How Many More Months Until Summer?

Why is it that January seems to be the longest month of the year? I am soooo ready for summer to get here and fast! It feels so drab & dreary outside, so due to the blah weather I haven't ventured out much to take pictures.

I was cleaning off the computer and I found a couple images that I haven't edited. So I pulled this one up of Abrie and decided to play around with it a bit in photoshop.

Hopefully one of these days I'll get out and take some new shots, but until then this will have to do.

The Old Forest Tree

I asked my daughter Abrie to give this picture a name and this is what she came up with, "The old forest tree". She's pretty right on except for the fact that it isn't in a forest. I mean it is a tree and it is old, so it would only make perfect sense to name it the the old forest tree, right? Gotta love kids!

I ran the Old Toy Camera action on this image that Toni from Blueberry Lane photography was talking about on her blog, then I added some texture and burned the edges just a bit.

Beauty Shop

One of the joys of being a little girl is painting your toes.




One of the joys of being a boy with a big sister is you get to have your toe nails painted...



...on a regular basis.

One of the joys of being a Dad is being married to a woman that lets their son get his toe nails painted by his older sister. (Did you get all that?)

I think my husband is afraid that we are well on our way to raising a gender confused little boy. My response to that is; I made sure to pick the most boy-ish pink nail polish I could find.

Fanny's Dream

I love this little book! It's a sweet little book about a farmer girl who wished that she could become a princess. Well, time passes by and she gets married (not to a prince) and has kids and all the joys that come along with it, poopie diapers and all. And at times she wonders about "If only I was a princess". The years pass by and then finally in the middle of the night her fairy God Mother comes to turn her into a princess, all her cares would be forgotten. But then she looks at her kids and her husband and realizes that nothing could be better than what she has now. I love that!

Life is like that sometimes, we are constantly searching for things to make us happy and what we are looking for is usually right in front of our face.

That concludes this portion of Reading Rainbow/getting sentimental with Ginnie.

This is the image SOOC and very bla-ish I might add.

This is the image after editing. Ahhh, much better!

And here is Fanny herself!

In the Words of George Michael...

Cause I gotta have faith-a-faith-a-faith, Baby...

You'll be cursing my name for the next hour or so if you're anything like me and can't get the words out of your head.

These were taken with my 50mm 1.8 setting were 1/200, 2.8 with an external flash

Snow...Finally!

After many anxious weeks of anticipation and waiting it finally happened. It snowed! The kids are super excited, where I on the other hand... not so much. It seems like when it snows around here the world just stops. It's crazy! So I decided to make the most out of the slush we call snow here and take some fun pictures of little Miss Macie.

This is the image SOOC

For this image I lightened it in curves, used the unsharp mask to add some contrast, bumped the saturation just a titch and then I again went back to curves and while in the blue channel I lowered the blue down slightly to bring a little bit more of the yellow out. And then the last thing I did was burn the edges a bit, added a texture and then lowered the opacity. Make sense? Probably not, but just go with it. Oh, and of course I resized and sharpened for the web.

This is the image SOOC

Again, with this image I pretty much followed the same steps as above except I decided to leave this one a little darker and not change the blue channel in curves.

And this is Macie wondering why the heck she's outside in the miserable cold when she could be inside warm and toasty.

A Little Cowboy Grunge

Give a boy a cowboy hat, some skittles and he's good to go!

I had some fun playing around with textures on this one. Settings were 1/125, 4.0 & ISO 800.

This is the image SOOC

For this picture I decided to run this cool vintage black & white action on it that I downloaded free from atcentral.com. This action is called Platino V1. After I ran the action I burned the edges a bit to give it more of an old rustic feel and then finished it off by sharpening the image.

After I was done with all of my editing I added a little texture to it to finish it off and voila... A little cowboy grunge!

Before & After

As promised, some more before & after shots.

The first shot is SOOC and the second is the edited version. The steps I took for editing were pretty much the same steps I took in the previous post.

Behold, the Power of PhotoShop

I know these aren't new pictures, but when I first posted them someone asked if I would share what I did in Photoshop to edit them. So here I am! My plan for this week is to {hopefully} post some more before and after pictures.

(I actually think that these pictures look better bigger. If you scroll down a little bit you'll be able to see the original post. )

This is the original image SOOC (straight out of camera)

This is the image after I ran an unsharp mask on it (basically that just means I sharpened it), then I lightened it and added contrast to the image using curves. I also boosted the saturation to about +12. And last, I added a soft light and then changed the opacity to about 30 percent.

After I did the above edits the image still looked a little dark to me. So I lightened it once more using curves. Then I used the sponge tool (saturate) to bring out a little bit more of the color in the brick and the grass. Next I used the dodge tool (lighten) up part of Macie's profile around the eyes, nose, mouth and forehead. And lastly, I burned (darkened) around the edges to add depth and contrast.

Here's the SOOC image and the photoshopped image side by side.

Kaleb

Why is it that the boys always get blessed with the long eye lashes and they can't even appreciate them?

Art Project

Abrie came home with this little art project she did at school. I thought the painted tinfoil looked kind of cool. So what do I do? Take a picture of it of course!

For those who care, settings were 1/125, 4.0 & ISO 800.

Camera Shy

This little girl is anything but shy. Sweet? yes. Naughty? yes. A tease? yes. But shy? no... not until you pull out the camera that is. So I end up getting lots of this...
This...

and this...

I guess that's just what happens when you have a camera happy mom.

Do You Bleed Blue?

Well this family does; actually all except the mom. She's more partial to the University Utah and I think I'm with her (sorry all you BYU fans out there).

I decided to play around with this one and do an acid wash color conversion with it...What do you think?

Little Piggies

A rare moment caught on film...the kids actually getting along. There's nothing like a little peace and quite even if it only lasts 5 minutes.