Fall Family Pictures

Back on October 20th, I finally did something that I have been trying to organize my family enough to do. We took family pictures. A couple of these pictures are proof that if you hand a teenager a nice camera with a fairly good lens on it, you will actually end up with acceptable pictures. (Any that include me but not Anaya are ones that she took.) Ones that include all of us were taken using the timer or a remote depending on if the remote was working at any given time.

I ended up with a total of 91 pictures after deleting the ones that were completely blurry or otherwise unacceptable. When I use the timer, it takes 5 pictures, so some of those are duplicates. I ended up getting a pretty good picture of all the different groupings that I was hoping for.



Now, while this experience was fine. There are definitely things that I learned to make it easier the next time I decide to do this.

1. Definitely have a list of the poses/groupings that you want. I did do this and it helped so much. Particularly since my husband was NOT really into the idea of family pictures anyways.
2. Plan for longer than you think it will take. By the time we were done, we were out of sun light. I have a beautiful picture of the sunset that I took as we were driving out of the park. I would've liked to try one more pose, but it was just too dark.
3. Scope out the location before hand. This is common sense, but I didn't really do it. I knew that there were multiple shelters are this particular park, but I didn't really know which one we would use (we ended up in my first choice area). And even though I had been there multiple times with Claire & Anaya to play at the park, I hadn't ever really looked at the area with the idea of a photo shoot.
4. If you are including a toddler, possibly have another person along to help corral the toddler so that you can take pictures of just the adults. My husband didn't drive over there with us because he was still getting ready, so I had Claire & Anaya there for the first half. Which means the pictures of just Anaya involved me holding Claire with one hand and the camera with the other. The one of Justin & I is one that Anaya took while holding Claire's hand as she was trying to run away.

These pictures were taken using a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. I actually borrowed it from my co-worker but now I have my own. It is an nice portrait lens. Definitely not the BEST one, but good cost/quality ratio. Particularly since mine is purely for me & my friends & family (I'm not a professional, nor do I want to be).

Photoshop Fun

We went to my brother-in-law's wedding tonight and I took 320 pictures...and I almost wish I had taken more!

I am most definitely NOT a professional photographer nor a professional photoshopper, but I did have some fun with photoshop with a couple of their pictures. I really wanted to take pictures in RAW mode and see what I could do differently with them than with regular jpg files, but my camera's RAW pictures are not supported by the version of photoshop that I have. That's the problem with have a version of photoshop that is 7 years old and a camera that is 1-2 yrs old.

Here's the original, straight-out-of-camera picture that I had the most fun with...



The first thing I did was apply a boost action & a warmer action. And then I cropped it a little since the original has just a teensy tiny bit of a kids head in the bottom of the picture.



Then I wanted to see how it would look in black & white, so I went back to the original picture and applied PW's Black & White action. I think it looks pretty good.



Then I decided to try and be all spiffy and leave all of the picture in black and white except for her bouquet and his boutineer. Wedding photographers always seem to have a shot like this.



All actions from Pioneer Woman's Action Sets