Hissyfits Photography Blog

Hello. Hello. Hello. So I have another photography related post coming at you again today! I want to preface this by saying that I don’t think I am some know it all photographer who is all that and a bag of chips! Photography is a realm that continues to challenge me in different aspects as I continue to evolve. I just happen to get a lot of questions sent my way {which I love!} and considering I had two this past week alone, I thought I would create a little post to answer them and maybe help out some others in the process!

I was also thinking it would be cool to use this as a discussion board so feel free to chime in down in the comment section and ask or add anything photography related you might want to chat about! For those who have never commented, I’ll try to keep up with approving comments as often as I can but I have a busy day planned today so don’t panic if your comment doesn’t show up until two or three hours after you leave it!

Alright…so here we go! Ready?

*I want to add that I link to Amazon a ton in this post! That is simply because it is well known and has everything! That being said, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you buy from there! I do, however, highly recommend B & H! They are extremely knowledgeable and reputable!

What kind of camera do you use?

I have a Canon 5D. I am lusting after the 5D Mark II, but the 5D has served me well this past year and I love it!

However, I only just got it last fall. Before that I had a trusty Canon Rebel XT. We had that camera for three years and it took a ton of wonderful shots! Many of the questions I receive have to do with what camera I would recommend for someone just starting out or for you mamas out there who want an SLR and don’t know where to start!

I only know Canon. It is all I have ever had so that is all I can really give any feedback on. I know that the Rebel XSi and the Rebel XTi would both be great cameras to get you off and running!

What lenses do you have?

When you are thinking about getting an SLR, be sure to keep lenses in mind! Depending on where you buy, your camera may or may not come with what is known as a kit lens. There isn’t anything “wrong” with these lenses, but they definitely won’t give you the blurred background and the professional feel that other lenses will.

For the most part, I shoot everything with my Canon 50 mm 1.4. There is a 50 mm 1.2 out and I would love to get my hands on one, but like the camera, for now I am very pleased with my 1.4!

I started out with the 50 mm 1.8 though and it was a great little lens for the money!

I have a 28 mm and am hoping to add an 85 mm to my arsenal before too long, but my 50 mm pretty much never leaves my camera! It is an all around fab lens in my opinion!

What photo editing software do you use? What would you recommend?

I use Photoshop CS3 for all of my editing. I know a ton of photographers use Lightroom and other programs and can’t imagine anything else, but that is how I feel about Photoshop! I won’t lie though…Photoshop is an EXTREMELY complex program and I certainly didn’t learn what I know overnight! And what I know is just one iota of what the program is capable of!

Scott Kelby is the Photoshop guru so any books or videos you can get your hands on of his would be really helpful I am sure! Youtube also has tons of videos and you can download Podcasts too! The information is out there, you just have to look for it and then use it!

Do have any pointers to capture photos like you do?

Ahhhh man! This is a toughie! The one thing I can say is to capture your child in the moment! Don’t try to force poses or faces because that ends up with EVERYONE being frustrated! Speaking from my own experience here, whenever I really want my two to do something specific or give me eye contact, they flat out refuse and then I end up totally flustered! I have learned with time to let them be and my style has evolved around that! And we are all much, much happier!!

That being said, I won’t lie…I WANT them to look at the camera and give me great, NON cheesy smiles from time to time, but I am no longer disappointed when that isn’t what I get. I say try to be funny and get genuine giggles and smiles out of them! I use Chris a lot too when shooting our kids. I can’t possibly get them positioned how I want, camera settings set and faces looking at me on my own! I will do whatever it takes to get the shot I am after!

Just remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder! I have a certain style of photography and editing. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is mine! Photography is an art…we all have a unique eye! Find your niche and embrace it!

I hope this answers some of the questions that I have been getting!! Let me know if you have any others!

Hi friends! Don’t ya love how I call ya’ll friends even though I have never met the vast majority of you? But that doesn’t matter…if you follow along and check back in every few days to see what I have to say, then by all accounts, you are a friend!

