All Boy - I Heart Faces Photo Contest

I decided to submit a photo of my cute little man in the I Heart Faces Photo Contest this month.  Here's my picture of him:

We were having so much fun at the skate park.  He abandoned his bike for a few minutes to fly around like Superman and I had my camera ready for some pictures (of course).

Black and White Dress Up

Have you ever checked out http://iheartfaces.com?  It is an awesome photography blog that I follow.  Their  photo challenge this month is black and white so I decided to take some cute pictures of my daughter for the challenge.

 

I haven't done much with black and white photography, but I read that you want high contrast so I picked out the black skirt with a black and white polka dot shirt.  I let her wear my red high heels and jewelry also which made it lots of fun for her:)

 

The above picture makes me laugh out loud!  She is so goofy!

 

Here's a couple of the pictures in black and white.  I'm not a huge fan of black and white pictures, but I like how these turned out.

 

I think I prefer the color ones though:)

Spring is Finally Coming

It has been an especially long winter here in Indiana.  But, most of our snow has finally melted.  I went outside in our yard today to see if I could find some green grass coming up through the mud and dead leaves (no, we did not do a good job of raking last fall and there was a LOT of snow so now we have a lot of mud).

I was excited to find a few patches of green.

 

I used my +10 micro lens attached to my regular lens (I have a 14-42 lens. It's the only lens I own right now.)

 

I love how detailed my close up lenses can get. 

 

Close Ups

My husband got me some beautiful flowers for Valentine's day.  I was about to throw them away yesterday (they were definitely past their prime), but I decided to take some pictures of the better looking ones first. 

I tried out the new close up lenses that I have on them.  I used the +4 and the +10 lens on them.  I really like the way they turned out.

 

I took the pictures in front of a window with the morning sun coming through.  I set a piece of white copy paper on the table with another piece of white copy paper propped up as the backdrop (very fancy setup, I know).

 

 

 

I used Picasa to edit the images. I played around with the highlights and shadows settings to see what it would do to the photos.

 

I love how I can use the touchscreen on my camera to pick the area I want the camera to focus on and it blurs everything else in the background.  I just love photos with a slightly blurred background! 

 

I know this is pretty basic photography, but I am just learning it and I am loving it!!!

My first few fledging attempts at photography

I have always enjoyed taking pictures, but only ever had a cheap point and shoot camera.  This year for Christmas my husband surprised me and bought me an awesome camera - Panasonic DMC-GF3.  I will be giving a review on it in a future post.  I am loving it and decided to do a 365 project.  I am posting my pictures on 365project.org and decided to blog about my photo journey as well.

Here are some pictures I have taken of my children over the past couple of months.

In this picture I was trying out taking a picture with the afternoon sunlight behind him. 

I caught her day dreaming at the park in this picture.

I love this picture!  She was dancing and singing and I just happened to snap the picture right as she looked at me with this great smile on her face.  I also love the fence on the right that is slightly defocused.  I only have one lens and the aperture on it is 3.5 - 5.6 so I can't as much of a blurry background as I sometimes want, but I really like the way it looks in this picture.

I took this picture as he was throwing snow in the air - check out that expression on his face!