and then she snapped: tips

Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts

christmas tree bokeh

You know I love me some Christmas.
And not just for the bokeh...I like the baklava too. ; )

linking up with Heidi.

the Christmas card that almost was

This is NOT our Christmas card this year. But it almost was. I had this idea that I wanted to make happen while we were in San Diego, and THEN when we were able to meet up with a friend who ALSO KNOWS HOW TO WORK HER CAMERA (!!!) I knew it could work. So my old facebook/new IRL friend Melissa snapped these for me, but then Chris vetoed the idea because he "looked fat". His words, not mine. To be fair, his outfit + the wind = a big block of a man, but then Heidi suggested I try picmonkey, and their nip/tuck action. It just sucked his little block body right in. (However, it also sort of sucked in the waves behind him which really bugs me, which is why it is NOT our Christmas card this year). I still really liked the idea of it, so I'm sharing it here. Also, I feel like we should all know about picmonkey (Oh, everybody else already knew about it??, fine).

If I did my googling and html-ing right, you should see Chris' "block" body when you hover your over the picture. If not, well, I tried. Really, I did.

So this is was going to be the front of our card:

And this, the back (get it? because that's our backs?):

PS Do you know how long I browsed fonts until I found that one on the Christmas card that wasn't even? Seriously, I have issues. Apparently.

entering the paper mama's christmas card challenge

shooting all three

I have VERY few pictures of all three of my kids together. Which makes me sad when I have a fabulous deal on a canvas I want to order. So this week I dragged them all down to the beach near our house for a photo shoot. It didn't really work. Mostly because Charlie was being a butt.

Any tips for getting canvas worthy photos? (Please share and I'll feature them in a post I'm doing for Paper Heart Camera next week).

how to edit bathtub photos in Lightroom

I'm posting over on Paper Heart Camera today and I wanted to share with you all too!

How many of us love to take photos of our kids in the bathtub only to have them come out looking yellow and nasty and depressing? I know it's not just me. Most of the time the problem is that your white balance is off (unless you have a ton of amazing natural light in your bathroom, which, well, I'm not so lucky). Fortunately it is a super easy fix in post processing! (PS, I know there is always the option to get your white balance correct in camera, but then what fun would this post be?)

The white balance tool is super easy to use. See that little eyedropper thingie? Click on it. Next, click on something in your photo that is supposed to be white, black, or grey. (I clicked on a part of the bathtub). And voila! Like magic your photo isn't yellowish anymore!

See? Before: (Ew! Ick!)

And after! Ta-da!

And since I'm showing you one of my favorite Lightroom tools I thought I might as well show you my other favorite tool...the straighten tool. Seriously. I love it. To use it you just click on the little level icon and then you click along a line in your photo that you want to be either horizontal or vertical. In this photo I "drew" along the edge of the bathtub. Lightroom will then "straighten" your photo and put the crop box around it (because when you straighten you end up losing a part of the edge of your photo), so you can then drag the corners of the crop box to make it smaller (like I did here) and then when you like what you see just hit enter to accept your straighten and crop! This is my favorite tool because I actually think it is really fun to do. I am a total nerd, I know.

new favorite

Pretty sure this is my new favorite photo:

Because, friends? Apparently white boys CAN jump!

We were riding bikes around the neighborhood like Charlie LOVES to do and came across this hopscotch (just like the one he'd seen on Curious George eight million times), so he decided to try it. I stepped back, switched to continuous shooting mode and waited. When he started to jump I clicked the shutter and held it down, and I ended up catching this baby. With not one, but BOTH feet off the ground. It's a toddler milestone I tell ya.

Have a great weekend, y'all.

(My sister lives in Texas now so I can say that).

tips for travelling with a two year old. and other such wiseness.

oh hey people! greetings from sunny palm springs. I would share a current shot of my weather app, but if you follow me on instagram (@andthenshesnapped) you are probably quite sick of my "vacation" photos anyway. I'm sure you can figure it out (PS it's NOT raining).

Charlie did great on the plane, thanks to two things. 1) snacks and 2) his "new games" (aka iphone). OK, three things, he was also buckled into his carseat the entire time, which meant he was, STUCK. As a public service to you I thought I would share with you, my adoring readers, some "lessons learned" on this particular trip:

Applesauce does not make the TSA guys happy when you try and bring it through security (apparently it counts as a liquid).
Don't try and stream Curious George videos across the airline's wi-fi (it's REALLY slow), better idea is to download shows onto your device beforehand (which we plan to do before the return trip)
Don't apologize before the flight even starts to the old bitty in the seat ahead of you for your toddler's (probable) kicking during the flight. The hag bitched us out afterwards, saying "I know you apologized earlier, but this flight was MISERABLE, and I'm on VACATION". Seriously, that happened. What she expected us to do about it? Especially AFTER THE FACT? I have no idea.

