Full Manual Mode!

I am pretty dang excited about my new camera. You can see the story of why I upgraded from a point-and-shoot to a dSLR in my previous post. I have been practicing and experimenting ever since I got it. I picked up books from the library on how to understand all the exposure controls. I certainly knew what the controls meant but I had no idea how to set them together to get photos to be well exposed. I had a smack-myself-on-the-head moment when I realized there was a light meter display right inside my view finder. Well sheesh, that just makes things too easy now doesn’t it! Once I had that figured out I was playing and playing and playing with changing aperture vs. shutter speed vs. ISO.

I have this book to thank for making some of these settings easy to understand.

I was/am really a newbie and did not know where to even begin setting the exposure controls. This book explains things for the absolute newbie but is easy enough to follow to skip things that are already known. Most of the other books I checked out from the library, while beautiful, already assumed basic camera operation knowledge. The Dummies books bug me with their over abundance of puns, but when you need to start with the very basics this book is a good thing.

So here are some of my first photos on full manual. All photos are straight from the camera and have only been adjusted for file size.

1. First real attempt at manual mode. Started with bright indoor photo with natural light. This is our cat Adam and I love to watch him bask in the sun.

2. This is my 4-year old. The one who broke my point and shoot. At the time I wasn’t sure whether to feel mad or not. Now I just feel thankful that it brought me to a new camera. In this photo I’m working on composition and depth of field. I love seeing her little bike back there just waiting for her to get that helmet on.

3. More depth of field. I was actually trying to get her fingers in focus and her face in the background. I think I know how to recompose my shot to get it to work how I intended. But I don’t know if I would want to. This shot came out really well with her little eye peeking out.

4. Yet more depth of field. This is why I wanted a dSLR in the first place. I wanted to capture more artistic photos and not just plain-old snapshots. Remember that dog I told you we dog-sat in my last post? This is the very creature! I wanted to get more of my daughters face in this one, but sometimes it is hard to get a good shot with pets and kids all at the same time. A less than perfect shot is better than none.


5. Okay, this was the scary shot in full manual. I was indoors in very dim lighting shooting a photo of my friend’s daughter. I was sure it would be horribly under exposed and/or blurry and/or grainy. It was a little blurry but really not bad for my first try! Next time I would open up the aperture more (I think I had one more stop available) in order to get a faster shutter for less blur. I don’t think I would touch ISO as I was at 800 already.

6. Here is little miss again. But in better lighting. Still a bit underexposed I think.

6. And my final shot of little miss’s mom and her expected twin brother’s. This shot could use some cropping for composition to eliminate too much dead space behind mom. But I got enough of the shot to allow me to crop it later.

Thanks for sharing my photo adventure with me. I am really excited about unlocking the power of this camera!

Small Post

It looks likes it has been about a month since my last post. Life has pulled my attention in different directions. I have only made 3 crafty projects in the past month and only photographed one of them. So I will share that one here with you today.

We had the joy to share some dog-sitting duties with another family to take care of a mutual friend’s beloved pet. This dog was such a treat to take care of. We had a dog a few years ago that was NOT such a treat in any way shape or form. So, to have this dog come into our house and be such a sweet creature was fantastic. We were only supposed to have the dog for a day but finagled our arrangement so we could keep her an extra day. I made this card to say thank you to a sweet young friend who was supposed to get the dog-sitting privilege a day early but had to wait for us so we could have that extra day.

RECIPE

cardstock, stamp: Stampin’ Up
ink: Ranger (green, black), Stampin’ Up (white)
die cut: Provo Craft (A Child’s Year– Cricut cart.)
border punch: Fiskars

I probably won’t have many projects for you in the coming months as the sun, gardening, family, my new camera, and travel plans will be my main focus. There are only so many hours in the day and I have to choose how I spend them and right now my crafty mojo is really low. Such is life. Enjoy your summer (at least in the norther hemisphere)!

New Camera

My point and shoot camera died last week. It had been on it’s last legs for a short while after being dropped by my 4 year old. I had thought it would hang in a bit longer. But no. When it finally keeled over, it was very near my birthday so we decided to upgrade to a dSLR for my birthday gift! I had only  used a point and shoot my entire life but I had been working on composition and learning how aperture affects depth of field for the time when I would be able to upgrade. Well that time came sooner than I thought it would.

