My Grumpy little girl

I have been playing with the settings in my camera, I just can't get the beautiful creamy, clean and bright skintones that are all the go with digi photography. The settings I had my camera on certainly wern't helping. I had the saturation up too high and the colour mode set to the brightest option both of which were really exagerating the pink tones in my kids skin. Changing these two setting have made a massive improvement on my shots.

I have also taken one step closer to addressing my lighting issues. You see we have a great room in this house for taking natural light photos, with two massive windows with Roaman blinds which are very easy to lift to let in as much light as possible, funnily enough it also happens to be our theater room so we need to be able to make it as dark as possible to be able to watch the big screen so the romans are blockout and we also have outside blinds installed. Ironic huh. ANyway one of the Roman blinds was not installed properly and could only be lifted about a meter off the floor or about to the top of the couches infront of the wondow thus not allowing any extra light in through that window. The dickheads who installed it went bust soon after instalation (Gee I wonder why, crappy workmanship perhaps) so we were unable to get them back out to fix it. Cam had set somehting up so I am able to manually lift it though with some string holding it up. These blinds are HUGE and a PITA to handle but so worth the trouble to let the extra lighting in so fingers crossed I will be able to get some better focused pics. This pic is not a good example as my focusing was off. I take full blame for that, nothing to do with the lighting. I still seem to have to use ISO 1600 which I HATE doing but I would rather slightly grainly in focus pics than smooth out of focus pics at this point.

Anyway here is todays effort with the improved camera settings and lighting. I have to somehow reduce the red in ALL my pics but I have not touched the colours in this one. I did add a simple colour pop though....something I have not been able to do untill now cos it only exagerates my crappy skintones.

Oh and Philly if you read this, you would not believe the surprise I got when I saw your comment this morning. I was wrapped, I was gushing like a teen who just spotted her fav celeb LOL. I have been admiring your work for a loooong time now, you are one of the photographers who inspire me and you took a look ay MY blog. Thankyou so much. I am thinking of posting this pic in the forum to get some CC on the colours. I feel I am so close to what I am trying to achieve I can taste it.

*I have removed the original photo and replaced it with a much much better version. This time I did play with the colours, I added bit of yellow to it to warm it up. I actually went right back to lightroom and started again from the beginning. Thankyou to the ladies on EB for helping me with this pic.*

One I am happy with.......

........and proud of. I just love this Photo of my sweet little boy. This one I am happy to add my watermark to LOL. Oh I just wanna kiss those cheeks RIGHT NOW. He is such a sweet cuddly little boy.

*have added a new version of this picture. I am not taking away the old one incase anyone would like to give thier opinion on which one they prefer.*

Learning New Tricks

Well, I have been perving on the watermarks some of the very clever ladies have on thier photos on EB and have taught myself how to make one as a brush for Photoshop. I am sure this will not be my final watermark but it will do for now. No need to get too serious when I can't even focus a shot properly PMSL. I really want to find a pic of a Peahen to use but the swirly things will have to do for now.

Here is a samply below on yet another out of focus photo of mine.

A problem fixed WHOO HOO

It's late and I should be in bed but I am waiting for bottles to sterilise. Why did I leave it so late to sterilise them? Well...........I have had this problem with my photo processing for a while now. You see my images look great in Lightroom and PS but once I save them they look completely different and it has been frustrating the poop out of me for months now. I have tried so many things and nothing was working. Untill tonight that is. As a last resort I stuffed around withthe monitor untill nothing and I mean NOTHING looked right. Even the icons on my desktop looked bizzar. Then I cried cos I didnlt know how to change it all back, then I crossed my fingers and tried the image and colour reset option on my actual monitor then hit the auto button and everything was fixed.......including my little problem with Lighroom, PS and Windows. Now when I post process my pics to within an inch of thier life they look the same when I save them.

Anyway, I got some new black fleece for my backdrop today so expect my blog to be flooded with new pics in the near future.....all with the black backdrop LOL. Here is one I took today, most of my pics from today are terrible due to crappy lighting but I liked this one. Of course I have added the gool ol Urban Acid Action....because I bloody well can.

Now back to bottles.

Oh and thankyou so much for the comments guys. Very encouraging. Especially my annonymous EB friend, that was a lovely surprise.

My "not so little" Man

It's been a little while since I posted a pic of my handsome man. I quickly snapped this one today. I had to make it B&W because he has an unslightly sun/wind burnt face. He is about as cheeky as they come and he looooooves his Mum. He is rough and pulls my hair if I am not smart enough to pull it back. He also claws are my face, neck and chest when he is tired and tends to stick his fingers up my nose when I am feeding him his bottle. He loves to shred paper and had been going to work on an old Cosmo I had lying around with Delta Goodrum on the cover lately. I just love him to pieces, he is my boy and he is handsome as hell and when his face lights up mine does too.

