Happy 4th of July!

So I moved a few months back. The new place is FANTASTIC. A cool discovery made this week was that the town's Fourth of July Parade starts right in front of our front door! This is both cool and slightly annoying. Annoying, our street is blocked off for hours! If we wanted to escape we would be unable to do so. Also the noise of setting up started around 8:30am. Cool, I just grab my camera and walk out my front door! If I get thirsty, pop back in and get a drink. Hungry, the same! Too hot, pop in and watch from my window! Battery dies (totally did), just go inside and grab the spare! Awesome!

In addition to the easy access to the parade, I got a new zoom lens in yesterday! Just in time for the parade! So I broke it in taking some awesome shots of the parade. I think this is some of my best "event" photography so far! I am pretty psyched!

Chrysta Rae Scavenger Hunt - March edition!

I participated in yet another +Chrysta Rae's Photography Scavenger Hunt in March. The hunts are fantastic, I am super sad I was unable to sign up for the latest one. I will be anxiously watching for the next sign-up!

In March the 10 hunt words were:
Regret
Strawberry
Mouth
Bubble
Landscape
Freeze Motion
Spill
Texture
Ant's Eye View
Brown

I had a lot going on during this hunt, but I was determined to get them done! Between moving and other life and work changes and demands it was tough but I think I got some good photos in the end!

Regret - there are a lot of subtle things going on in the background. I liked all the detail that I put into the photo. A last minute addition was the crack in the heart, I did that in photoshop as an afterthought while processing. I was not entirely satisfied with the quality of it but that was the best I could do at the time. 

I think this is my favorite photo. EVIL STRAWBERRY PEOPLE!! The Strawberry People are sacrificing the Blackberry People around the Banana Alter, consuming their strength for their evil purposes! This was so fun to make and take. Also to eat! They ended up as dessert that night!

This was for Mouth. It took me a while and by the end my lips were so raw and chapped! If I'd been thinking I would have done each on a different day to save on that. Oh well! Next time I know! Avengers Assemble! 

This one was for bubbles. It was just carbonated water. I took a series of shots as I poured it into the cup. After, in processing, I added in the colors to make it more dramatic. I liked creating the transition from red to purple to blue, as if there were the two colors mixing. It was also fun to practice the technique of altering the colors of a photo and play with photoshop. 

We moved to a nice complex. This is the main house and pool of the complex. I took this photo one morning on my way to work. I originally thought to take it for Brown, since the building was brown and the trees were still leaf-less. It turned out to be better for landscape. 

This one was texture. I liked the texture of the old fashioned light. The candle had a crazy glare that radiated all over, I used processing to tone it down. I am not wholly crazy about this photo but it was the best I could do at the time. 

Ant's Eye View. The kitty is going to eat the ant! I liked the extreme close up of the kitten, though this may not have been the best photo for the prompt. I was having a real hard time being creative on this one. 

Ok, cop out. This was one of the first photos I took with my new camera about a year earlier... I went to a Colorguard Competition with a friend and snapped this. I was out of time and didn't have a photo for Freeze Motion. Looking through my old photos I found this one and reprocessed it for my purposes. 

Spill... the jelly beans! I wanted to do something different with this one other than just the beans spilling out. I noticed that our counter was very reflective so I decided to do a touch of color on the reflection rather than the actual beans. 

Brown. The science teacher I worked with this year had a bunch of plants in our common area. I liked all the motion in the weaving of the vines. 

New Blog, New Start

All of the earlier posts were originally posted on a different blogger website. I've turned a corner in my life and I decided to move to a new page.

This blog is going to be dedicated to my photography, specifically my learning experiences as I try out new processes, refine processes, and learn how to take better photos!

I have been doing photography for just over a year now. I love it, it is a fun and creative way to explore the world and to look at things in a new way. I am a teacher, and I love to learn and teach. I will share the things I have learned with you as I go and hopefully you can learn with me!


I will be catching up on some posts in the next few weeks! Here is a preview!

Ponte Vineyard. Temecula, CA

February Style It Challenge

Another month, another challenge!

This time the challenge that +lane langmade and +Shantha Marie Fountain set before us was Fantasy with the added challenge of Natural Light!

Well, I only ever use natural night... I have no lighting equipment or anything like that, but I know that my lighting techniques need a lot of work! So off to research I went!
I found out how to make my own reflector at home, so that is something that I will endeavor to do.

I called up my two go-to models, Maggie and Jill, and asked if they were interested. I set the photo shoot date for February vacation, where I will have more time and so will they since we all work in education! They confirmed their interest.

Then it was time to decide WHAT to do.

This was my original idea scribble.

I decided that I wanted to try a levitation photo. I've always wanted to try to do one and this seemed like the perfect opportunity! My idea is that one girl will be levitating in the air, she could be a witch or fairy, with or without wings, doesn't matter to me as long as she looks DRAMATIC AND CRAZY! The other girl will be on the ground looking up to her. She could be normal, or she could also be a DRAMATIC AND CRAZY fairy or witch, either way. She could even be levitating just slightly off the ground too. In between the girls I want to have them both reaching for something. This could be a dragon (dragons are AWESOME and necessary whenever possible!) or it could be the sun, or the moon, or a generic orb. Maybe even a beautiful rose or something?

Next, OFF TO PINTREST! Time to search through images of fantasy photos and tutorials for levitation. I already know *generally* how to do it, but it doesn't hurt to find a tutorial.


