70/365

Today I am thankful for the fact that the girls sleep in a full hour later with the time change, but they still go to bed at the same time. I am sure I have said this before, but I don't function well in the morning. We are SO blessed because even when the girls get up early, it is never before 7:15 am. Lucy has done this every year, when the time changes, she becomes a total lazy bones in the morning. She is sleeping until around 8:15 or 8:30 and Annie is sleeping until almost 9!!!! Can I just say, I LOVE when they sleep in. I hope this sticks. Annie got 14 hours of sleep last night. She went down a few minutes before 7, woke up for 5 minutes for a bottle around 4 and slept until a few minutes before 9. Gotta love that. On school days, I let Lucy sleep until the last possible minute, wake her up and have her fed, dressed, ready and out of the door in about 20 minutes. We have a pretty great routine down. I am thankful for every extra minute of precious sleep or quiet time that I get in the mornings.

Justin went back to the doctor today. Another blood test and a chest xray just to make sure it wasn't pneumonia since he has this horrible, painful, chest cough. Both came back fine. He is still just really sick from having the flu. I hate that he has been so sick for SO long. It has been hard on us all.

I feel the need to say this before any and every post that I talk about photography stuff - I think I know what I am talking about, but who knows? I have to laugh out loud at myself for a moment. I was reading through a section of my post from yesterday this afternoon and noticed that I called aperture apenture. Twice. So funny since I am giving photography "advice" and I can't even spell the terms. I noticed it myself and just wanted to point out that I am not, in fact, a total moron, just a partial moron. Are you sure you want advice from me still?? To be perfectly honest, I think that I have maybe always spelled it incorrectly and just never noticed until today. Not my best. I do this because I know when I was in the beginning stages of learning, I was desperate for any help I could get. So if this is helpful to even one person, then I have done my part.

So here is my standard photo processing workflow. I dump all of the pictures that I took from the day onto my external hard drive via Lightroom. Lightroom has this great feature where you can go through and reject photos. I am sure this is hard for you to believe, but I take a lot of pictures. A whole lot. And a whole lot of them are no good at all. There is no reason at all to keep crappy photos. I am certain, you will never be digging through photos and say, "Where is that really terrible picture I took back in March?" So get rid of them, especially when you are shooting in RAW because the files are too huge to keep the bad ones. So, I reject the bad photos and delete them. I usually make myself go back through them again after my initial deletes because there are almost always more that need to go when I get a second look.

After I only have the images left that I want to keep and work on, I get started. Now that I am understanding my camera and manual mode, I have to make much less adjustments, but a few months ago, I almost always had to increase the exposure and clarity of the picture. I go through and see how different presets look on the set of pictures because they always look different based on the light in the photo. I find a preset that I like for the set and apply it to most of the pictures. I always play around with a few of the pictures just to work on doing some different type of edits. This whole process does not take me long, unless I took a zillion pictures, which is not unreasonable to assume happened for a day. After I am happy with how the pictures look in LR, I export a jpeg copy of each image to my hard drive.

Now that I have jpegs in addition to the RAW original files, I will open Photoshop CS3 if I felt like any of the pictures needed something else. I will often go in and tweak my black and whites or remove boogers! :) I ONLY open the few pictures that I think absolutely must have additional work done in PS. This 365 challenge would consume me if I tried to do them all in PS as well. Now, if iI am editing for a client, it takes a whole lot longer because it is important to me that every image looks its absolute best, so I do edit all of those in PS in addition to LR. I mostly use PS for blemish/dirt issues, to give more depth to a black and white, and to sharpen if it is needed. I do not sharpen every picture. In fact, most of the pictures you see on this blog are only sharpened how Lightroom does every photo, which is almost nothing. I get really turned off by photos that are over sharpened. I hate how hair looks and it just gets to be too much to me. I do think that every digital photo needs a slight sharpen though to get rid of that little bit of digital fuzz.

And that is it. Then I upload all of my final images to Flickr and dump them on this blog.

Several of you asked about your shots being blurry and how to fix that. It is one of two things. Either your lens has not held its focus on your moving target or your shutter speed is too slow for the action. If you are shooting something like a running child or a sporting event, change your focus setting to Continuous Focus. On a Nikon, there is a switch on the front of the camera by the lens that has three choices - M, S, and C. M is manual, s is single focus, and c is continuous. If you are taking pictures of fast movement, choose C. This will keep the lens focusing nonstop on whatever subject is in your autofocus area. You have to keep the shutter held down halfway to keep it focusing all of the time. When you are not shooting a fast moving subject, I would keep it on S. Focus on whatever you want to be in focus (it is ALWAYS the eyes for me, or Annie's toes :)), keep the shutter held down halfway, and reposition the frame to your liking. This will hold the focus on where you started, but you don't have to have the eyes in the dead center of the picture. If shutter speed is your problem, you are only going to be able to fix this if you have enough light to keep a fast shutter speed. In order to have the fast shutter speed required to "freeze" action, you need enough light around to support it. You can't have a really fast shutter speed with little light because there is not enough time to draw in enough light. When shooting action, I think you need a shutter speed of 1/250 at the bare minimum, and I prefer faster, like 1/500. When you see the numbers on the setting of your camera, the shutter speed (on a Nikon) is the number to the left of the f stop. On your camera, it will say 250 or some other number, but this actually reflects a fraction: 1/250th of a second. That means that the shutter opens and closes in 1/250th of a fraction, which is really fast. The higher the bottom number of the fraction goes, the faster the shutter opens and closes. So, if you are trying to catch a crisp image of a child playing soccer, you need a fast shutter speed to freeze the movement. If you have a slower shutter speed, even 1/100th, you image will be blurred because the subject was moving too fast for the length of time the shutter was open to freeze the motion. I have no idea if this makes any sense, but it does in my head. You can get REALLY cool shots with a really slow shutter speed of a second or longer, but you need a tripod or else the picture will be blurry just from your hand shake. Lights are especially cool with a slow shutter speed. Your manual or the Digital Field Guide for your camera will be helpful with things like this. There are also some awesome books called Understanding Exposure and Understanding Shutter Speed that I highly recommend. They are extremely helpful.

I barely took any pictures today. It was cold, dark, and rainy all day long. Don't hold the bow in Annie's hair against me. I was playing around with Lucy's bow and kind of forgot it was there. I am so used to seeing bows in Lucy's hair that I really didn't even notice it when I was snapping pictures. Her poor hair is just crazy. It is not long enough to lay down but not short enough to stay completely spikey (which is how I love it). I kind of wish it would stay short and spikey for a while longer on top. It is just so cute.

Here is my new hair cut from today. Like I said, I love getting my hair done. You just feel better afterwards. I look like such a dork - I have such a natural fake smile. Ha :)




She seriously never stops drooling.