Amazing photoshoot for me

I had an amazing time with this family!  I think it went very well, too.  It was a family friend that I've known for quite a few years.  I asked if they would allow me to practice on their family doing portraits.  I didn't do well on the individual shots, but feel that the family shots ended up nice and the couples shots of the oldest son and his new fiance turned out really good as well!  I had a few moments that I should have changed what I did, but over all, I think this shoot went very well.  It was a cold, windy afternoon (right before sundown), so that was tough to deal with, but they did great and were very great subjects!  Here are some of my favorites from their shoot.  {D} Family

Thanks so much to the {D} Family for letting me practice on you!! 

Baby P.

My little niece was born almost a month ago and my sister was nice enough to let me practice on her.  She is such a beautiful little girl and I enjoyed taking her picture!  She was exactly 2 weeks old when I took these.

 

30 Day Photography Challenge!

I've decided to try this out!  So this is my first post and picture!  Here's the link to the challenge given by another blogger (I'm sure there are lots of them out there, but this is the one I'm doing).

http://whitepeachblog.com/2011/05/25/photography_challenge/

So here's my first picture...a self portrait!  It's not that great, but it's what I was able to get under the conditions that I had.  My settings were f3.5, 1/100, ISO 400.

Portraits of my kiddos

Well, I got some of each kid that I'm very happy with!  Finally!  I do wish I had them change their shirts (the older ones), but even with the weird shirts, I'm happy with the pictures!  So I'm finally updating my blog with these pictures that I recently took.

Coming soon, pictures of my new baby niece!  I'll post when I'm done editing!!

Pumpkin Patch Pictures

I took my kiddos to a local pumpkin patch to practice and let them each get a little pumpkin.  I had a few problems.  #1 was that I forgot to change over to RAW.  I really want to shoot in RAW when I am doing these kinds of pictures, so I need to remember to change it over.  I also (after this shoot) changed my AF area to "wide", I had it on spot, but have been having problems getting the focus and loosing it (as you will see with my youngest, she's OOF a little because it focused on the hay for some reason, probably because I focused on her eyes, then moved the camera a little and it changed the focus.  Anyway, I would have liked to change the WB after because they all came out a bit orange, but I was able to (mostly) fix that, but that would have been much easier if I shot in RAW.  So anyway, here's my results:

 On a side note, I plan to get a 50mm 1.8 lens very soon, so I'm looking forward to trying that out in the very near future!

Not much to show for a while

Well, I really haven't done a whole lot lately, my kids are ornery as usual about me taking their pictures.  Especially the baby!  I really wish she would just let me take a good picture of her for my wall!  Anyway, I did get a couple of pictures of my nephew yesterday when I was over there.  I guess I didn't check my settings when taking them, though because I had to do some work to fix the lighting and such on them.  I need to remember to check the settings right before taking the picture!  Anyway, I'm going to post SOOC (straight out of camera) and after editing, just to show.  

Photo shoots

This is going to be a long post since I haven't posted in a while.  I've done a couple of practice photo shoots recently of friends' families and my own kids.  I have some that I LOVE, and some that I was pretty disappointed with, but, overall, I think these have been great learning experiences.  My first photo shoot was of "M. Family".  Really, it was mostly for the kids.  I did the photo shoot and after getting home and looking at the pictures, I was kinda disappointed in myself for making some rather obvious mistakes, but again, these are things that I just have to get used to noticing.  My main problems here were 1. I was still having problems with my exposure, 2. I didn't pay close enough attention to the backgrounds, 3. Started the shoot too early.   Overall, the family was happy with what they got and I was happy with the practice and experience.  Here are a few shots from their family:

After doing "M. Family", I was so pleased with a one main pose, that I just had to try it on my own kids!  I went to a different location and tried it there, I was more pleased with my results because I tried to be more aware of my surroundings.  Though I did make a few mistakes, they weren't as big as before.  Here's the result:

Next was more recently, I had a shoot with the "D. Family".  This one I had the most success with, but again, made a few small mistakes.  But I felt much happier with the results.  Some of my mistakes were, my aperture wasn't opened wide enough, shutter speed was too slow, as the sun got lower, I cranked up my ISO too much (at the end, it was at 800) and made my photos too grainy.  But overall, I believe I did better with this family and, again, the family was happy with what they got.  Here's a few of those: