I Spy . . . Summer!

Do you ever drive past a wall and just dream about stopping to take pictures?  Well, I do . . . all the time, all over the city and towns and country, where ever I travel.  Usually we're on our way somewhere (running a little late) or I don't have my camera with me or I don't have cooperative children. 

Just this once, I made this wonderful wall in Concord, MA our destination with a bribed child and my big camera.  I had ten minutes before we were due to pick up big brother, but I love the colors of this mini-shoot.  Just right to claim summer as arrived!

Come on through for more summer-time images!

From Grumpy to Gorgeous

 

Remember this cute girl?  Well, she did not start our photography session in a good mood.  At all.  I guess she'd refused to take a nap that afternoon and it had gone down hill from there.  Trying to get at least one good photograph of each of four children, I didn't have too much energy or time to wheedle happiness out of her if she wasn't willing to cooperate!  So I went for just shooting away, regardless, getting at least some of the honest feelings she was emanating. She would look back at me with this look that said, "back away!"

And then, all of a sudden, a switch was flipped and her sparkly sunny side came out!  And she couldn't get enough of being in front of the camera, even going so far as to push her brothers out of the way if she felt it was her turn to shine.  :)  She became quite the model, calling for me to take her picture and walking oh so suavely down the stairs and posing just right.   I don't think I did anything to bring about this change, but I sure enjoyed watching it and capturing both sides of this little girl.

Click for more pictures of this cutie

The Transformation: Darkroom/Lightroom

 

When I was a teenager my mom encouraged me to take a darkroom film developing class from the continuing education community classes.  For one evening a week for six weeks or so I was engrossed in the magic of developing pictures.  I loved the process and the tactile experience of revealing an image.  The chemical baths, tweaking the exposure, waiting for the photograph to dry:  I loved it all.  Getting into digital editing has been a long road full of frustration and a lot less of the magic feeling I had when working with film.  I had my DSLR camera for about a year and a half before I was brave enough to move to using RAW files.  Now, of course, I wish I'd started out with this format.  With a lot of practice and trial and error finally some of the magic quality of editing photos is back.  I love the control of the RAW file.   Even a picture that perhaps would have ended up in the garbage before (though honestly it wouldn't have because I was too afraid to throw anything away in case I never got anything better) can be redeemed with a little swipe of the mouse here and a bit of digital tweaking there.  I leave most of my photos relatively lightly edited.  I don't have the time or confidence to go deep into the editing of a single photo.  I think that's for the better.  Also, in case you're interested, I mostly use the little editing software in iPhoto.  Every now and then I'll pull a special photo into Photoshop to play around with the options there.  I have yet to fully tackle the learning curve that is Photoshop . . .

So here is a photo I was this close to deleting off my camera when I first took it and saw it on the little playback screen.  Luckily I've mostly trained myself to pause and wait a minute.  I can just as well delete it later so why not just keep shooting and worry about removing images later.  I'd been shooting from a different angle with different light and had not adjusted my settings at all.  This was kind of my test run photo (which usually I do delete right away) but the expression was sweet enough to hold off on deleting immediately.  The image is a little under exposed for my liking, making it muddy and dark. 

Pull up the histogram and let's get editing!

click through to see the magic transformation!

Color or Black-and-White?

Every now and then I run across a picture that I truly can decide whether I like it color or black and white.  Often a picture just looks best one way or the other.  Usually I happen to prefer the classic, timeless quality of b&w.  It can also (I'm giving away my best secret!) hides a lot of imperfections in a picture.  So of course most of my imperfect photos are lent an added charm by switching up the tonality.  I honestly think most pictures I take look better in b&w.  So when a picture looks good in color I keep it in color because I feel I lucked out on the settings I had set and the light I was using, etc. 

When a photo is lovely in both I am pleasantly surprised.  But then I have to make a choice!  Which one?  Just one? 

Here is where the indulgence of digital, never mind the vanity space of blog-world, let me get away with both!

A recent shoot with baby sister yielded several nice shots (more to come!) and for the sake of this discussion I am posting both color and black and white versions to enjoy.  Feel free to vote which ones you like better!  I'll take that into account when the time comes to make the final decision of which to actually print.  (Although at thirteen cents a print it's not that hard to print both, too!  How did people do it way back when with expensive film?)

click through for more color versus b&w photos