June 7

My practice photo shoots continued today! This morning I took pictures of Cael (age 2), Dylan (age 3), Abby (5th grade), and Alyssa (6th grade). I am still working on editing them all, but so far, I am pleased with the pictures. This photography stuff is totally addicting! Today, I took 240 pictures...at the rate I am going with the editing process, I am guessing I will keep about 80-90 of them.

It was hard to pick today's picture, as I have several that I really like so far. But this one of Dylan is one of my favorites of the day. Probably because I actually got him to pose the way I wanted him to pose!

I would say posing is probably my weakness as a photographer. I'm so caught up in the camera settings and the lighting and trying to get a picture that is in focus and well-exposed, that I have a hard time trying to pose the subject as well. Something else to practice, I guess!!

June 6

Sorry this wasn't posted yesterday. Blogger was down last night and all day today...
The look on Audrey’s face here is one of pure joy! She has eaten watermelon before but never right off the rind like this. She loved it! And it was the best entertainment for her. She would slowly suck on the juice, and it took her forever to finish the piece! Plus it matched her outfit, and made for some cute picture opportunities!

My photography challenge this week is still going strong. Today I took about 150 pictures and kept about 40 of them. I'm keeping track of the number of pictures taken vs. the number of pictures kept just for fun. I want to get better at taking a good picture on the first (or maybe second or third) try. Sometimes I feel like it takes me 100 tries to just get one good picture. So that's a skill I have been trying to improve with this challenge.

I've also been trying really hard (and succeeding so far) to get all the pictures edited on the same day that I take them. 100-200 pictures a day add up to a lot of time in front of the computer! If I miss one day, then I may never make it through all of them!

Giving myself this challenge and blogging about it has been a lot of fun! A lot of work, but a lot of fun! Just three days left!

June 5

It was hot and humid and rainy outside, and Audrey was a huge grump all day...therefore I did not take too many pictures today. I finally grabbed the camera at about 6 pm and walked around the neighborhood, looking for something to photograph. This is a flower in our neighbor's yard. I have decided that I would much rather photograph people than inanimate objects. Flowers seem to be easy enough to photograph, but they are kind of boring to me. I definitely prefer human subjects, specifically kids!

So on my little walk around the neighborhood I took about 50 pictures. I haven't made it through all of them yet, but I'm guessing I will save about 10 of them. Most of them were not so good. Tomorrow should be a better picture day: we are going to a three year old's birthday party and then we are hosting a cookout...both events should have lots of people and kids to photograph!

June 4

Today I had a big photo shoot with my friend Katie's family. Six kids under the age of 5! I was a bit nervous about it, as it was my first paid photo gig. It ended up being a bright and sunny morning. I suppose that is better than rain, but I think it is hard to get a good picture with the bright sun, at least for my inexperienced self it is hard. It was a bit stressful for me this morning, as I was trying to find photo spots with good light but not direct sunlight and no shadows. And then I was trying to remember everything I was supposed to remember about ISO and shutter speed and aperture. And all the while, trying to take pictures of six kids who only wanted to sit still for less than a second at a time! (Actually, the kids did pretty good at posing...especially the three oldest ones). Stressful, but fun too!!

All in all, I took 250 pictures and ended up with 85 keepers (an improvement on my percentage of keepers from yesterday). My favorite of the day is the one posted above. It's not a very realistic picture as her eyes are not really that green in real life (I think they looked more blue in the other pictures I took). But we took this picture underneath this tree with really low branches. It was almost like were were inside a tree tent. The light was shining through the leaves of the tree, giving everything under the tree a greenish tint. She was looking up into the light, and it just made her eyes sparkle green! I love the effect!

And I'm going to cheat, because I have several favorites from today. Here is another one I liked. These two brothers were so sweet and did a great job posing for the camera!

I have several more photo shoots lined up next week...I don't think I'm going to want to mail this lens back on Wednesday! =)

June 3

While I have this camera lens, I gave myself a goal of taking 100 pictures every day for the next week. I didn't quite reach that goal yet today...I've only taken about 75 so far. And out of those 75 pictures, I only saved about 20. And out of those 20, I probably only really like 5 of them. But that's why I am practicing!

It's a good thing that someone invented digital photography. Imagine how much it would cost me if I was shooting with film...today it would have taken me about three rolls of film to get my five decent pictures! And even then, I wouldn't be able to edit them afterwards, so they still probably wouldn't look very good. Seriously, I have an extremely high level of respect for photographers who are able to regularly capture good images with film. I am a very big fan of the digital age!

June 2

Audrey seems to be better. I don't think she had a fever at all today, and she is acting and looking like normal. And that's a good thing, because I needed her to be my model tonight while I took a few pictures with my new camera lens! It's not my lens to keep; I'm just renting it for a week. I am doing a photo shoot for my friend's family, so I decided to splurge and borrow a nicer lens (in hopes of getting nicer looking pictures in return!).

So what's the difference between this $1000 lens that I am borrowing and the $100 lens that I own? I didn't have a lot of time to play around tonight, but I did take a few pictures and quickly noticed a big difference between the two lenses. First of all, this new lens can zoom in and out; my regular lens can't. Also, this lens focuses much quicker and easier than my regular lens. And finally, there is a definite difference in the image sharpness. I took two pictures to demonstrate this. The picture on the top is with the nice borrowed lens. The picture on the bottom is with my regular little lens.























I took both of these pictures with the exact same settings on my camera. And I didn't do any editing afterwards. If you don't notice the difference right away, look at the trees and houses in the background. Notice how the picture on the top has much more clarity and contrast than the picture on the bottom.

So that was my experiment for the night. I am hoping to experiment much more with this lens while I have it for the next week. If you live in the Springfield area and would like to loan me your child or family, I'd love to photograph them!!

June 1

Poor Audrey is still sick today. She was acting pretty normal all morning, so I thought she was feeling better. Then at one point, she brought the thermometer to me and said "beep, beep!" She felt a little warm, so I thought I would take her temp. I was shocked because she had a 102 degree temp but was running around like she felt fine.

As the day went on, I think she started to feel worse and worse. When I feel bad, I sleep a lot and lay down and rest all day. But it's hard to get a toddler to lay down and rest! Even when she wasn't feeling good, she didn't want to lay/sit down and be still. I did get her to sit for a few minutes at a time by putting on an episode of Elmo's World or Yo Gabba Gabba. But Audrey just wanted to be up playingconstantly. But then she whined the whole time she was up and wouldn't really play with any toy or focus on anything.

Tonight we needed to get out of the house, so I took her for a little walk before we went to bed. She was pretty tired when we got home. I'm hoping she will get a good night's sleep tonight and wake up doing better tomorrow.