I can not believe how quickly the past few days have gone!! Goodness gracious. They've been good days but they're over too quickly, nap time is over before it's even begun and I'm falling asleep putting the kids to bed... today my challenge for you is to photograph something you don't usually photograph, or in a way that you don't usually photograph. Find a detail of something - or step back to take a bigger picture. I have some fun pictures on my camera but they're still on my camera and need to be transferred and processed. This photo expresses pretty much perfectly what today has been like for me - gray and dreary and fuzzy but somehow in the middle of it all really beautiful and satisfying.
I'm still making my way through all of last week's photo. I've been to most of them and will be sure to get a post of favorites up really soon. I thought it would be done by now but - that's life, I guess. Especially when you have a baby! I have so enjoyed seeing all of your photos - I hope that you take some time to visit each other's blogs and leave a comment. It's very inspiring! Also don't forget to grab a button and plan on participating in the Poetic Winter Photography Challenge which I will be co-hosting next month! It should be awesome. I can't wait to see your photos!
P.S. You can still register for my photography class for the month of February. It's focused on crafters, bloggers and online shop owners. My next photography mentoring session is set for March. I'd love to see you there!
I'm not a big fan of the "hey, I'm still here" posts.. but here I am, writing one. I'm terribly behind (having a baby is kicking my butt!!) Plus it was my anniversary on Friday - eleven years of marriage - whoot whoot! The hubs took me out, and of course I forgot to take a single photo, but we had a wonderful time. It was nice to have an uninterrupted, hot meal. On Saturday I got completely lost on This Life - they let me in early, while it's in beta and I can honestly say I have never ever had such a positive experience...
So here is a photo I re-discovered the other day, when I saw it in my photo stream I was like "hey, did I take that? why yes, yes I did." That's always a nice surprise.
I promise a "real" post will be up, hopefully tonight - with tomorrow's challenge announcement.
Eli just LOVES his johnny jump-up - he spends a lot of time there every day, bouncing or just sitting and watching what everyone else is doing, always with a big smile on his face.
I was photographing some other stuff and had my macro filter
on my 18-55mm lens, it made a really interesting effect...
I put Eli in this walker thingy we were given. He liked it pretty well, Josiah loved running in circles around it!
The way that I got this soft, subtle gray scale is that when I applied the gradient map I altered changed the gradient from a "black to white" gradient to a "dark gray to light gray" gradient.
This is what I find inspiring:
going into my backyard and capturing a little bit of beauty that I hadn't noticed before.
This week's photography link-up has an optional challenge theme inspiration - I want to know, what inspires you creatively? What makes you happy and feeling inspired - if you post before Friday you might be featured!! Don't forget to check out last week's featured photos :) Also in case you missed it - I will be co-hosting a photography challenge every Friday through the month of February with my friends Rebecca, Alicia & Kristi. It's called Poetic Winter : read more about it here! Then go check out the prompts - they should be so much fun!!
Good Monday morning y'all!! Hope this Monday finds you with a good hot cup of coffee (or tea) and some good music. It made my day to log into my blog to see that I'm already only 5 away from 100 followers. I know GFC is silly but it's nice to feel loved. It's MLK day here - and in Georgia it's a pretty big deal (The MLK museum is in Atlanta.) The kids have the day off, banks and libraries are closed. So three day weekend here we go! The kids put the Glee Xmas album on... so I'm having flashbacks to Christmas break and getting into a mini cleaning frenzy! ha! Heaven knows the house needed it. Having a baby is kicking my butt. If only I could wash dishes one-handed.
Did you have a good weekend? Emma is feeling better! But now my boys have got colds. Josiah got a bad case of the Wal-Mart cruds. It seems like every time I've gone grocery shopping there he's gotten a runny nose! Keeping the boys apart is impossible, despite my desperate attempts Eli still got a pretty bad cold. Bless his heart.
Okay - now onto some photography challenge announcements!! First things first - do you remember that awesome photography challenge I participated in a couple months ago - it was called "Shades of Autumn" - well I will be co-hosting a photography challenge with that awesome group of photographers during the month of February. We put our heads together, came up with some fantastic challenges and are calling it...
Okay - I've got to run but before I go I just wanted to let y'all know that my photography challenge will go up tomorrow morning - I'll try to have the linky up tonight by 12am and the optional theme is inspiation.
What is inspiring you right now? What's your go-to when you are in a creative funk?
For me it's going into my back yard with my macro filter
on my camera and finding all of those little special shapes, colors and details of nature that I usually don't notice...
You can view last week's tutorial week 1 of 52 weeks of editing by clicking here. I am really excited about sharing today's tutorial!! It turned out a little longer than I thought it would so I'll save cropping with rounded corners and creating new layers for later - today I want to show you some cool things you can do with actions in elements.
First of all I'll let you know - installing actions in elements is a pain. There is no way to get around it. There is an excellent tutorial by my friend Amanda at Everyday Elements which pretty much lets you know everything you need to know.
I'm going to do a mini-version here and share a couple little pointers that I've discovered. You'll want to refer to Amanda's tutorial if this is confusing.
There are actually two places where you can install and run actions in Elements.
One is here:
The path is Program Data (which will only show up if your hidden files are turned on/displayed) > Adobe > Photoshop Elements > [whatever version of Elements you are running] > Locale > en_US > Workflow Panels > Actions
This will cause your actions to show up here:
To get to this pane you need to make sure you're in the "Effect" (orange tab) then you need to be in "Guided" mode and then (you can see it highlighted in the list of options there to the right) click on "Action Player" once you've clicked on "Action Player" this is what it looks like:
Some actions you might buy/download must be installed here. For example - the excellent set of FREE actions from Willette need to be run from here. The action set from Nodding Violet and also the set from Mandi's Actions are just a couple examples of actions sets that I have that need to be installed and run here. Those action sets are one file with several actions. If you don't install it here it runs as just one action.
There is another place where you can install actions and that is here:
The path for this is Program Data > Adobe> Photoshop Elements> [version] > Photo Creations > Photo Effects
If they don't display properly you'll need to close Photoshop Elements, delete the thumbnail database (click up a couple layers in the file folders and you'll see it) and re-start.
Moving on...
I'm going to show you how I run FREE Autumn Action set from Willette
In the Action Player choose the action set you want to run and then pick your action from the drop-down menu and click play action.
If you don't like the look of your action you can click "Revert" there on the lower right.
Pick a different action. If you like it but want to tweak it press "ctrl+z" (which will undo the flattening step within the action)
and then click over to "Full" (from the Guided tab you're currently in) and you'll see the layers of the action (if you don't press ctrl+z then your image will be flattened and you won't be able to edit it) . You can reduce the Opacity of the layer from here.
Here is another action I ran: it has more layers. I reduced the opacity of these layers: here is what it looks like at 100%
Here is what it looks like at 66%
Here is another way to revert to your original Edit> Revert.
You can also run actions from the Effects pane and edit the layers from there.
Okay - so leave your questions and I'll break it down a little further if that would be helpful.
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Every week I'll include a task to practice and an image to practice it on, if you'd like, as well as a link-up to show your work! This week: If you'd like to practice you can use this image. Add an effect to it, reduce the opacity of the layers within the effect, post it on your blog and link up here! If you apply any other edits be sure to mention them in your post :)
Grab a button below for your post and link up anytime before next Saturday! Next week I'll show you how to create, group and re-order layers. Let me know if there is anything else you've been wanting to learn!
on my 18-55mm lens, it made a really interesting effect...
on my camera and finding all of those little special shapes, colors and details of nature that I usually don't notice...
