Another fun photo outing

I want to thank Tammy and her two adorable boys for being guinea pigs for Jess and I! I had an awesome time and am thrilled with the photos. I hope you are too! Here are a few of my favorites...

Snow

We got some snow last night and are still getting some now. The weathermen really messed up this forecast. We went from expecting 10-16 inches to barely getting 4 inches here at my house.

Anyway, I threw Daisy in the snow and tried to get some pics of her - she's really difficult to photograph because she moves all over the place (unless you put her on a table like I did in previous pics). I ended up having to hook her up to the tie-out so she wouldn't run away on me.

Here's the best of the worst!

more editing with PW actions

This is me.

Jess and I had a date today. We headed to Pennypack Park. We had such a great time. I never even noticed the photographical opportunities that were there until we made a stop under one of the bridges. We practiced photographing each other and came away with some really awesome pictures. I have to say, I must be sort of a purist. I find it so difficult to edit photos b/c I honestly love the color quality of the straight-out-of-camera versions.

In these next 5 pictures, the only edits I made were to the sharpness of the eyes, to add some sparkle. Also, I played around with creating a watermark for my photos.

Here are a few shots Jess took of me, which I edited in Photoshop using some of the Pioneer Woman's actions. The first two are Heartland. The one all the way up top is Seventies with a little quick edge burn.

A day at Kelly Drive and Main Street Manayunk

Jess finally got her camera!! So I finally have someone to go out and shoot with. It's so much more fun learning that way. We headed to Kelly Drive by the Philadelphia Art Museum:

Water Works

Boathouse Row


Another shot of Boathouse Row. Jess was doing a photoshoot with the geese.

Philadelphia Art Museum (side shot)

Then we headed to Main Street in Manayunk. One of our favorite places is the Manayunk Brewery. We always have a great time there, especially in the spring and summer when we can hang out on the back deck along the Schuylkill River.

Jess with her pregnancy glow

We found this awesome rock wall with some moss growing on it, and some strange blue coloring. It was so neat to come across such great colors in the drab winter landscape.

Daisy did some posing for us

And I happened to get an accidental panning picture! I've read a lot about panning and how it takes a lot of practice but you can sometimes get them accidentally. I was pretty proud of this one.

Light Box

The newest rage for food blogging is having a light box. The biggest reason I rarely update my food blog in the winter is because of the awful lighting in the house after 5pm. Today I decided to try to make a light box by myself. Before I lost my job I considered buying one off of ebay for $35 or something like that. Doing it by myself only cost me $1.91 for 2 pieces of heavy duty cardboard, plus some supplies I already had on hand like a box and tape. That's it. I'm getting quite thrifty in my unemployed days.

Anyway, I decided to play around with the camera after I finally got the light box done. I tried taking some pics of a black and white seashell my friend gave me, but I think I need a stronger light bulb because the pics were just not turning out that great. So I was thinking, "what can I photograph that has a lot of color?" Personally, I just love colorful photos. So then it hit me - I just bought a box of Fruit Loops (I love kid cereals). So here are the results:

Hayley

My girlfriend Nikki had a sweet little baby girl 7 weeks ago. I had the pleasure of playing around with the camera some more during a visit with Nikki and Hayley yesterday. Thank goodness for the awesome SOOC quality of the pics that my Nikon produces (and the adorableness of baby Hayley), because my skill is just totally lacking:

She has the cutest little winter boots!

I love the nostalgia of this one:

I LOVE Flowers...

I have an insane obsession with flowers. They're one of my most favorite things to photograph. They're just plain one of my favorite things to look at.

For my 2 year anniversary (and to help cheer me up after losing my job), my awesome hubs ordered a flower arrangement from the florist who put together all of the flowers for my wedding. The arrangement was almost an exact replication of my wedding bouquet, just with a few changes. Despite the changes, I was absolutely in love with the flowers, I can't stop looking at them, and I of course had to photograph them.

This photo is my ultimate most favoritest picture I've taken with the new DSLR yet:

Daisy

When you're playing with your camera, you need things to take pictures of. The easiest thing for me is my dog, Daisy. She's adorable. But she hates having her picture taken. It's pretty evident in the pictures I take, but it's so funny when she runs away when she sees me pull the camera out.

My living room is painted this amazing blue color. I took the opportunity to play with some daylight photography since losing my job last week. Here are a few of my faves:

The Beginning

So a few weeks ago I purchased my first ever DSLR camera. The Nikon D60. It's my new baby, my pride and joy. I'm having a ball getting familiar with it. My ultimate goal is to just have fun with it. So far it's brought me loads of joy. I can only imagine how much fun I'll be having with it when Spring finally comes and there's more exciting things to take pics of outdoors.

In the meantime, check out the progression from day 1 with the camera to now:





Finally I was able to take a few quick pictures outside with Daisy in the daylight:









And eventually I got so sick of trying to figure out how to take correct exposures indoors with the awful lighting we have so I purchased Understanding Exposure: How To Shoot Great Photographs With a Film or Digital Camera by Bryan Peterson. This book is incredible. It was beyond enlighting by page 20 of the book. The picture examples to help explain things were beyond helpful. It's a quick read and definitely a book that I will be referring to as needed in the future. I definitely recommend this book to any new DSLR user.

So once I started playing around with what I learned from the book, I was able to get these pictures which were leaps and bounds better than the above photos:

The moral of the story is - I've still got a ton to learn, but I'm going to enjoy it in the meantime :)