Okay, I decided to show you my newest favorite photo before I show you my Christmas and zoo layouts. This photo was taken on Whidbey Island at the Deception Pass State Park. We had been walking along the beach and Rob picked Matthew up and they were between me and the setting sun and I knew I had to take the picture. I’m so happy with it. I saturated it a tiny bit but really not much, it was so beautiful out! I got a whole bunch of beautiful pictures of the setting sun and the sun through the moss in the trees too. I also got a whole bunch of beach, rock, sand, wood, and cement pictures to use as textures and brushes for my digital scrapbooking design stuff. People must have thought I was loony taking pictures of weird stuff!! Haa. Oh well. Anyway, on to the photo:

I am constantly amazed at how big Matthew is getting!  He’s learning so quickly and is starting to communicate, but not yet with words.  I love that both of them are in silhouette and the slight angle of the horizon.  I love that I didn’t directly center the two of them and that I got lots of the sky in the shot.  What do you think?

DeAnna

Well, I’ve been getting crafty lately and at the crop I managed to get almost an entire 8×8 album completed (8 of 11 layouts complete) but I didn’t get to work on any of my own layouts.  The good thing though is that I have 4 other layouts ready to work on and finish as I have time!  I’ll be scanning in my album soon but I can’t show it off until after we’ve given it to it’s recipient!  Might be a week or two.  In the meantime, I am working on a new template and my Christmas 2007 layout – it’s coming along nicely and I’m almost finished with it.

I’ve been trying some new techniques with colouring and inking and stamping that I haven’t done before.  I’m really into paper these days and I haven’t been doing as much digital stuff, but I think that will change soon.  I seem to go in cycles, digital during the summer/fall, paper around Christmas with cards and stuff, and more paper as I begin preparing for the PE crop in March/April.

I think my computer is sending me a message since Photoshop is acting very slow these days.  I think it’s trying to tell me that I need to shuffle some stuff to my external hard drive!  ;D

We are in the middle of planning for a birthday party – Matthew will be 1 in just over a month!  I can’t believe it’s gone so fast!!!  He’s growing so much and is so adorable.  I think the theme will be baseball related, and I have an idea for a really cool cake using my Silhouette as a template – I’m excited!

At any rate, I haven’t completely fallen off the grid, and I’ll be back soon with some new stuff … but I’ll leave you with a photo I took last year in Osoyoos.  It had just started to get cloudy and the sun was streaming through the clouds.  It was one of those images you would see in inspirational calendars.  I worked it a bit in Photoshop, added some brushes from House of 3 (which of course I got from the class downloads from JS (Photoshop Special Effects and Frame Ups) and a quote.  I love it because we were at a wedding and about 10 minutes later it started to drizzle and by the time we had moved the wedding reception indoors, the rain had stopped.  They say a wet bride is a lucky bride…

I showed you this family photo in a previous post.   My youngest brother Ryan’s former girlfriend is standing next to the bride.  Ryan and his girlfriend have since broken up and he asked if I could work some magic and remove her from the photo for the album I’ve been working on for Brandon and Eden.  I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I thought I would give it a try.  Here’s the original:

Here’s the after:

Not bad, if I do say so myself.  Not perfect though.  I basically created a copy of the original photo on a new layer (ctrl + J), removed the right half of the copy (the top layer), and moved it over so Ryan was closer to Eden (the bride).  On the bottom layer, I removed the left half of the photo from about where Ryan was standing so I didn’t have any overlap at the left edge.  

Then I started erasing Ryan’s ex-girlfriend so that you could see Eden again, using a soft rounded brush.  The detail work was hard since Ryan is turned so sharply, and the left half of his body was covered by his girlfriend. 

I used the colour picker and changed the opacity of the brushes here and there to match the colour of Ryan suit, and using a combination of hard and soft rounded brushes I painted his suit back in.  Considering that I’ve removed an entire person from the photo, I don’t think it looks half bad!

My brother Brandon got married just over a year ago.  I’ve been working on the photos so I can prepare a present for them for their first anniversary (of course it’ll be scrapbooking related).  I had a lot of work to do to my photos since we had just gotten our brand new Nikon D80 less than a month earlier, and I hadn’t figured out all the dials and buttons yet.  All of the pictures of the ceremony were quite dark since they only had the lights on at the back of the room and over the couple was dark.  My standard flash wasn’t strong enough, and I had no idea how to change the ISO yet. 