So there I was with a new camera in hand and just days away from our annual homeschooling conference. I didn’t know how to use this new tool but I had to do something. I set it to auto-no flash and just started shooting. I tried out various situations to see what it could and couldn’t do. The results were surprisingly nice. The camera can take much better pictures indoors (no flash) than my old camera. That is a relief since most of my photos are snapshots of my kids playing inside. The auto setting on the camera is smarter than my old camera. It is adjusting for depth of field much better so I am getting some lovely in focus foreground and blurred background images without having to choose settings. While it is better, I still want to play with settings manually to see how far I can push it because I wold like it to go even farther. Finally, the camera is just fun to use. I feel like the photographer I want to be with this cool tool in my hands!

Here is what I accomplished with this tool so far. These photos are straight from the camera (except cropping out distractions on the two as noted).

Using natural light from a window. Even on a cloudy day this camera beat my old camera by far!
Getting up close. Flourescent room lighting only. I think in this case the auto-depth of field tried to do too much and caused the left side to blur.
The auto setting created a nicer depth of field on this one that my old camera never did.
I was tring to force the depth of field in auto mode to see what would happen. A nice effect but I know I want to push it even more. Will work on those manual settings!
This one was cropped for distractions. A sun-loving friend living in the wet Pacific North West takes every cance to catch some rays. And I even caught those rays with my camera! It tells the story nicely.

Taking pictures though a window. I cropped this one to cut out distractions. But the window reflections were picked up in the camera and ruined the photo. Those are distractions I can't crop out.
My husband got hold of the camera. He actually studied photography for a while and here is what he captured.

Garden Crafting

View from lawn entry. Paths meander and fork all in this area. An exit exists on the far back right and goes around the side of the house.

Paper is probably my first crafting love. Gardening is running a close second. I’m not very talented in the garden though. Plants grow too much or not enough and even die on me. Makes my design life more difficult when they do unpredictable things. I have a spot under a walnut tree that used to be scraggly grass. I dumped mulch all over it a few years back with the intent to turn it to a shade garden. Never really happened and it became a weed garden. One of my trees fell on my neighbors house last year and had to be chopped up. I kept the logs with the intention of burning them, but decided to create a real shade garden with log-lined pathways. Then a friend who is moving away let me come and selectively dig some established shade plants from her garden. That helped me because I could instantly fill in my garden nooks without the cost or plant investigation/purchasing. I spent all day yesterday finishing off my garden nooks and transplanting the plants I dug up from my friend’s yard. All my body aches from the work, especially moving those large log-stumps I used to surround the walnut trunk. It is all worth is since I now have a lovely, mostly full shade garden. I left a few spots for moving some things from the backyard and I still have some weeding to do along the house. But other than that, it is looking really nice. Enjoy the photo tour of my new garden area. I wanted to get some nicer photos but we are having a typical gray wet day here in the Pacific Northwest!

Left view of front entry from lawn. Yes the lawn still needs work, but one thing at a time!
Right view of entry from lawn. I still have space to fill and weeds to pull, but it is looking good so far.
Center left nook.
Center right nook.
Rear of shade garden. Path goes off the the right around the side of the house. Path to left circles back to front of garden.
Looking from the rear of the shade garden up toward the front ("left" side).

Happy Mother’s Day

I worked on Mother’s Day cards this week like many of you. Here is what I came up with.

First Up

This one I made to enter into The Paper Variety’s current challenge. The challenge is to use mists, inks or paints. I wanted to add just a touch of paint to stamp my greeting on. But in the process I squeezed my paint tube so hard that I ended up with paint exploded all over me. I don’t think that is quite what they had in mind with a messy challenge. Luckily I was in good enough of a mood that I didn’t use any explitives, but instead carefully reached into my pocket to grab my phone and snap a couple of pictures. Witness…

That was only about half the mess. The rest landed on my pants, the floor and my table. I’m happy to report that everything came out in the wash!

Recipe
well, of course, paint: Ranger
pattern paper: DCWV, Scenic Route, Creating Keepsakes
cardstock: Stampin’ Up
other: thread, fabric flowers from a fake flower bouquet

Next in line

I just played with my stamps and copics. I am still trying to figure the markers out. I thought I would be able to blend different shades better, but so far I can blend similar shades but not very different ones. I’m still exploring!

Recipe
pattern paper, stamps, cardstock: Stampin’ Up
card base: Petersen Arnes
markers: Copic
other: ribbon, floss, pop dots, thread, button

Video #3

I’m back after my 2 week break with a new video for you. This one is for my non-crafty friends. I just wanted to prove that they too can be crafty and they probably don’t even need to buy anything special do it with either! If you have friends who think they can’t be crafty or think it is too expensive, then show them this video!

