From pixels to paper - My first POTD book!

It's been way too long since I've made time to post anything on this blog but here's a little of what I've been up to instead of blogging...  With the arrival of Baby #2 coming up very soon we have been working hard to get everything ready for him/her.  Evan's new "blue room" has been rearranged, painted, and decorated (the baby will eventually occupy his current "green room").  The newborn clothes have been washed.  The car seat is installed and ready to go.  My hospital bag is (finally) packed.  And somehow I managed to get Patrick to clean the spilled juice, goldfish crackers, and beach sand from the inside and out of my car!  Also in the last month I've (barely) managed to keep Evan fed, entertained, and rested between my own feeble attempts at rest and sleep.  Now I'm trying to be patient as I wait out the final days of my pregnancy - this is only made harder by Patrick constantly saying "I wish the baby would come tonight".  Well dear... while you are sound asleep (and snoring BTW), and I'm gettting up to pee for the 3rd time, I have the exact same thought!  Needless to say we both can't wait for Baby #2 to get here!

On to the subject of photography... In my last post I talked about the POTD (photo of the day) concept and just how how far that can go to improve your photography and your sanity.  Here's an example of how I put my POTD work to good use.  I used all of my 2010 POTD images and the captions that I posted to create this awesome 120 page hardcover book for our family.  It was so great to have the POTD images at my disposal for this project.  I was able to tell the book software to organize all of the images by date and had it automatically add them into my layouts.  Then I copied in the captions.  Can you believe that I was able to design a whole book with a full year's worth of photos within a matter of a few hours? Thank you POTD project!  Having something like this completed makes me look forward to getting older so that I can look back at these currently fresh memories and see them with a different perspective that only time will bring.

Just in case you were wondering... I designed and printed my book through Blurb and I'm pleased with how it turned out. Our 2009 book is in the works now.  If you're interested, you can see the whole 2010 book here.

 

Pick just 1 image

In a previous post I alluded to my photo of the day (POTD) project that I do for my family (and anyone else who wants to peek into my life! Well, today is the day that I want to encourage anyone who is interested in improving their own photography skills to take on their on POTD challenge. 

Here's an example of 1 day of my POTD project.  These are the thumnails of all 22 pics I took on a random day in January (you can see this larger here)

You might be able to tell from the thumbnails above that some shots are better than others.  Some are out of focus or not exposed properly, and one is completely black (should have deleted that one!)  Some days it's really tough to choose a single photo and others it's a no brainer.  Picking the best photo of the bunch is not easy but by forcing myself to do that I have learned to be more critical of my work and as a result have improved my skills.  So, without further ado, the winner for the day was...

Here are my top 5 reasons that you should start a POTD project for your family...

1) The best of the best will always be ready to go. 
In 2010 I had 170 images in my POTD project (no I don't really take photos 365 days a year).  Lets just say that for each day in the project there were 10 images to choose from.  If I had not sorted out my favorites during the year, I would have 1700 photos to look through to find the ones I like the best.  Now that I'm in the process of putting my POTD images into books for each year, I'm so glad I don't have to sort the best images out of 1700+ files.  That would never happen, not even for me.

2) Your friends and family will love you for it.
A POTD project will allow you to give frequent updates to the people who love you from a distance.  This was the main reason I started my POTD project after Evan was born. 

3) Less is more.
If you think that uploading 50 shots of your kid doing the same thing is better than displaying 1 photo a week, think again!  It's not necessary to share every image you take!

4) It will make you a better photographer.
By forcing yourself to choose 1 image a day to show off, you will start being more critrical of your images and can learn to improve your skills.  Also, as with any skill, the more often you practice, the better you will be at it.

5) Less editing! 
My editing is pretty streamlined now but even so, there is no way that I would ever have the time to edit every photo I take.  I bet you don't have that kind of time either!

My POTD's are located here if you would like to check them out
2011 POTD
2010 POTD
2009 POTD

If you want to start your own online POTD gallery, here are a few (of many) free places you can use...
Flickr
Picassa
Facebook
Shutterfly

Good luck and please share your photos with me!

Everyday Life - Fun in the tub!

Here's another one of my favorite shots of Evan from 2009.  Bath time is a great time to break out the camera when your kids are little.  Turn on some music, get out the toys, pour in some bubble bath and you're sure to some genuine and excited expressions from your little ones.  Here are a few other tips for making your bath tub photo shoot a success...

• Since you'll be holding a camera instead of a wrangling a slippery kid, get someone else to help with the actual bath time monitoring.
• Don't worry about getting the kiddos to look at the camera for every shot.  If fact I would say you should ask them to look at you for only a few shots.
• Instead, allow the photo shoot to be about what they are having fun with... painting on the wall, dumping water on dad, eating bubbles... you get the picture.
• Capture the details... naked tushies, bubbles in the hair on the nose or in the hands, and the mess on the floor!
• Try different angles... get down low (as in the shot above), get over the action by straddling the tub (just don't get hurt!), zoom in, zoom out...
• If you're a more advanced photog, use a flash gun on top of your camera but point it up at angle to bounce the light off of the walls/ceiling.
• And as always with those sneaky kids, take lots of photos because you never know what they'll do next.  Just don't be afraid to let go of the shots that aren't great.  And yes, I do mean that it's okay to delete the pics of your kids that are not as good as others.  I know, you think there are no bad photos of your child.... well, we'll talk about that later!

