RED

Ok, I got some red pics in the last couple days. I need to choose between them or try again (I don't really LOVE any of them) so I will post them here for consideration.

Here's Janey on a walk in her snuggly red stroller. She is so cute!

Here is an attack of uno cards.

and another kind of cool attack.

Here is my diaper bag hanging up and ready to go, along with the clock subtly in the background telling me I am for sure late. Oops, I think this one is overprocessed. Thought I fixed that. But you get the idea . . .

Here's Ethan's first day of Kindergarten apple telling him which class to go to. Now it hangs upon his schoolwork basket.

I'm also contemplating red socks and a book (together, and upon feet and in hands . . . you get the idea). I am not being so inspired this time!

Yikes!

Our assignment this month is kind of hard. I have to take a picture that is mostly red, another orange, another yellow. I just never leave my house. I guess I'll have to drag myself out and about.

SO, does anyone have any ideas? I've seen lots of red around since I've been looking, but who knows if I can make a good picture.

BUT, just to give myself HOPE (and a way out if I really don't find anything) here are some pictures I've already taken that fit the category:




So, I could use these, and maybe when we do our little gallery, I will. But I really do want to take new pictures for the assignment. I'm on the hunt!!

Just Because You CAN . . . .

. . . does NOT mean you should.

I've been a little too excited about my new CS4, it seems, for I have been doing very uncharacteristic things. I mean, sure, I love a good picture collage, and fine, it's all good to add a little "Janey Jump Up" now and then, just to be cute, but THIS is getting ridiculous:

It all started out so innocently, with my searching for shadows for this month's photography assignment, and I found some great ones in Janey's bed:


Then to accentuate the shadows, I turned in BW:


It's a good enought picture on its own, but I felt it was a little lonely, almost sad without an actual BABY in the picture, so I thought I'd tell a little story through a mini-collage:
Then, because I had just downloaded some fun new fonts, and because I had a cute title for the picture, I thought I'd just SLAP the title RIGHT on the collage, and what do you have?

Photo Scrapbooking.

Not that there's anything wrong with that . . . it's just . . . not for me. I'm not a big scrapbooker. Plus, what is this for? I mean, if I were putting it into a scrapbook, sure, or some other little storytelling project. But a photography assingment??? Nope. And to be honest, for my own personal style, I'd choose the collage without words over the cutesy one with words 9 times out of 10. So why do I do it? Because I can, I guess. Because I'm practicing with my new software? And also because every now and then, words can really accentuate the picture and help tell the story.

In this case, it was a mistake. Without the words, viewers can bring to mind their own stories. Did she just wake up? Will she not go to bed? Is she just having some pre-nap playtime? Does she just love time in her crib?

Yes, much better.

So, I'm posting this to remind myself to EDIT my edits. RETRENCH! Sometimes simple is much better.

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!)