Happy Spring!

Easter Eggs straight from our hens bunny.

I hope you are enjoying this time of year. I have to admit that spring is my least favorite time. It comes after a long wet winter. And just continues to be cold and wet when I am aching for some sun and warmth. Then it (the huge tease of a spring) will throw in a few days of just what I need, only to yank it away again and replace it with more cold and wet. All the way into June. So, no, spring isn’t my favorite. I have to really hang on to the little joys. My fresh, home grown, naturally colorful eggs being one of my spring joys. What are your spring joys?

(BTW, I have all the usual excuses for being AWOL, for any that actually ready my blog consistently. I’m hoping to be back next week with more projects for you.)

CKC: March Layouts

Like I said recently, I took a handful of basic supplies (pattern papers, ink and cardstock and alphabets for the most part) to my CKC crop. I wanted to simplify my preparations and this certainly did the job. I also simplified by going in knowing I was going to use the same basic layout for these 3 pages. My kids each got a gift certificate to spend at an online store. I had pretty much the same picture for each kid enjoying their booty from the package that arrived. So I thought, why not make pretty much the same layout for each one? These layouts are going in different albums so they will be viewed at different times. This will reduce the boring, repetitive factor (if you are worried about that kind of thing). So go ahead and make the same layout! It really isn’t a big deal.

The layout below is what I had in mind originally when planning for these layouts. I wanted the title to arch around a circular photo mat. I used my Cricut to cut my photo mats before leaving for the crop. That was the only special thing I did to prepare for these layouts. I used a combination of papers that came in my crop goody bag and older papers I had stuffed in my crop bag. I really planned to keep these pages simple to keep the focus on the story.

I just slightly adjusted things for the next layout, using up scraps of pattern paper from other projects.

And finally I made this one using up a bunch of older product, including these alpha stickers that I have had lying around for about a year.

1-2-3 Recipe challenge

This week’s The Paper Variety challenge is a 1-2-3 recipe challenge. You pick any items and use them in the quantity of one, two and three. I wanted to see what I could do if I went really hard core with this challenge. So here is what I picked: one pattern paper, two stamp sets (an image and a sentiment), and three distress ink colors. I wanted to go all the way hard core and only use those things. But I just couldn’t do it. So the additional supplies I used were cardstock for the card base (though I probably could have worked in more of the pattern paper), a waterproof ink to stamp my images (so they wouldn’t bleed when water colored) and a punch to shape my pattern paper.

I used my three distress ink colors three ways to make them go farther in the design.

  1. I used them to distress the background with layers of color and added subtle stamp images from the image stamp set.
  2. I used it to add hard inking of the paper paper edges to get it to pop a bit.
  3. I used an aqua painter to pull color from the ink pad to paint in the stamped image.

When you are restricted in your product choices – for a challenge, a small crop bag, a tight budget or whatever – make your supplies go farther by figuring out multiple ways to put those items to use.

No go cook up your own 1-2-3 crafty soup!

CKC: February Layouts

At the Creating Keepsakes Convention I packed supplies to work on my kids calendars for the months of February and March. Here is what I came up with for February

First we have my oldest daughter’s page. I saved tags, buttons and other tidbits from a couple of her fashion shopping excursions to use on a layout. I think they fit perfectly here to capture the things that I see I see in her that are in between being a little girl and being a teen. It was a great photo and journaling for her ninth birthday.

My son’s layout came out of one of the CKC classes I took focusing on using sketches. I took the sketch and the supplies provided to create this layout. I had this photo of my son in the back of my mind when I made this project in class so I used a larger amount of orange pattern paper and kept the pink to a minimum accent. The pink works on this boy layout since my son is holding a glass of pink “snow cone.” When I made the project in class I left off the recommended title and added in my own titling later. Don’t be afraid to mix it up, even when taking a class. If something different works for you, then go for it!

And finally, my youngest’s layout. I used pattern paper that came in my goody bag at the evening crop at CKC. I didn’t have any plan for this layout going into the evening, but when I saw this energetic paper I thought it would be great for the photos of my daughter “building” at the science museum near us. The paper was a very stark contrast and I inked the paper just to tone down the white a bit. This is one of my favorite techniques to use paper that otherwise is just a bit to bold or busy. If you tone it down, you can make it work. You don’t have to stress out over layouts, just use what you have on hand.