So I thought I would switch things up on this little blog of mine and share some deep, dark photography secrets! Or maybe just the steps I go through in editing an image! Nothing all that secretive really! And definitely not the only way or the right way by any stretch of the imagination…just my way! Although I am pretty set in my workflow, I always love to see the steps other photographers go through in post processing and thought I’d do a little before and after of my own!

So here she is…Gentry girl in all her foofy glory straight out of the camera. A cute shot, yes, but it needs some work!

So the first thing I do in my workflow is to fix the exposure. I lighten 99% of my images. This can be done in several different ways. Some use a curves layer; some add a duplicate layer and then change the setting from “Normal” to “Screen” {adjusting the opacity} in the layers box; some use actions. And there may be other methods out there I don’t even know about! Anyhow, I have done all three of the ones I listed. All three require layer masking {I’m not prepared to give a lesson on that one so Google it!} so it really just depends on personal preference. I have an action I love {from none other than Sheye Rosemeyer} and I use that when I lighten an image.

For this one, I adjusted the opacity on each level and then painted back in the very white sky so I could get whatever detail might be there and also on Gentry’s face. Because her hair is so “white” as she calls it, I almost always have to paint it back in or I lose the detail.

My next step was to add a pop of color! Using the same action set mentioned above, I ran “Zap” on this. I adjusted the opacity on each of the layers until it had the look I was wanting. The color can also be adjusted in Photoshop using the the Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation sliders. I have also used those methods, but am all about making things as easy as possible and when I have an action I love that works the way I want it to, I am more than okay with just pushing “Play” and letting the action work its magic!

Once I have the exposure corrected and the color “popped” I am ready to start editing the photo to achieve the feel I want it to have. No secret here, I love the retro look, so that is precisely what I did to this one! I first ran “Mini Makeover” {same set of actions from Sheye} over the image and adjusted all of the sliders to get the feel I wanted. Side note: I often mask back in bits and pieces of the image where I want more or less of the effect.

I also added a duplicate layer {Layer: Duplicate Layer} and ran my Neat Image noiseware over the image. I have read and researched and everyone seems to have a different opinion on where is the best place to do your noise reduction, so I just throw mine in somewhere in the middle! I have the free version of Neat Image and it seems to work pretty well! I then add a vector mask and go back over the eyes so as not to lose detail there.

At this point I ran “Buttersnap” over the image followed by “Zap” at a super low {5%} opacity. You may not even be able to tell I did much…less IS more!!

At this point I played with the image just a little more in Photoshop. I ran “Circa 1963 with Grain” over it as well as “Clarify.” I then added a touch of haze with “Hazey.” All were at low opacity and changed the look only slightly. Something I have noticed is that when I run anything that clarifies as part of an action, I mask back over the cheeks. The clarifying seems to add a sharpness to skin that I don’t like! It is all personal preference and this is just what I have found works for me!

At this point I am happy with my image! It has the feel I want it to have and I am ready to sharpen, crop and blog it! The first thing I did was to create a duplicate layer and then run one of my sharpening actions over it. {Sorry…not sure where it is from!}  I adjusted the opacity and then painted back over her hair and anywhere else I didn’t want to be obviously sharp.

For my blog, I crop to 5 x 5 or 4 x 6. I wanted this one to be 4 x 6 so I cropped, rounded the corners and then added in an ever so slight edge burn {Sheye’s actions once again}. I added my watermark and here she is…

Her eyes look a little funky to me…but just ignore that! I probably didn’t pick the best picture to use for this, but once I decided that, I had already spent forever going through many of the steps!!

As I mentioned earlier, there are countless methods to achieve the look you want in Photoshop. This is just mine and what works for me! If you found something helpful, YAY, and if not, well, that’s okay too!

Hope you are all having a FAB day out there in the blog world!

