Flashy

So, I have an Amazon gift card that I want to use on photography stuff. Here are my thoughts:

Some sort of flash or flash filter so I don't just keep taking yellowy grainy pictures inside and whatnot.

OR

A new lens. Macro? Telephoto? Something I don't know about yet?

What do you all recommend? My gift card is only $50, but that doesn't mean I can't spend more! :)

PC assignment 3.1

Here's one of my situations. Making pumpkin bread with my boys. They love to bake with me, and I love to bake! This year, pumpkin bread has been especially popular, and Ethan wants me to make it every day. There is pretty much no light in my kitchen, so I just did the best I could. They may not be the best quality, but I LOVE that it really captures my buddies helping me bake, and fooling around and making a mess at the same time.



The next situation I did was Miss Jane in her Jonny Jump Up (we call it the Janey Jump Up now). She is in it all all ALL the time and loves being in it more than anything--well, she's starting to like crawling around a little more. She just loves her independence and she spins, jumps, walks, looks around, and just hangs out for hours every day in her little bouncy seat. Again, it was hard to get good lighting in a door jam, but I did my best and they get to be BW. Also, extremely hard to get in focus pictures of a bouncing baby, but I figured that blur was part of the appeal. So, here she is:



I made a couple collages of actual jumping techniques as well, here they are:
There you have it. Part one of assignment all done. I took a MILLION pictures, and it was so hard to choose from them. Sometimes I had to sacrifice quality of the picture to get the idea I wanted, sometimes the other way around. But it was so fun, and now I have these lovely keepsakes! If I ever happen to have an indoor trampoline in Jane's room or something, I think I'll print these out and put them on the wall!

Photoshop Questions

Ok, so I often take pictures that are too cool. Sometimes I like them that way, sometimes not. While I was waiting for my Photoshop, I often changed this in Picnik, which was fine. I usually just told it to automatically change the warmth, and left it at that. So, I tried to do that on Photoshop by putting a warming filter, and it did warm it up, but it seemed to change a few things. Whenever I try to change the colors using a filter, I am always disappointed in the eye color. Besides, it looked a little greenish. I had to put on a red filter in order to make it look more natural. Look at these two for example:

original

edited in Picnik with one button

edited in photoshop using a yellow warming filter and another red filter

I think the picnik one actually looks better, and it took a lot less effort. What is picnik doing that I am not doing in photoshop. I mean, I could fix the eye color by using a sponge, changing the color filter, and saturating just the eyes, and maybe tone down the read a bit, but maybe I'm just not doing it right. Still, it seems I'm doing a lot of work to try to make it look like the Picnik one. And anyway, what is the advantage of photoshop then? I know I have a LOT more control, but if I just need a quick warming effect, should I just use something like Picnik? Or is there something wrong with the Picnik one that I don't see?

Another quesiton--BW conversion. I tried it 4 ways. Three of them are the multi-step processes from this article. The other was my plain old desaturate and play with brightness/contrast on Digital Photo Professional. Can you tell which is which? I asked Jake which he liked best, and he chose my lame-o "flat" conversion. I am not seeing the depth vs. flat. I know it looks flat if you just desaturate and leave it at that. But do the layers really add a lot of depth? I mixed them up when I put them in, and now I'm not even sure which method is which.


SO, photo peoples, please tell me what I'm missing here. I have used PS extensively as a desktop publishing tool, and didn't do much photo editing besides crazy effects or fixes, so I'm new to actual photo editing.

Also, don't feel obligated to answer. Many times I just post these questions so as to remember them and see what I was working on for the future when I'm smarter and stuff.

As far as getting to know PS again, I've been making my way through the help. It is actually quite helpful.

A Little Edit . . .

Piano and Viola Antique edit
Originally uploaded by Cami Turpin

So, Jeri gave me hope that my piano and viola pics were not all a total loss, so I put this picture in Picnik and fixed it on up, adding a little antiquey feel to it, desaturated the color, gave it a little vignette, and a few other little things. Suddenly I like it a lot! I would like to do more to it, but alas, my photo editing capabilities are still crippled. Hooray for digital photography! What would I do without editing?

(p.s. I did this using Flickr's "blog this" button. Pretty easy!)

PC2 assignment 2: Books

This was going to be Books, Blankets, and Beds, but I thought books were busy enough. Obviously I'm a reader. I wanted to show a big stack of books without it looking too posey. I had some on my favorite reading chair, but it was too hard to get right, so my chair theme didn't work for me this time. (Did you notice they are all on a chair of some kind so far? But I guess this is on piano bench, so it still sort of works.) I tried on the bookshelf too, but it just didn't look fun. These still look too posey for me, but I do like some of them.

Jake liked this two stacky one, but it looks a little haphazard for me.

I was trying out the open book thing. Probably should have used a different background.

Then I added the open book to the stack. Much better. I toned down colors a little in this one and added a little more contrast.

Here it is with the WHOLE stack. I wasn't sure if I liked the extreme angle on this one, but I do like the idea of the tower of books.

The end. I think I won't do food, which was going to be my last favorite thing. (I'm not counting people.) I could do a whole SET just of foods. I'm thinking maybe I'll do dishes to represent foodies! I could do a stack. I seem to be leaning toward stacks of things . . .

PC assignment 2--favorites: Music

This one is hard. I can get shots I like of the viola. I can get shots I like of the piano. But together, it is way hard. And that's after I gave up on adding the guitar! I may just give up on this whole shot and just make a little collage of each individual instrument. I'll just leave it out of the "favorites" assignment.

THIS:

plus THIS:

does NOT equal THIS:

Lame-O.

So, I have many other options, and I suppose I can use one of these if all else fails, but maybe I'll try to work something else out. It all just looks so posey!

PC assignment 2: blanket, books, and rocker

Ok, so sadly there was much ado to get this chair into decent light! And then it was hard to find a good background and a good angle. I think I will also probably tweak this to make it a little warmer, more cozy. But here are the best shots I could get in my limited space:

This one looks to focused on the books.

This one looks a little too confusing.

I like this one best, but it is all a little confusing to me. I can't tell what's good anymore.

So, what do you think? Does it convey time with babies? That's what I was going for. Any ideas for better shots to convey that? I only REALLY want the rocking chair.