Farmyard pics

I am mainly adding these pics for the Mum's group ladies to save me emailing them and clogging thier inbox's LOL. The latest Challenge for the photography blog was "metal". Perfect timing considering this weeks Mum's group was at Rain, Hayne and Shine farmyard which happened to be loaded with old metal farming equiptment and other stuff. Anyway I thought it would be nice to email the girls this link so they could see why I was maddly snapping strange things LOL.

Not much else happening here. Have cut runs back to 3kms for various reasons. I hope to be back at 5kms in the near future but I am not going to push it. I am luuuuuurving the Gym. I got an awesome new pair of sunnies for running the other day, actually the same day we went to the farmyard (thanks Andrea) and they are sensational. Soooooo light and so clear and absolutely NO FOGGING UP and bugger all glare. They are by far the best sunnies I have ever had. I will have to take a pic LOL. I have 5.5kg to go to get to pre preggy weight.

Kids are O.K. Ryan has just been crook and keeping me up for 3 nights straight. He is fine now though. Anna had her first real haircut at the hairdressers the other day. Again I must post pics.

We all went to a friend of mines daughters first B'day party today. I can't believe how quickly that year went....Happy B'day Charli. Ryan is 8 months old TODAY..........in 4 months we will be having our own first B'day big bash here. Goodness, how scarey. He is walking a bit when you hold his hands now and he is increasingly cheeky. I just love him to bits.

Well.....I think that's it. I need to go to bed so it is going to have to be it. Oh almost forgot, I am in contact with one of my cousins.....we used to be very close, penpals. We are very close in age. I am extremly happy to be in contact with my Kellie again. You gotta luuuurve facebook. Oh Oh and I am meeting a "net friend" tomorrow. A lovely lady from my Parents group who also happens to be a member of the photography blog. Exciting exciting. Must rememeber to take camera.

Anyway I really have to go to bed. Oh I had better email this link out first PMSL.

Shannon.

Shannon, I hope you read this. For some reason I can't comment on your blog. I dunno what the go is there. Anyway just wanted you to know I am thinking of you. That's all I will say XXX

Just playing.

Been a while I know, I have been meaning to blog but just never seem to find the time. Things can be really full on here. I only just picked up my camera for the first time in a few weeks yesterday.

Cam took me out for lunch yesterday, we left the kids with my Mum and went to the tooradin airport restaurant called "Wings and Finns". It is a seafood restaurant but I managed to find a nice spicy chicken salad on the menu, it was divine. All the salad ingredients were very fresh and reeking of quality I have not been that impressed with a salad for a while. We also got a bottle of wine and some desert, I got a Pear, Lemon & Lime tart and it was AWESOME. Lucky for my calorie count we didn;t need dinner last night LOL.

The running and gym is going well, I am jogging 5km each run and getting better slowely. Had a scare the last run I went on involving a car load of guys drinking at 6:15am in one of the carparks I jog through on the track but I wont go into that. That was Saturday morning and I have not attempted a jog since due to a nasty headcold but I have been back to the track and was a little jittery so who knows how I will go when the time comes.

Here are a few photos, the first one I took a while ago but played with it for a scrap challenge so why not upload it LOL. The second one I took yesterday, I took it through my closed window in a moving car with three wines under my belt so I am impressed. I have added an action called Urban Acid and a vignette during the RAW processing.

The Third one I took last night, once the kids were in bed hubby suggested I take my camera down to the beach for a play. I need to get some photos for a blog challenge and am struggeling, I wanted to get a shot of 3 beach boxes and had an idea of some effects to apply to them but I just wasn't feeling it last night and came home with some very average shots. The beach was busy and I was worried people would think I was a sicko and taking photos of them. Anyway I did get this beach box shot at Mt Martha South Beach and pretty much Post Processed it to within an "inch of it's life" as hubby would say LOL. I processed it in Lightroom then in PS CS2 I added a vintage action, I have so many I can not for the life of me remember which one, then I added a pink Grad filter then a lens distortion filter, of and of course one of Bud frames I love the finished product, too bad it doesn't fir in with the blog challege theme.

The last photo was also taken last night too, It was taken at Nun's Walk....where I run. I blogged a photo taken at the exact same spot in 2006 in an entry called Picture of Nunn's Walk There is a lookout right where I park when I go for my runs and this is the view from it. Breathtaking in everylight, this is the first time I have taken sunset photos. I was chatting to an elderly man the whole time I was taking photos, he was an artist and interested in what I was doing. I was glad for the company considering my experience at Nunn's walk only a few days ago. ANyway the photot was again processed in Lightroom then taken into CS2 where I added a slight "pop" and adjusted the colour balance to bring out the blue in the sky. Yes I am getting right into post processing, gotta keep up with the times. I added one of my fav Frame actions Jodi's Multiple Choice Frame Action

Well that is it for me, I have more photos to upload before my camera battery dies and then bottles to fill. Kellie, I know you read this and I wanna thank you for taking an interest. I know you love seeing pics of the kids. Lub you xxx