A Photo a Day: Day 9

I didn't take many pictures today, and I didn't like most of the pictures I took. Here's one of the better ones. (Watermarked because it's my kid. And I'm paranoid.) I used a few Actions because I'm still in the OMGLOOKWHATICANDO phase - so I think I may have overdone the eyes, maybe.

There was a lot of "Honey, look at me. Hair out of your mouth. Fingers off your face. Wipe your chin. Stop moving." While I definitely want to be someone who catches the "real" moments or whatever, I also would've loved to just get a straight-on portrait of her today.

Also I'm definitely still learning what happens if I set A, B, and C vs. A, X, and C or Y, B, and Z.

A Photo a Day: Day 8

Look out world, I've discovered Photoshop Actions.

This is what happens when one is self taught (which is not always a good thing, even if it is, at times, both fun and necessary). I've been using Photoshop forever, but mostly for tweaks and/or for resizing/working with art for my button biz.

This is a whole new world. And....I fully expect to overdo it before I settle into using it properly.

Eventually it will all come together. I need the time and opportunity to both take great photos AND tweak them for fun in Photoshop. I've had the camera for a whole week now. I'm having a blast.

(I took a picture, then cleaned up the mess....)

A Photo a Day: Day 7

All books about DSLRs, photography, etc. One thing I am trying to accept is that tweaking a picture in Photoshop or another photo editor is not cheating. What the hell is "cheating" anyway? To whom am I reporting? I want to make art. Maybe making art means starting with a nice camera and editing with an editor. I cropped this picture square.

Unedited.

Color adjusted, filters used, noise added....

A Photo a Day: Day 6

Today was hard.

I want to write a separate post about it at some point, but basically having a child with a disability is difficult for reasons you would never expect. Like paperwork reasons. Like having to be on hold with an agency for 45 minutes just to get the answer you already knew but needed to have made official for a different agency. Like it's not enough to worry about your child and her abilities (though today she walked across the room and I got all choked up, it was so beautiful) - you also have to worry that you dotted those is with just the right roundness of the dot so that your child can keep going to physical therapy to be able to walk across the room.

ANYWAY. I didn't do as much picture taking today as I wanted because everything came tumbling down. Mercury is retrograde and all that.

I tried taking some product shots for my Etsy store/Facebook page. What I learned is that a) I need a macro lens and b) I need a tripod and general setup to do this.

I Photoshopped it only in that I cropped it close. It's not that great, but it's a start. (This is an interchangeable necklace set - five magnetic charms and one pendant with a black cord - on the card that I slip inside a metal tin for display at the local artist co-op.)

I also went for a 10 minute walk and just randomly took pictures while trying not to feel both self conscious and pretentious. Here's one:

I like the depth and focus that this has, even if I'm not totally excited about the subject matter.

A Photo a Day: Day 5

Today I decided to do some food photography - because hey, I was already posting pictures of my food to Instagram with my phone - which, for the record, is a Galaxy S3. Tangent: I can't afford to upgrade it right now because I use a service that is very cheap per month for unlimited everything but that doesn't subsidize phone purchases - the camera is still decent, I think, but my original plan, before the camera deal came across my Facebook feed, was to upgrade the phone and use THAT as my main camera. I'm so glad I got the DSLR, which cost half of a phone upgrade, instead. The phone can wait.

Anyway. A version of this picture was posted on Instagram in cropped/square form, but here are a few uncropped versions. They're certainly not professional food pictures, but I can see the difference between these and my phone's shots.

The details as I not only pretend (HI IMPOSTOR SYNDROME) to be a photographer but also a food blogger: A spiralized white potato, tossed into a frying pan with some onion, some garlic powder, some salt, and some olive oil. Fried until crispy. On top, an egg cooked using the soft boiled egg technique I learned from Budget Bytes, but cooked two minutes longer today so that the white was more set and the yolk was just slightly less runny. Crumbled feta sprinkled on top. The coffee mug in the background was thrifted and then I added a vinyl decal to it - one of the most complicated designs I'd ever created with the Silhouette (I traced an image I purchased from a site long, long ago, then had the machine cut it, which went about 90% well - I had to hand-place the last 10%). I was trying to get the food in focus and the mug not quite as focused - my lens isn't powerful enough to do that perfectly but it sort of did. I'll learn. I'll learn.

A Photo a Day: Day 4

I'm trying to just soak up all the knowledge like a sponge. And I'm trying different techniques, making setting changes on the fly, and having so much fun. The pictures I take of my kid are great, yes, but the pictures I am taking where I'm trying to make something creative just make me want to burst.

I actually went for a walk to mail an Etsy order and saw several spots where I wished I had my new camera to take some funky shots. But it's cold and I knew my hands would cramp up - I'm not there yet. Then I remembered my phone...oh yeah, that. And so I took a few pictures that way - like I always have - and it was fine.

I was happiest about these two shots - cat in foreground in focus, cat in background in focus. I call this "Showdown."

I took this in the morning while we were doing a practice run for school (she doesn't go back until tomorrow - today's a teacher workday). I didn't love it as-is, but I went into Photoshop and gave it a few Lomo-type tweaks and I like it much better now.

More practicing with foreground/background focus. I like the contrast in color here.

A Photo a Day 2016: Day 3

Following the "31 Days to a Better Photo" series that I found from Life with My 3 Boybarians (I read through the entire thing Friday and Saturday night, today I'm poking through it with my camera), I started playing with the Av setting and working on depth of field/understanding aperture/trying to get the foreground sharp and the background blurred.

I chose a critical subject for my experiment - the Gator that my husband's father brought my daughter from Florida - and then threw my kid's shoes in the background so there was an obvious distinction. Then I took about 50 pictures - all at ISO 200 or 400 (I changed that occasionally), and then, following the series info, staying in a single spot and starting with the smallest aperture and going up (which makes it smaller.....I'm still trying to wrap my head around that).

And of those 50 shots, which included some with settings that were terrible and/or had carried over from other experiments but were totally wrong for this one so I had to change some things midstream, about two were actually doing what I wanted. Learning learning learning! The shoes are slightly blurred, the gator is clear and in focus in the foreground with no blurring, even when I zoomed in.

(The side thing I learned is that I absolutely will be buying one more lens (that is a referral link) - a Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8 STM lens - sometime this week, probably, when I have time to think and the kid is back in school.)

The only manipulation I did with this picture in Photoshop was to crop it and resize it.