So last week I had some friends over for a night of bow making fun! We ate, we chatted and we well, made bows! Where I am going with this is that one of these sweet girls asked if I have regular ‘ole snapshots of my kids! And the answer is without a doubt YES!! I take hundreds, thousands actually, of photos but only blog a handful of them! Not every image I take is one I want to spend time editing, let alone share! I just post the ones I love and spend time on for all to see!

However, because I still have pictures from this summer I want to get to, I am going to post ten random snapshots from our Cali trip here for your viewing pleasure! HA! I simply don’t have the time or energy to edit all of these and there is really no need…they won’t be printed huge and hung on the wall so I may as well leave them as is!

So here they are in their unedited, uncropped and unstraightened glory!! SCARY!! I guess if nothing else you’ll see that a lot of time is in fact spent editing from what you see here to what I normally post!

On our first full day there, we hit up Birch Aquarium, met with Julie and then ventured to the beach!

My thoughts: The aquarium was overpriced for what you saw, Julie rocks and the beach was a bust because we hadn’t been there 10 minutes when it started raining. The rain got harder and harder and by the time we packed up and made it to the car, everyone was pretty wet…except for me who is always cold and had a hoodie on!

I know…my littles are so stinkin’ cute you just want to squeeze them, right?! And those knee socks? Love. Notice the bracelets…I had some on that day and had to rifle through the ones I took to find some for the fashionista here!

This would also be the day that Huntler peed his pants. Yep. You read that right. He has been potty trained for two years and NEVER has accidents. Well, my friends, that day he did. At the park…in front of Julie. Wonderful. That would be after he woke up the night before and peed all over the hotel floor. Nice. Or not. But that one wasn’t totally his fault…he was out of it and disoriented and thought he was in the bathroom. I highly recommend never going barefoot in hotels…you have NO clue what has happened on that floor!

Anyway…I am glad I had extra outfits packed that day! We don’t usually take extra clothes anywhere, but I was worried they would get soaked at the beach and need something dry!

Love this shot of my boys!!

I would say that this water table was the hit of the entire aquarium!! The kids {and Chris} loved it! This was right up Huntler’s alley…he could have spent all day forming and reforming the “tracks” and racing boats!!

Here is a beach shot…it was so dark and gloomy! Notice Huntler is no longer in the jeans…they were soaked by this point from his little accident! We asked him CONSTANTLY for the rest of the trip if he needed to potty!

So that Saturday {October 3} we ventured to Legoland. Tons of fun! The kids LOVED every second of it! Well, every second except those where Gentry could be found rolling around on the disgusting asphalt throwing a tantrum because she wasn’t tall enough to ride the rides with the boys and had to hang with me instead. Those weren’t some of our finer moments, but we survived!

Sis and I were taking pics of the boys from our helicopter!

The detail in these Lego structures was amazing! I would NEVER in a million years have the patience for that sort of thing!

Saturday nights in October Legoland has “Brick or Treat.” It was SOOOOOOOO much fun! There were kidlets in costumes everywhere, fun music playing, contests and Trick or Treating! We had a ball!! All of us!! I am so glad we took their costumes so they could participate!

Our hotel was only a block from a pumpkin patch. Since I wanted to go to a pumpkin patch anyway, we decided to just go while we were there! It was close AND it was MUCH cooler and cloudy!! Can’t beat that! Yes, they are totally sporting some fab fall fashions there!

And the apple orchard in Julian…

Proof that I was in fact along on this little journey!!

And that’s it for today! Ten snaps from our California road trip! Hope everyone is having a wonderful Tuesday!! It is warming up here again which totally stinks…the high Saturday is 99 but they are saying we might hit that 100 degree mark yet again. Blah!

Rad. If you have been reading along for awhile, most of you probably know that the word “rad” has crossed my lips {or been tapped out on the keyboard} only a handful of times, if ever. I talk {and write} a lot, but for whatever reason, rad has just never made it into my regular vocabulary! However, it is one my sweet friend Julie uses and uses often! And since this little post here is all about getting to meet the famous Julie, I thought it only appropriate to bust out a word or two from her repertoire!