Cubical Wall Art

Here's a little project that I did for Patrick for Father's day.  He doesn't have space on his desk at work to display many standing frames and I don't know of a good way to hang regular (heavy) frames on his fabric cube walls.  This was my compromise.  It was actually pretty simple!  For this set I used 8 pre-cut mats from Michaels.  Six of them have 3x5 openings and 2 have 5x7 openings.  All I did was tape the 4x6 and 5x7 Walgreens prints to the backs of the mats.  (I used painter's tape so we could easily change out the prints some day later.)  Then I glued a ribbon at the top, this is where a t-pin can connect the frames to the fabric cube wall.  Super easy and cheap ($24 total).

Here's a shot he sent me from his desk (I might have to go in to re-arrange and get a nice pic)!

Mom's DSLR Crash Course - Which Mode? & Assignment #2

Mom, don't worry, I don't expect you to be the "pro" at Ali's wedding.  You need to be able to enjoy the occasion and not worry about camera settings the whole time.  But... I'll try to teach you a few tricks that will give you an edge over the other wedding guests with "nice cameras."

Check out the descriptions (starting on pg 40 of your manual) for the modes that are in the basic/image zones.  These are pretty self explanatory.  These are the "point and shoot" modes.  Since we don't have tons of time before the wedding, you should get to know these modes because you will probably want to use them, especially during moments that you just don't want to bother with camera settings.

The new mode that I want you to start learning is the Av (Aperture Priority) mode in the creative zone.  See pg 70.  In this mode, you will tell the camera what size aperture you want and it will set the shutter speed for you.  I'll go into details later about aperture size.  For now, here are my reasons as to why you should use this mode over the basic modes for some of the photos you take....

• Av mode (and the other creative modes) will allow you to decide what to focus on, rather than letting the camera assume what you want in focus.
• We can set the camera to record RAW files instead of jpegs when using Av mode.  This is good because there are greater editing possibilities with RAW files.
• On camera flash is not the greatest thing since sliced bread.  In Av mode, we will try to limit the number of shots in which the camera needs to use it's flash.

Here's assignment #2....

1) Put the camera in Av mode

2) Find the 2 places that the camera shows you the aperture value (this will be between 2.8 and 22 for your lens). 

• Hint #1: When you look into viewfinder and press the shutter button down half way, you will see it here...

• Hint #2:  Look at the LCD screen on the back of the camera, it's here...

3) Use the main dial to adjust this value

4) Go outside and pick 1 thing to photograph.  Pick an angle and shooting distance and keep that constant.  Now take and share a few pics at different aperture values.  Oh, and have fun!  Love ya.

Composition - Frame It (Through crib slats!)



Don't worry, you don't have to go out and invest any money to achieve this sort of framing!  Every now and then you will have the opportunity to capture an image with a "natural" frame.  This is really simple to achieve, all you have to do is shoot your subject through some object.  This photo of Evan was taken when he was just over 4 months old.  It's tough to get a lot of variety with babies of this age, so I decided to get one with him framed by the slats of his crib.

Start watching for framing possibilities in your own world!  You don't have necessarily have to set a shot like this up.  Just watch your kids as they play and look at the things that surround them.  This is something I find the opportunity to do often so I will post more framing ideas in the future. 

Mom's DSLR Crash Course - Assignment #1 - Join Flickr

The "Mom's DSLR Crash Course" series of blog posts that you will see in the coming weeks, is actually for my mom, but hopefully it will benefit others as well.  She will be attending my sister's wedding in August with a DSLR camera in hand.  Unfortunately, she doesn't know how to use it - yet!  Hopefully we can (somewhat) fix that before August.

Assignment #1
Mom, your first assignment is to join flickr and post at least one new photo, anything will do.  Then let me know what your flickr name is.  By posting pics on there (instead of trying to email them to me) I can better help answers questions for you (regarding your future assignments).

By the way, here is a link for the manual to your camera 300D Manual.  I'll probably reference it in the future.

Good Luck Mom!  It's gonna be a fun summer!

Organize those files!

Okay, this is so boring and really not why I started this blog AT ALL so let's just get it over with because it is actually pretty important.

If you are anything like my mother (love ya), all of your photos from the past 102 years are ceremoniously dumped into your "My Pictures" folder.  There maybe some attempt at organization with a few files labeled with things like "Thanksgiving 2007" or "Uncle Bob's visit."  And... the naming convention of each image is the same name the camera gave them, something like... IMG_12345 (sure, I remember that day)!

There are plenty of ways to be more organized.  But, here's how I do it (it's actually pretty simple)...

