This week was all about shooting in your daily environment, and in my view, making something out of nothing. Sometimes, moments can go unnoticed, but they are just as important to document.

Brayden is turning into quite the little bully! He loves to play with my sister on the floor, give kisses, and most of all, pull her hair! She got him giggling SO much the other night, and I am so glad I captured the look on his face in this picture. The lighting isn’t great, I am definitely not zoomed in enough, and the way Jamie is laying is slightly distracting, but still- the emotion is there, and I will treasure this picture for years to come.

Brayden loves to help unload the dishwasher. This is one of his favorite things to do! This picture is flawed due to the flash coming through on the front of the oven and the shadow from the dishwasher. I was just trying to catch him in the moment before he moved on to the next thing!

This is one of my favorites from our wedding. I cropped the distractions out but the look on my face totally sums up that day. Happiness, relief, pure love and joy. Love love love it.

This week is all about portraits! I have never attempted an actual portrait shoot with Brayden, so I figured now would be the time. After he had a long nap and a big lunch, I put him out in our mudroom to see what I could come up with.

It is SO hard for him to sit still anymore, I am surprised that these turned out as well as they did. I didn’t have much to choose from as far as a backdrop, so I cropped these photos so that they weren’t distracting. I learned a LOT from this lesson, and look forward to doing more portraits in the near future!

Week 8 already! Woo!

This week’s lesson was all about taking pictures on the go. The top 3 things that have us on the go are pets, sports, and kids. I chose a combination of option one and three for this week: use a fast shutter speed outdoors (we were indoors) and embrace a little blur.

Notice how Brayden’s arm is blurred?

And the toy?

If I increase my shutter speed, I get this:

I promise, he was still shaking that toy (as you can see by the expression on his face!) and the color in the picture is actually much better, even though I was in the same place!

This week’s lesson was all about shooting outdoors, which was perfect, because the weather here lately has been nothing short of awesome! Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the lesson and forgot to use my macro (ugh!) but here is what I came up with.

See that massive drool bubble? haha! The bright sunlight on Brayden’s face is causing shadows, and making his face appear yellowish in color. Also, you can’t see the true color of his eyes.

In this close up, the sun isn’t in his eyes, letting you see that gorgeous blue color. I wish the background was faded a bit more though, so that it wasn’t so distracting.

This week’s lesson on composition felt like a giant breath of fresh air compared to the lessons on flash and aperture! These 6 tips really helped me to know what to do to get the absolute best out of my photos every single time.

1. Keep it Simple.

In this picture, I was trying to get the tree that is in the forefront. There is so much distraction in the background though, so I took a vertical picture instead.

It is still not the greatest, but at least some of the distractions are eliminated.

2. Apply the rule of thirds.

“The rule of thirds capitalizes on the fact that our eyes are naturally drawn to a point about two-thirds of the way up (or over) on a photo. Mentally divide your scene into 3rds as you’re looking through your viewfinder or at the LCD screen. To follow the rule you’ll want to compose your photo so that your subject(s) or action is located at one of the intersecting points rather than in the middle, or dead center, of the image.”

4.  Frame your subject.


This can best be done when you use objects in the forefront of you photo to frame your subjects. I KNOW I have done this before, but I can’t find any examples. And it doesn’t help that my photo library i the most disorganized that it has ever been since I switched computers. Just take my word for it!


5. Fill in the Frame.


To keep out the distractions, fill in your frame with your subject. 

This is such an old picture, but it was the only one I had that was a good example! Too many distractions, you can’t really see our faces. 

6. Try a new perspective.


I did this in the first set of photos. 


So, I didn’t get to use ALL of the tips this week, but I did find some in the archives that show these tips. How did things go for everyone else?

So, I am a day late posting/doing this week’s lesson on flash. A busy weekend left me NO free time! So, here goes nothing.

I couldn’t really take advantage of the weather, and flash in general just confuses me! I end up using it almost all of the time indoors, because our house doesn’t get a lot of light. But, I am not sure how to turn it on when I am outside. (And no, I haven’t looked in the manual yet.)

I took this picture with the flash off.

Obviously, there is a shadow from the bookcase. To eliminate the shadow, I turned on the flash.

The result? A much crisper photo, more colors shining through, and the text on the book cover is easier to read!

I will be keeping this lesson handy for when it is nice enough to be outside, that is for sure. I kind of felt over my head BUT learning isn’t always going to come easy!

Week three’s lesson is about the color of light. Sunlight is often referred to as white light and contains every shade in the spectrum, so depending on the time of day, you can have a variance in your color in your photo. Generally, a cool yellow cast will show in the early morning, blue tones will show mid-day, and an orangy glow will show in the evening.

This lesson showed me how I can control the white balance in my photos by using the custom white balance feature on my camera. To do that, you just set your camera to Custom White Balance, and then taking a picture of a white piece of paper or posterboard, making sure that it takes up the entire frame. When you set your custom white balance again, it will ask you to choose the picture you just took. Just be sure to redo it if you change locations.

This week, we were asked to do three photos: One in Auto White Balance, one in Tungsten, and one using our Custom White Balance.

And I am not sure why the middle picture is so weird…but you get the point. I will have to do some more playing in Picasa I guess!

Week two is all about ISO and shutter speed. I was definitely looking forward to this lesson because my knowledge of either of these is very, very slim. One particular part of this lesson really helped me:

The higher the ISO, the quicker the image will be captured and the less light that is required. The lower the ISO, the longer it takes for the image to be captured and the more light you will need.

The lesson was the kitchen sink trick. Note: our kitchen sink is permanently stained brown/yellow and looks dirty no matter HOW often/hard I clean it. SO I decided to use the bathroom sink. Only problem was that there was hardly any light in there. So…not the best results…but I totally get the point of the lesson and learned a lot!  I had to correct the second picture so you could even see the water. Not the best, but I understand a LOT more about how ISO affects my pictures!