And now for your enjoyment, a photo of said toddler eating pretzel #3,428:

And a gratuitous shot from the air (Also, if I'm honest I have no idea what gratuitous means):

wordless wednesday but with words

Hi Again! Are you having fun photographing the holidays yet? I've gotten re-inspired with my camera lately and have actually TAKEN some pictures the past few days.

One thing I love to photograph this time of year is bokeh (that pleasing, "blurriness" that I especially love when it involves Christmas lights!)

How to create bokeh with Christmas lights:
It's super easy.

Set your camera to Aperture Priority. (This is A on a nikon and Av on a canon).
Adjust your aperture as wide open as it will go (this means the smallest number). (I used my 35mm lens at f1.8).
Turn your ISO as low as you can. (I used 100 ISO).
Let your camera figure out shutter speed : )
Ok, ready, now you want to focus on something in front of the lights. The farther away your focus is from your lights, the bigger the bokeh will be.

Here I focused on a little star shaped card holder:

Here I focused on my finger just right in front of the camera then moved my finger before taking the picture. Genius, I know, I know...

Seriously, anybody could do this, as long as you can manually adjust your aperture, but it looks really difficult.

To prove how easy it is for "regular people" like you and me to take amazing photos, Olympus recently gave (yes, GAVE!) over 1,000 people in 6 different cities their own Olympus PEN-E-PM1 camera. Seriously? Where was I when they were handing those out?

Anyway...to see what these "regular people" shot with their brand new (FREE!) cameras, visit The PEN Ready Project.

Link up below and with some of my favorite wordless wednesday hostesses: project alicia, the paper mama, and naptime momtog.

PS. Before you go have you entered the awesome giveaway I have going on right now?

This post is sponsored by Olympus.

shooting the moon

I'm currently taking Kent Weakley's Night Photography class, and so far, I have NOT been a good student. I've been too busy thinking about Christmas, and watching TV, and NOT taking pictures. I did however, TRY shooting the moon when it was full the other night, and I came across a couple of problems:

1. My longest lens only goes to 135mm, so I really can't get close enough to the moon without some serious post processing cropping. I think I really need about 300mm to get something that looks like a moon.

2. I just haven't been really motivated to do nighttime photography this time of year. It's cold out! I am enjoying watching the lessons though, and I'm taking notes so that when it's not dark at 4:00 and mid 30 degrees that maybe I'll get up the motivation to practice some of the lessons!

Here are a couple sorry attempts at shooting the moon the other night. I don't love either of them.

ISO 100 | f/6.3 | 1/15 sec

linking up with communal global and weekly kodakchrome

ISO 100 | f/6.3 | 2.5 sec

wordless wednesday, but with words

Oh hi!

Simple tips for shooting your Christmas tree:

1. tripod
2. low ISO
3. wide aperture (small number)
4. slow shutter speed (start at 1/2 second and adjust to taste)

ISO 100 | f/3.5 | 1"

I don't really "get" wordless wednesday. So around here words are totally ok, and actually encouraged! So if you like words too and want to link up your wordless wednesday, but with words, please do. And if it's Thursday by the time you get around to it, well heck, that's ok too.

Link up below and with some of my favorite wordless wednesday hostesses: project alicia, the paper mama, and naptime momtog. I'm also showing off my tree at Thrifty Decor Chic's Christmas Tree Party!

tuesday

In case you haven't guessed, I am totally having an illicit love affair with Lightroom. Look what I did with four clicks:

1. increase exposure

2. crop

3. run a whoiswolf preset

4. rounded corners preset

5. export for web

(OK, five clicks)

linking up with communal global, weekly kodakchrome, sweet shot tuesday, and touch up tuesday

show {off} your shot

Welcome to all my new readers who have come over from Ashley's blog! I'm so glad you're here! And if you haven't come over from Ashley's blog, you should head over there and wish her a Happy Birthday, so that you can enter to win an awesome and then, she {snapped} camera strap cover! It's what all the cool kids are wearing these days.

I love this photo that Kristen submitted for last weeks show off. I especially love the coloring of it, it's so calming. (This makes two winning beach pictures two weeks in a row! Think maybe I need to head to the coast soon and get my own fix? Yes)!

Kristen, Here is your winner button, wear it with pride!

My tip this week is simple:

Same subject, different angle.

