Baby "B" and Big Brother "L"

A friend of mine asked me to take some pictures of her kids ages almost 2 and almost 4 months yesterday. I searched and searched for pose ideas for photographing this age combo......you know what.....I found next to nothing!!! You know why???????? One should not try to photograph this age combo together! What a challenge! The little guy wanted nothing to do with me and baby sister wanted nothing to do with little guy. Baby "B" did great for the first part, but her smiles didn't last too long. Big Brother "L" didn't have many smiles for me at all! The kids are adorable and I got some great shots of them individually, but very little together! The lighting conditions were less than ideal for a beginner like me, but thank heaven for external flashes. If you are reading this and do not own one for your DSLR, I strongly and seriously recommend you purchase one! The bounce light effect is fantastic! I purchased mine from Amazon, but you can get them at B and H photo, buy.com, ebay, pretty much anywhere that sells camera accessories. I think mine cost around $5o.oo. It was one of the cheaper ones, but it does the job just fine for my purposes. SO, I repeat, SOOOO worth the money! These were all shot in manual mode and processed in Photoshop Elements 6. I took these photos in RAW and JPEG fine on my camera. I LOVE the RAW editor!!!!! It really makes up for my lack of technical expertise where exposure and white balance are concerned. So, without further rambling, here are several of the photos I took yesterday.

We picture {this} Daughters Entry

Okay, first I want to apologize to my 3 followers for posting this picture AGAIN, but it's my current favorite picture of my girly. The main reason....it's the only one in which she is looking at me. So, I am entering it into the We Picture {this} contest. This month's theme is "Daughters". It truly was hard to choose a favorite because I have so many sweet pictures of her, but I'm going with this one. Shot in Manual mode with a Nikon D80 with 50 mm 1.8 lens. F/4.5 1/125 ISO 400.
You can click on the picture to enlarge. Thanks for looking!

Finally making use of the adorable kitchen set I got them for Christmas!

I found this super adorable play kitchen at Sam's Club at Christmas time. I was so excited for my kids to have it, knowing that my girl was a bit young at the time to care and my boy was, well, a boy. Anyway, this kitchen is Pottery Barn cute at a Wal-Mart price. This weekend, I broke out the kids chef hats (bought to use as photography props sometime in the future). My boy loved his hat and immediately set out to make "something to do stew". I'm pretty sure the something to do stew came from Blue's Clues. Some of these photos are edited and some are SOOC. I get a little lazy with photoshopping sometimes.

Easter Weekend Fun

After a 3 day paperwork marathon and a total of 7 hours sleep in 3 nights, I can now say that my taxes for 2008 are completed and ready to mail!! Having a self-employed hubby with mountains of receipts and invoices makes for lots of hours of math. I think it will take me months to catch up on all the sleep I have lost over the past 3 weeks. So, taxes being done, I was able to enjoy a lovely weekend filled with lovely weather for Easter. I think this was the first Easter with warm and sunny weather in several years for us. I, of course, took tons of pictures. My children, of course, did not cooperate to have a nice (translated - formal) picture together. I got several photos I love anyway though.

I heart faces week 14 entry ~ Easter Amateurs Category

Okay, so this isn't a perfect photo, but it is an Easter photo. It's of my little girl hunting eggs with her basket, and even with all it's imperfections, I love this shot of her! As usual I couldn't get a decent shot of both of my kids together, so I have several of them individually. This picture was taken with my nikon D80 with my kit lens. I took this picture in manual mode, but I think my settings may be a bit skewed. I accidentally messed up my exposure meter setting, but anyway the settings were f/5.6 focal length 58mm 1/320 second ISO 100. If you'd like to see some other adorable kids hunting eggs and wearing Easter duds or enter your own, head over to IHeartFaces and join in the fun!

Constructive Feedback Friday

This is my first attempt at re-editing the photo based on the feedback. I really appreciate all the feedback, and I agree.......I do like it better warmed up and without the blurry rock, that I somehow didn't notice when I edited this the first time.

I am submitting this photo for constructive criticism at Iheartfaces.

I love this photo of my daughter! Just thought I'd see what some more experienced people have to say. I shot in manual mode and edited with Photoshop Elements 6. I personally love the crop, but was wondering if maybe it needed to be cropped closer in. Also, I think maybe I should have raised the opacity of my soft light layer in the color and reduced my diffuse glow layer a touch in the b and w. I love a high contrast black and white, but I think maybe the highlights might be a bit bright. I think they look better if you click on them and view them full size, but I want to put the color one on canvas, so I want to make sure it's at its best.

Nikon D80 with 50 1.8mm lens

f/4.5

1/125

ISO 400

Focal Length 50 mm

Another Day at the Lake

Sunday was such a beautiful day! We went to the lake again with some friends and had a great time! The kids played until the couldn't take it any more. Lucas decided to take a swim in the 50 degree water.......twice. He was totally unfazed by the frigid temperature. Seth and Sophie liked it too, but they were happy to stick with wet hands and feet only! I, of course, was the trip photographer and enjoyed every minute of it! I finally captured one of my princess that I ADORE.....it's going on canvas for sure!!! Seth spent the day fishing, playing with Lucas's dumptruck, and throwing rocks. Sophie played with Muffy the dog and threw rocks. Sophie spent most of her time with her Papa. After I had already published this post I came across a challenge at You Capture about fun....Well since everyone was having so much fun I linked this post. There are way more photos than the challenge calls for, but I was being lazy and consumed with tax preparation and decided not to do a new post. Sorry if there are too many photos, but I loved them all!