So way back when I started my original blog, my main intention was to have a place to share photos as well as bits and pieces of our day to day life here in AZ with friends and family back home. My how things have evolved over the last year and a half!! I really didn’t expect many to read it, let alone total and complete strangers! It didn’t take long though and I was getting comments from people I didn’t know…

One of the first was from Julie. From her comment I linked over to her blog…a little place that many of you know, Joy’s Hope. She hadn’t been blogging long at that point and I was able to scroll back and catch up easily. Funny how now she blogs almost daily and has a readership of hundreds! Thousands probably. Not sure, but a TON of people follow her blog!

Julie and I first started out as blog friends, commenting here and there on each other’s posts. From that point, we then started emailing ideas, links, patterns {although she is the only one of the two of us who can sew!} and all sorts of goodness back and forth. And this summer we started chatting on the phone.

When we decided we were taking the kids to California this month, I knew I HAD to meet her. I was going to make it happen…no matter what! Luckily Julie was game and was able to clear out a little time for us in her busy schedule and even braved the crazy {and I do mean CRAZY!!} Cali traffic and highways to meet up with my little fam at a park!

First of all, yes she is really that tan. And yes, I am really that white. Yes her necklace was uber cute and I wanted it. Yes, her baby is a doll and there is another pic where she was actually looking, but I am being vein and chose this one because I looked “better.”  Better meaning I don’t love this shot of me, but it is better than the other one! Julie looks darling in both of them!

So, sweet Julie here is every bit as adorable in real life as one would think from reading her blog. Her girlies are total cutie pies and Huntler loved playing with them! It was so, so fun to finally meet! She is such an inspiration to so many and someone I have been following along with for a year and a half now, so it was time! I was hoping that by sitting and chatting with her that some of her mad sewing skills might have somehow jumped inside me, but no such luck!

If you have never visited Julie’s blog, you’re missing out!! For real! She is witty and sarcastic and totally hilarious, but she is also real. She doesn’t pretend to be someone she’s not. She lays it all out there for the world to see! And don’t even get me started on her craftiness! She can sew, necklace make and spray paint with the best of ‘em!! Gentry has oodles of her messy flower headbands {found here} and every time she wears one {which is often!} I think of sweet Julie here and am so, so thankful for the friendships I have made and the connections I have formed on this little thing we like to call the internet!

Julie, thanks again for taking the time to trek across the city to meet us! It was such a treat to meet you in person! Your family is beautiful. If you are ever this way, you know you have a place to stay!

Oh me, oh my…I am drowning in a sea of pictures here! There are just.so.many from our trip that I can’t possibly begin to edit each and every one I want to share! And because this is a photography blog, I feel this need to edit everything I put on here! If only there were about fifteen more hours in a day and three or four more days in a week…and possibly another “me” as well! Maybe, and only maybe, then I could attempt to stay caught up!

I have managed to pick through {pun intended} my shots from the apple orchard though! First of all, props to Julie for being the one to tell us about this fab little mountain town in Cali, Julian. Had she not mentioned it when we met up {yes…we met in REAL LIFE…more on that in another post!!}, we never would have known about it! Thanks Julie…we loved it!

Let me preface this by saying, Julian was awesome!! Beautiful, quaint, cold, nestled in the mountains…perfection. However, the drive into and out of Julian, not so much. It was all I could do to keep from puking my guts out. If you ever go and are prone to getting carsick, load your little self up on Dramamine because believe me, you’ll need it! I was miserable!! I am sure the drive was scenic and grand, but I spent it with my eyes closed and telling myself over and over again to keep it together!!

Julian is known for its apples. They apparently celebrate big in October and November {check out their site} and there were people everywhere. I am nearly convinced that all of southern California was there!! We drove around for 15 minutes looking for a parking place in town so we could get out and stand in the super long line for cider and pastries but finally gave up and went back to the orchard to pick our apples! We still had a good 5 to 6 hour drive ahead of us, I was nauseous and cranky and we just needed to get our apples, snap our pics and get back on the road!!

