Funny story. I went to the botanical gardens today in blistering heat dargging along both my cameras (My P&S specifically because it takes WAY more awesome macros than my DSLR thanks to my distinct lack of a macro lens) specifically to get some good flowering photos but nothing seemed to be flowering! Lots of green but not much by way of other colors. Except the roses.

I really really dislike roses. A lot. They are so cliche. I am just not a fan. I didn’t want them in my wedding, I don’t want them for Valentine’s Day, I don’t buy them for my home. So of course the roses are what I had to work with.

Later we went to another park that had MUCH better color but I didn’t realize there were gardens at all on the grounds so I didn’t bring in my great macro-shooter. All I had to work with was my DSLR.

So the top two pictures are from the DSLR and the bottom, well, roses are from the Point ‘n Shoot.

See more beautiful flowers to brighten your day at the Land of K.A.: Theme Thursday

Filed under Nature on May 29 | 4 comments

Filed under Nature on May 28 | 2 comments

Filed under Addison on May 27 | 0 comments

All of my pool pictures turn out awful. Its forced me out of auto mode because on my no-flash auto setting the pictures have grossly distorted color hues leaning heavily to the blue side and are all over the spectrum in exposure – either way under or overexposed.

An examples:

Too dark, too blue. Blah. It doesn’t help that we tend to swim after dinner when it is pretty much full shade back there, too dark for low ISO settings which mean that often my pictures are pretty grainy to boot.

Here’s the post-processed true-to-life version:

I can get it the way I want it post-processed, more or less. But I want it more true to life SOOC. I’ve played around with the exposure compensation, the shutter speed, aperture, the white balance, etc. The one thing I haven’t done is try to manually set the hue adjustment to compensate. That seems a little drastic though.

Any ideas? Opinions?

Filed under Before & After, Post-Processing on May 25 | 4 comments

Ok, the shirt represents before: when I had control both of what I bought and what Addison wore. The pants, baseball glove and sunglasses represent after: when she figured it all out and took back the power. I still make her wear the shirt: its nice irony, don’t you think?!

Filed under Addison on May 23 | 3 comments

Well I intended to go out into rural Texas (which frankly is ALL of Texas pretty much) and find me some awesome barns to shoot but post-vacation business got the best of me so here I am posting what I already had. I really do love this assignment and hope to revisit it in the near future on my own because I only just recently, within the last year or so, started to see value in shooting things that are old and juxtaposing them with things that are new. I never understood the appeal, now I do. But my eye rarely goes to those things and I rarely remember to look for those shots. I’m getting better but verrrry slowly. So this is all I’ve got, from my recent Mother’s Day picture series.

This is when I first moved into our new house. I loved all the rusty metal and weathered wood contrasting with our “new” yard and home:

Bonus: this is aged via post-processed. Usually I’m not a fan of the sepia and the post-process aging but I had this photo I loved that was otherwise too grainy to use. I really like how this one turned out

See many more aged photos over at the Land of K.A.’s Theme Thursday!

Filed under Nature, Post-Processing on May 22 | 8 comments

Filed under Noah, Teegan on May 18 | 1 comment

Recently I took this photo of Addison:

I really love the photo but the ugly BRIGHT orange cone jutting out from her shoulder was a LITTLE distracting to me.

I’ve noticed that often times I can salvage a photo like this without doing heavy photoshop work just by converting it to black and white. Suddenly, the orange photo isn’t so obtrusive and distracting at all:

Filed under Addison, Before & After, Black & Whites, Dalton, Noah on May 17 | 2 comments

My family!!! Taking pictures of wet dirty kids: a mother’s dream come true!!

{my most beautiful sight in the world}

{childhood}

{all growed up, damn him}

{my baby boy}

{shelling: down and dirty}

{annoyed}

{looking cute, despite the glaring sun}

{water logged}

{dinner! Yes, he was really THAT happy about CRAWFISH!}

{I know this photo is all blown out and oversaturated to boot but I just love it anyway. I love these kids!}

Filed under Addison, Dalton, Noah, Teegan on May 16 | 3 comments

I spent Mother’s Day on the beach in full sun so had lots of opportunities to play around with the sun. There wasn’t a beautiful sunset to work with but I had fun experimenting with silhouettes:

Other than the vignette, they are both SOOC so I probably could have enhanced the silhouette effect better with Photoshop.

See more creative uses for sunshine at the Land of KA : Theme Thursday

Filed under Nature on May 15 | 3 comments