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How sweet is this?




Today I am thankful for getting really great advice, for free, from someone who you respect and are certain that they know what they are talking about. The girls and I had a playdate with our awesome new friend, Janet and her cutie daughter, Goo (this is the nickname they call her and is how she is referred to on the blog - but she has one of my favorite names ever). Goo and Lucy are really similar to one another and they did great today. They mostly played on their own, but they were both really independent and had a great time. I met Janet a few weeks ago at a kickboxing class, we have been emailing, she is the one that inspired me to start the daily giving thanks in my posts, she is also posting everyday this year, and I think we are kind of keeping one another accountable on this project. Janet is a great christian, mother, and wife. I really appreciate her outlook on life and she is a person that will always inspire me to do better. I like that, a lot. We talked today like we had known one another for a long time and I hope we can both learn from one another in the future. She is a fabulous photographer - very, very talented and I have had a lot of questions for her that I finally got to ask today. We got to talking about what mode we shoot in and she convinced me that I need to go back to manual. (If you care nothing about photography, skip to the next paragraph) I have gotten kind of lazy lately and have just shot in Apenture mode because it is quick and easy and I can fix most of the issues that I don't like with some quick post processing. I have never been confident in Manual mode, but I did get where I could get pretty good pictures with it. But again, the lazy side of me stopped practicing once Annie was here because I just wanted to get the pictures. She gave me some advice that will change the way I take pictures from now on and make much less work be needed in post processing. And guess what? Since I love all of my fellow beginner photographers like myself, I will pass the tip on to you. First thing to do is figure out how to set your display mode to show the highlights on your viewfinder when you look at your pictures. If you shoot with a Nikon, go to the menu, then to Display Mode, and then check the Highlights box. I had to uncheck the Histogram box and then click Done. Now, when you take a picture and look at it on your viewfinder, click the upper arrow in the circle thing that you use to scroll through the pictures. This will make it so the highlights show up on each picture you look at. What this means is, the areas of the photo that are blown out from over exposure will start blinking. Next, set your apenture on whatever setting you want for your picture - a low number if you want a shallow depth of field and higher numbers for less blur in the background. Start adjusting your shutter speed until you have a meter reading showing you are properly exposed. Take a picture and see how it looks and where the highlights are. As long as the face does not have highlights on it, don't worry about the any other places in the picture having highlights. Janet and I both like really bright faces, so you can keep slowing down the shutter speed by a couple of stops until you get highlights on the face or the picture starts to blur from too slow of a shutter speed. If you start out getting highlights on the face, increase your shutter speed by two stops, take a picture, and check again. Keep repeating until the face has no highlights because you don't want blown out places on the face. You want all of that detail. It is really easy. You will realize that you don't have to have a perfect meter reading in order to get a great looking picture. I found that my meter always told me I was overexposing by a couple of stops, but I never had highlights on the face. I hope this makes some sense, because it really is very helpful.

So, when Annie got up from her nap, I put her in the AWESOME pettiskirt that Nicki sent her in the mail today (what a fabulous surprise, huh? Thanks again girl!) and out we went to practice. I was stunned by the results. The pictures looked a million times better than my Apenture mode pictures. Her face was bright and the colors were vibrant and it was greatness. Now, it is no secret that my ideal picture is bright, bold, and colorful. I am a big fan of post processing. I love to boost the color, brighten the exposure, increase the blacks, etc. I never post a picture that I haven't tweaked in some way, but these were good enough that I would still be proud of them with no processing because of the great advice from Janet. Thanks again! My picture taking just changed forever because of you. So, go practice this! It is amazing the results that you will get.

And just so you can see, here are the straight out of the camera pictures from this afternoon. Absolutely nothing has been changed in these examples. Then I will give you what I would still do to these pictures. Which do you prefer? Everyone is different so let me know. Do you like the editing or prefer the more natural SOOC look?

SOOC:


Edited (the skirt actually has more detail in this version because I increased the blacks, the face is a bit brighter, etc.):


SOOC:


Edited:


SOOC:


Edited:


All of the rest of these have been edited to my exact liking, but they required much less tweaking than I would normally have to do.

Lucy was telling her a big story.




















Lucy and Goo checking out the ice skaters.