Another sidenote…the orchard we went to had only one port-a-potty. Sans toilet paper. Great. Oh, I didn’t mention I was about to wet my pants the last 30 minutes of the treacherous drive? Did I mention that it was 55 degrees, cloudy and windy? All three elements I LOVE LOVE LOVE but really make the fact that you need to tinkle even more apparent! But in all seriousness, we had a really great time! We have never been to an apple orchard before and I would love to go again!

HIYA!! So we rolled in at bedtime last night from a super fun filled weekend in Cali celebrating our little man and his FIFTH birthday! We had a wonderful time…but as we all know…with the fun comes the not so fun aftermath! Unpacking and laundry and all sorts of craziness that isn’t so appealing. And that is where I found myself today and will probably find myself tomorrow. Add in a girly girl with a super snotty nose, chapped cheeks and who was extremely exhausted and fussy all.day.long with a boy bursting at the seams with excitement over his brand spanking new 833 piece Lego set that he is beyond excited about and a mom with a pounding headache and a “to do” list a mile long who is NOT so great at Legos and you’ll get a glimpse into my world today.

I had my pity party and am over it. I have two BEAUTIFUL, happy, healthy children and could not be more blessed. So what that there are piles of clothes laying around? And Legos scattered from here to timbuktu? And feathers floating aimlessly from Gentry’s boas? I did…and I do, but reality hit me again tonight when I watched these two videos. So if you are one of my fab friends coming over this week for some snacks and bow making fun, ignore the dust and the dirty floors. And remember that I was outside soaking up the COOL temps with my littles…we are all moms and know how fleeting these moments are!

And I am off to bed! Another busy day awaits me! I’ll try to post a few pics each day of all our Cali adventures!!

P.S. This image did NOT come out of the camera looking like this! In the perfect world, Chris’ hand would have been down, there wouldn’t be other people on the roller coaster and they would have gone around about 9 times so I could keep snapping and get the perfect shot! But let’s be real…it was a two minute ride that LOTS of people wanted to go on and my photo ops were fleeting!! Award winning? No. But a wonderful memory of my three favorite peeps LOVING the roller coaster? Definitely. There was a great deal of sharpening involved and now I see that I ended up with some fringing along the edges of Huntler’s face. But I am too tired to fix it!

I am sure it comes as no surprise that I have BIG things in mind for Huntler’s five year photos. We are talking crazy cute and something totally different than anything I have ever shot before! I am excited beyond words to get him all decked out in his snazzy new duds and snap away…in NEW YORK CITY!!

Yep…you read that right. I was originally thinking we would head up north to Flagstaff of somewhere else, but considering we are going to be going to NYC this fall anyway, I am totally going to wait and have his shoot there! I mean, I did Gentry’s early so that I could do them in Kansas…it only makes sense that I would wait in order to have the fab location of NYC for our little man! I have a feeling my kids and my camera are going to get quite the work out while we are there! Not to mention Chris’ patience because I am going to want to shoot the whole time but we have never been so we have LOTS of other things to do as well!

Here is what our little FIVE year old will be sporting…

This funky orange tie!

These cute kid cuff links! {If you remember, we will be taking the kids to Legoland this year instead of having a party for Huntler so these are PERFECT!!}

This cute newsboy hat! {I REALLY struggled with which color to get, but Chris said black! I was torn because the gray seemed more versatile, but Chris said the black would look better, so black it is!}

And these shiny black shoes!

I found a long sleeved white button down shirt at Target and he has some super cute baggy jeans he’ll be wearing! Now I just have to find some black suspenders and we are set!! I am SO SO excited for these pics and am crossing my fingers that Huntler will cooperate and give me some great eye contact and cute expressions!!

That’s it for  today friends! Have a wonderful weekend and I’ll see ya again on Monday!