Here’s a straight-out-of-the-camera shot of our family at the wedding:

Here’s how it looks after I’ve run a Pioneer Woman Boost action (and played with Levels a bit to lighten it up):

At any rate, I played with the Levels a bit, and used some really cool actions.  The Pioneer Woman is one of my favourite websites, and she has two Photoshop action sets.  I used Boost on pretty much all of the photos, and chose several to convert to black and white using PW’s B&W action.  I really like the edge burn on the B&W action, but I found it a bit dark for my black and whites, so I usually lessened the opacity on it.  On a few of the photos I wanted to keep the colour and make the photos a bit dreamy so I used Lovely & Ethereal.  These actions were all from Set#1, but Set#2 has some very cool photo effects in it as well.  I particularly like Seventies, Colorized and Sepia Tone.

Here are some of my favourites:

 

You can take a look at the rest of the photos here.

So far, I’ve learned that taking a photo is all about light.  I’ve learned this from reading various websites and books.  I have also learned this from the new digital photography class I’m taking, Oh Shoot! from Jessica Sprague’s website, taught by Candice Stringham.  How much light you let in is very important.  Shutter speed and aperture; both are all about light, but in different ways.  Shutter speed is the mechanism in your camera that opens and closes to let in light.  How long it stays open is determined by your shutter speed.

 

The tricky part about shutter speed is it’s calculated in fractions of a second.  A slow shutter speed is about 1/60th of a second and under.  A fast shutter speed is higher than 1/60th of a second, up to around 1/2000ths of a second, or higher, depending on your camera.  My Nikon D80, for instance, goes up to 1/4000ths of a second.

 

A slow shutter speed will let in lots of light, but if your subject is in motion (such as a toddler, for instance, who we know are always in motion, right??), then you will have blur.  A faster shutter speed will freeze the subject.  I like a bit of blur to show the movement, but not too much!

 

Aperture, is the mechanism in your lens that opens and closes to let in light.  How much it opens is set by the f-stop.  Each lens will have a range of f-stops.  The range will depend on the lens.  My lenses range from: 1.8 to 22 for my 50mm f/1.8 lens; 3.5 to 5.6 for my 18-135mm kit lens; and 4 to 22 for my 70-300mm zoom lens.  I haven’t learned much about the actual f-stop values, that’s next week!

 

Anyway, here are the pictures I took for assignment 1 of Oh Shoot! about shutter speed.  If you click on the photo it will enlarge and show you the details of the photo:

 

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Next up I have a tutorial planned on how to use templates in photoshop for your digital scrapbooking.  Coming soon!

 

DeAnna

Well, I have officially finished Digi: In Deep, and here’s my new blinkie:

Hee hee! I can’t wait for Digi: In Deeper in October.

Oh Shoot! Digital Photography started Monday, and we took our photos tonight but I haven`t resized them yet.

We went to the beach on Sunday, and got some great photos with our new zoom lens – check them out.  I love how we froze the sand in mid-air.  Kyle had so much fun, and then got some kisses from a puppy!

 

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I haven’t done much scrapbooking lately, I figured I would take a week off since I finished Digi: In Deep only a week ago!  It was an intense class but I’m glad I took it!  Haven’t received my Shutterfly book yet, hopefully it will arrive soon.

DeAnna

I am so excited – I got an email today telling me that my album, Kyle’s First Year, is being featured on Shutterfly’s gallery! You can check it out here, or in my post here.  I love the album and I can’t wait to get the copy I ordered.  It was shipped yesterday and I hope I get it soon!

 

In the meantime, I finished Week 4 layout from Digi: In Deep.  This is a fantastic layout, I am so happy with Jessica’s layout design.

 

 

I managed to sign up for Oh Shoot! Digital Photography on Jessica’s website.  That starts next week.  6 weeks of digital photography learning bliss!  Weeeee!  To finally learn how to use my 50mm f1.8 lens

So my friend Lynn convinced me to take a cake decorating class with her. I thought to myself, sounds like fun! Of course, I didn’t think about the fact that I’d have to bake cupcakes, lots of cupcakes, to practice on and bring to class. People at my office have a hate-on for me right now! I’m threatening their summer diets, don’t you know. I’ve gained about 5 pounds in the last 2 weeks! It’s been fun, though. Take a look:

 

 