A folder for each day...
In my "My Pictures" folder I have a folder for each day that I took pictures as well as folders for previous years.  The folders are named with the following convention... YYYY_MM_DD.  (I do it this way so that they can easily be organized consecutively.)  I usually have this folder set to "thumbnail view" but here's what the naming looks like...

File Naming...
This is super easy too.  After I move my images onto my computer they are re-named (automatically) by date.  The convention is shockingly similar to the folder naming with a sequence number added... YYYY_MM_DD-001  One caveat here, you will want to have a program that names the files for you.  It's likely that the program that came with your camera could do this.  If you don't have software that can do this you could try Picassa from Google for free.  Here's a link to the renaming help page... Picassa Renaming Help. No promises from me though, I haven't actually tried it so let me know if it works for you.

That's it!  Like I mentioned, there are plenty of other ways to organize.  This is how I do it and it works really well for me.  I highly recommend finding and using an image organization system that works for you!

Everyday life - Don't look at the camera!

This just might be one of my favorite images of Evan from 2010.  He was getting really good at crawling by this time so I had to get low to get this perspective.  This photo is unique because it was (and still is) very rare that he would let me put any hats or hoodies on him.  What I love about this photo is the interesting "texture" of the print on the outside of his jacket paired with the pop of color coming from the inside.  Also, there are lots of colors (ok well, clutter) in the background.  In addition to these elements, I like that this shows off his cute baby face and the handsome eyes he got from his daddy!

But... he's not looking at the camera!  Oh, no..... Oh, yes!  I like that too!  With as many photos as I take, I'm able to get some with him looking at the camera but it's not something I constantly strive for (if you look at enough of my photos, you'll see that).  It's important to me to capture my family members in their element, doing what they do.  If Evan's looking cute and playing with a car or his dog or his dad, I want to try to capture the moments as they happen.  I like to show the relationships and interests as they exist.  If you like this too, then my advice is to hold back from saying "look at the camera" as often as you may.  Be a fly on the wall (with a camera)!

Composition - From Above & Close up

If you've ever looked for any help on photographing children, I'm sure you've seen that a common suggestion is to "get down on their level."  While I agree with this advice 100% (and will be sure to write about it another time) I wanted to start with and idea that breaks this rule - because for some reason, I like to be different!  Although I do try to get down low for many of my photos of Evan, this photo was actually taken at a higher angle.  The moral of the story is... by varying the angles from which you photograph, you can add variety to your images.

Advanced notes...

• Image caputured at f/3.2, 1/100th, ISO 2500
• For this close up shot, this wide aperature worked well to provide good focus on the entire face while nicely blurring any distracting elements in the background.

Get those photos off of your memory card!!!!

My first bit of advice around here is to work on getting all of those precious photos off of your memory card and safely onto your hard-drive! I know you're busy and doing this takes time away from your family and all of those other chores you need to get to. But, it's an important step!

This is a topic that was a problem for me in the past, but not so much anymore. After Evan was born I made taking and displaying photos for my family to see a priority. That's when I started my POTD (photo of the day) project and couldn't afford to neglect the memory card. You can see my 2011 POTD gallery HERE. More info on POTD in a future post.

For now, here are my tips on how to consistently clear that card...

• Use a smaller card, this will force you to clear it more often (just don't resort to deleting shots so you can take more!)
• Add card clearing to your To-do list (really... it only takes a couple of minutes)
• Start your own POTD (photo of the day) project.  So many benefits with doing this and I"ll write more about it later but for now, more photos, more often will make card clearing a part of your daily/weekly routine.

After moving files onto your computer, I suggest "formatting" the card in your camera rather than simply deleting files.

Keep reading my blog and I'll share ideas of what to do with your photos.... but they have to be on your computer first!

Later I'll let you know how I organize my image files.

My Family Photography Philosophy

What does it take to create a special photo? 

The best camera? No.

A highly skilled photographer? Nope. 

Perfect focus, composition, light, and exposure? Naw. 

Perfectly posed subjects wearing matching white and khaki outfits and all showing their pearly whites?  Ugh!

As my family's photographer I always try to get as many of these things right as possible but what's most important to me in creating images that will be with my family for decades is to convey the varied emotions, unique personalities, complex relationships, and important milestones that are a part of my family's lives.

You will see that sometimes the perfect photo for a specific moment might be grainy, have motion blur, or be a little out of focus.  Sometimes, there isn't time to get the camera perfectly set, plan a thoughtful composition, and press the shutter at the exact right moment.  The important thing is to use the best tools that you have to the best of your ability to create lifelong memories that you will cherish for years to come.

But... there is always more to learn!

I decided to learn photography because I know that there is always room for improvement, even in the impromptu nature of family photojournalism.  My favorite images, and the ones that I want to display in my home, are the ones that some photographers would call "snapshots" and not "portraits."  And that's okay with me!  My goal is to create the best snapshots possible.

I hope you'll hang around here as I share some of my tips, tricks, and ideas about family photography.