AND THEN that happened! I had grandiose plans, an idea I was really excited for... BUT we signed on a fantastic townhouse and have about 2 weeks to pack up and move. The hasty packing and moving process meant that my photo plans had to be put aside for the time being. I totally plan to try this idea out later on, I am still excited about it. Now is just not the time.

I was wicked bummed that I wouldn't have a photo to submit this month. On a packing break I decided to go through some of my unprocessed photos to see if there was anything I could use for this fantasy/natural light challenge. Like I said earlier, most of my photos are using natural light, so that would not be much of a challenge. And the photo shoots I did with my two models were all fantasy-ish.  Not too bad. Searching through I found a couple possibilities.

In the end I went with the most simple one, and the one that took me the least amount of time... because it just looked the best. Sometimes simple is best. At least when you are short on time, energy, and brain power! 

My submission:

So this is actually from the same photo-shoot as my January submission. My model, Maggie, was doing her steam punk thing. Towards the end of the day we started getting silly. I set my camera on long exposure around sunset and Maggie walked towards the camera. It created a ghosting effect. I manipulated the photo in Lightroom. I put it into two-tone with brown and cream. I added vignetting and increased the grain on the photo to make it look older. I decided to call it The Haunted River Walk. 

January Style It Challenge

Google + has a new feature, Communities.

I have joined in a few photography communities, primarily ones that issue weekly or monthly challenges. It is nice to have an assignment or a goal to reach.

One group is a Style It, Shoot it, Share it group, where you have to design and style a photo and then manage to make it happen.

To be honest, January is a bad month for me. It is busy at work, it is my birthday, my stepdad's birthday, and it was my dad's birthday which is always a rough day for me. In addition to being busy with those things, I got the flu (despite getting a flu shot!!) and was out of commission for a week. I got a late start on this challenge. I didn't start it until a week before it was due. Oops!

So the challenge was to create a photo that includes two elements, apocalypse and a created background. I had NO idea what a "created background" really meant, luckily one of the lovely moderators, Lane Langmade, and some others in the group got right on that to help me understand. There are a few types of "created" backgrounds, modify an existing background, create a background, or composite a background digitally.

I decided to push myself and learn how to digitally composite.

Another aspect of this community is that you are encouraged to share HOW you accomplished your photo. That is where this blog entry comes in!!

Here is my finished shot:



The picture is primarily two photos with bits and pieces of a few others added in for effect. The two main photos are these ones:

I took these photos a few months back. The model is a friend Maggie, epic costumer geek and filled with awesome. This is her Steampunk reporter character and the shoot was a lot of fun. We roamed all over the old mill city of Lowell and used the old mill buildings as a backdrop. 

I grabbed some smoke and fire photos from google images and took just tiny slices off of them. I didn't have any photos that would work for those in my repertoire. I did have a few "burning embers" type photos that I used for fire raining from the sky and explosion type effects. These two photos are from a number of months ago. They are of my friend Kitch playing with steel wool. That was a lot of fun, and gladly nobody called the cops on the group of people playing with fire in the parking lot. 

As I was working on the photo composition, adding things in together and processing, I went through a few stages. There were a couple times that I thought, this is good, I think I might be done. Then I decided that I was not and kept going. This may or may not be for the best... 

Selfy-Sunday meets Doctor Who!

Whoo! Back to school has been kicking my butt! The last 2 weeks have been non-stop school stuff. I have a GIANT backlog of photos to process and more to come soon for the Chrysta Rae Photography Scavenger Hunt on G+!

I took a little time out of my Sunday for my by-monthly Selfy-Sunday photo! Every two weeks, on G+, there is a Selfy-Sunday photography event. Sometimes there is a prompt or challenge to do, sometimes not. This time they were trying out a new submission system so that was the focus, no theme. So I gave myself a theme!

DOCTOR WHO! If you do not know Doctor Who then you need to go and educate yourself! Doctor Who is a show that started in the 1960's and has had a number of re-boots since then. The latest re-boot started in 2005 and it is AWESOME! A few years ago a couple friends of mine were shocked that we had never seen Doctor Who. They grabbed a couple seasons, shoved them at us, and told us we were not allowed back into their house until we've watched them! If we didn't like it, fine, but we needed to at least see it. We were hooked! And it turned out, I had seen the show before! When I was living in Scotland we had a little TV in the common area of our flat. It did not always work. But one time it DID and I watched a really interesting show, but was never able to figure out what I was watching. When we got a few seasons in I saw the episode that I had watched years earlier.

Now my husband and I convert others into Whovians (Doctor Who fans!) and I do happy dances when my students know Doctor Who. One awesome little nerdlet wore a Doctor Who shirt to school the other day, awesome! I love teaching nerdlets.

In honor of the new season of Doctor Who starting Saturday I did a Doctor Who themed photo for Selfy-Sunday.

There is a character on the show named River Song. I love River. She is awesome! She is feisty, she is sarcastic, she is viscous, and she is mysterious. I decided to try and pull off a River Song look.
The photo below is River Song.

I curled my hair and grabbed my jean jacket and white button up (usually reserved for my Harry Potter Luna Lovegood outfit!) and got ready for my photo. I grabbed a picture of the Tardis (The Doctor's time machine, Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) and edited it so that I could shop it in once I was done while my hair sat in curlers. I did my makeup a bit more understated and natural than usual, then grabbed my tripod and camera and ran out to my yard. My next door neighbor saw me taking a bunch of photos and yelled CHEESE at me, which almost made me break my, "Don't mess with me," face! I ran back in, edited it in Lightroom, then moved over to Pixelmator and added in the Tardis. 

Below is my River Song!

 I think it turned out pretty good! :-D