(Feel free to come up with something more catchy...my brain isn't functioning at full capacity right now. Apparently).

Instead of getting bored with your subject shoot from a different perspective. I'll be the first to admit that snack time isn't all that exciting of a photo opporunity (especially since there weren't any oreos involved)...but thinking about shooting from all sorts of different angles helped to liven up this mini little shoot, and I got some shots I maybe normally wouldn't have!

I want to clarify that you can link up any photo you want each week. I don't choose themes, and you DO NOT HAVE TO FOLLOW MY TIP. I would LOVE if you could share a tip of your own each week, but if you don't have one, please feel free to show {off} your shot anyway!

Now it's your turn! Link up!

~~Rules~~ Guidelines:

~One photo per person, and the photo must be taken by you.

~Blog about your photo and share something about how you took the photo, or how you edited it. (because it is so fun to be able to learn from one another).

~Add my button (below) to your blog post...(text links are ok too, but please do link back to me ~~or I might cry~~)

~Link up to your blog or Flickr page, (but please link up to your specific post and not just your blog homepage...if I can't tell what post you are linking up I will have to delete the entry).

If you have ANY questions, feel free to email me.

I can't wait to see what you come up with this week!

I'm linking up with What I Learned at Click it up a Notch

show {off} your shot

This photo totally makes me smile...Congratulations to Branson from My Reflection of Something!

I've been reading Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure and decided to try a little experiment that he talked about in the book. These shots are all taken with correct exposure, meaning the right amount of light is let into the camera with the combination of ISO, aperture and shutter speed. But they are all different. I kept my ISO the same, but for each shot I opened up the aperture a little more while at the same time, keeping the shutter open a little less. This effectively lets the same amount of light into the camera, but lets' me choose whether I want a slower shutter speed where I can see the movement in the water as in the first example, or do I want to freeze the motion with a fast shutter and, perhaps isolate the waterfall a bit with a smaller depth of field (with the later examples, the background should be getting blurred).

I'm not sure if my examples are extreme enough to show what a really large aperture or a really slow shutter speed looks like, but I hope to have given you an idea of what you can do creatively with your photos, and maybe even inspired you to experiment yourself!

Now it's your turn! Link up!

~~Rules~~ Guidelines:

~One photo per person, and the photo must be taken by you.

~Blog about your photo and share something about how you took the photo, or how you edited it. (because it is so fun to be able to learn from one another).

~Add my button (below) to your blog post...(text links are ok too, but please do link back to me ~~or I might cry~~)

~Link up to your blog or Flickr page, (but please link up to your specific post and not just your blog homepage...if I can't tell what post you are linking up I will have to delete the entry).

If you have ANY questions, feel free to email me.

I can't wait to see what you come up with this week!

show {off} your shot

We had a lot of people linking up this week and a lot of AWESOME shots, it was tough to choose my favorite, but I kept coming back to this one:

It's from Sarah at naptime momtog and it is nothing less than fabulous, don't you agree?

Sarah, here's your winner button!

This week's tip:
So I had a little revelation this week when I realized that my thinking had been all wrong regarding sunset shots. I previously thought that when shooting sunsets, it's kinda dark out, so I'm going to need to increase my exposure (add more light). WRONG! If you try and take a photograph of a sunset in auto mode (or even aperture priority or shutter priority) it's not going to work, because your camera is going to try and achieve "proper" exposure, which means it's going to achieve a balance of black and white which equals gray which is going to be a pretty boring sunset.

I took the following shots all at ISO 800. The first one is probably close to what auto would have done, but I really wanted the sky colors to pop, and the stuff in the foreground to be black, so I kept decreasing the exposure. First, I closed the shutter a bit (from f/5 to f/8) then I messed with leaving the shutter open less (first 1/80, then 1/400, then 1/640). The meter showed these shots as underexposed, but in this case, I don't think that means it's wrong. KWIM? I definitely like the darker shots better, they are more dramatic. Which is your favorite? I'm kinda hooked now and want to experiment with some more sunsets! (Oh, but I think we have to have SUN for that to happen).

Now it's your turn! Link up!

~~Rules~~ Guidelines:

~One photo per person, and the photo must be taken by you.

~Blog about your photo and share something about how you took the photo, or how you edited it. (because it is so fun to be able to learn from one another).

~Add my button (below) to your blog post...(text links are ok too, but please do link back to me ~~or I might cry~~)

~Link up to your blog or Flickr page, (but please link up to your specific post and not just your blog homepage...if I can't tell what post you are linking up I will have to delete the entry).

If you have ANY questions, feel free to email me.

I can't wait to see what you come up with this week!