Then, one day I was checking Kimi Kreation blog, and she was talking about how she was hating her D80. She wasn’t liking any of her photos, they were flat and lifeless. Uh, okay. I thought they were pretty good. Then she showed us what they look like after changing some of the custom settings as recommended by Ken Rockwell. Well, okay, I see your point! I quickly went to his site and made the appropriate alterations, and holy crap! What a difference in my photos. We took Kyle to the park and met Lynn and Nyla there. Kyle and Nyla make such a cute pair! Kyle actually asked Nyla to hold his hand. He’s not even two! Awwww. Just look at the saturation in the colours on Kyle’s shirt – beautiful. And check out the sky in this photo! Absolutely amazing! I’ve done nothing to these photos except make them smaller for the web. Unbelievable!

 

 

So then, this past Monday I started taking Jessica Sprague’s Now We’re Rockin’ digital scrapbooking class. Great class, so much fun so far, and we’ve only been doing it for 1 week. Here’s the layout I completed from Lesson 1, featuring, of course, my cupcakes.

 

I have also been checking out this great website, The Pioneer Woman.  This woman is absolutely hilarious, and has some great content, ranging from general farm life, her amazing love story, photography, cooking, etc.  You have to check her out.  I have laughed hysterically every time I have checked out her site!

Anyway, life is pretty crazy.  Kyle has his 2nd birthday coming up, we are going camping next weekend, and there is just not enough time in a day to do everything!

Talk to you all soon! 

 

 

While we were in San Francisco, we went driving around sight-seeing, heading in the direction of the Golden Gate Bridge.  We drove through Presidio and came to a nice beach called Baker Beach.  From the beach you can see the Golden Gate bridge quite well, from the base of the bridge near the San Francisco side.  It was quite cold and windy that morning, and very cloudy, but I guess the locals are used to it because Rob found some people playing volleyball on the beach!  Kyle was sleeping in the car, so Rob was the one who had the pleasure of walking the beach to get as close to the bridge as he could.  Here’s one of my favourite pics of the bridge.

On the way back Rob saw this amazing wooden staircase, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to do some cool vignetting to it.  

That night in the hotel room, I was checking Kimi’s Kreations blog, and she had a link to this great website called Keep Designing, which happened to have a free download of some very cool vignettes.  I downloaded it, and this is what I came up with:

 

I totally love this picture.  It was such a great coincidence that the Keep Designing download featured a staircase in the woods!  I added a layer and filled it with a nice neutral colour, put a gradient on it and changed the blending mode to Soft Light.  I think it gave it a really dreamy look.

I think I might have to print that one out and frame it.

DeAnna

 

Well here’s a few new photos for the challenge.  These are pretty raw, I haven’t done anything to them except change their size to save for web viewing.  Most of these are from a day hike and bbq in Golden Ears Provincial Park on the Lower Falls Trail on the May long weekend.  It was an absolutely beautiful day and we spent it with good friends, Darren, Lynn and their daughter Nyla who is only 11 days younger than Kyle.  Rob tried to get a shot of the falls (which were much bigger than the last time we took a photo of them, but there had been some major run-off that week, so it was raging!).  There was so much spray that our UV filter was dripping wet when we took it off!  Check out this shot:

I have also come to the realization that I am not a good gardener.  My garden is so neglected that it has some major cobwebs!  There’s just not enough time in the day for everything.  So I decided to try to get some photos of the cobwebs in my garden and I think I got an amazing shot of one of my flowers just about to bloom.  I have no idea what this flower is, but it’s fantastic when it blooms, it becomes this giant orange puff ball. 

We’ve been in San Francisco since May 24, and we’ve gotten some amazing photos.  You should check them out on our family website:  www.allanfamily.ca  We`ve got some great videos on there too, especially one of the sea lions at Pier 39 at Fisherman`s Wharf.  Very cool!  I`m planning my scrapbook pages already.  We went to the Golden Gate Bridge, and the gift shop actually had a scrapbooking kit with 4 papers, tags, a photo grouping, and borders all about San Francisco and the bridge!  I can`t wait to get my photos ready and printed.  I think I have to start Kyle`s first birthday page first !!

Lynn and I also scrapbooked on the May long weekend, and I finally finished my Groovy page.  Check it out:

 

I really hope that we continue our plan to scrapbook once a month.  I think it would be completely beneficial to both of us!

Anyway, that`s it for now.

DeAnna