Playing with Photoshop...

I got this angelic pose of my little monster... So I started to play with it. I need to broaden my bag of tricks! : ) Anyway I just thought that I would share this cute little picture.

Tummy Pics

A friend of mine is expecting their third little girl and she wanted some pictures of her girls with her tummy. I was really set on using available light for a softer picture and I thought that it would be easily doable with the new lens. Well... I had a lot of pictures that turned out blurry...grrr. Part of it was the auto focus reseting in between shots and me not paying close enough attention. Part of it also was bouncy two year old. I also used one of my friends sheets as a background when I discovered I liked the light the best shooting into the dining area and I thought that the table and chairs would be too distracting. I don't like the sheet! From this I learned that I need to slow down, pay more attention to the focus and I should have been using my flash (bouncing off the ceiling) from the beginning. I think that she will be pretty content with the results even if I am a little frustrated. :)

Lines

As I was going through the dvd's of pictures from the holidays... I came across two from the Ike storm damage that were strong uses of lines. I posted them on the forum, but I thought I would also post them here. I am really enjoying myself....

Texture...

Okay, so in this whole trying to better myself thing I found this forum that has bimonthly challenges. It is not a contest or anything like that. It is just an assignment to give you focus and help you sharpen your skills. Right now the challenge is lines and I have posted my line pictures although they were just okay.... but the first one of the year was texture. I took some texture shots, but I missed the posting deadline for that one so I decided to post them here...

Hmmmm... I wanted a way to try to document my growth in photography this year... primarily as a gauge to myself. Last week I got a new lens. It is a Cannon 55mm f1.8-22. The cool part is that with an f 1.8 you get a really shallow depth of field which I love. The problem is at 1.8 the depth of field is too shallow to take pictures of squirmy kids. Most of my recent pictures have an unintended area as the source of the focus. Oh well... This is all about learning.