Fireflies

I've been on a mission the last couple of nights to photograph the lightning bugs. Or fireflies... whichever you prefer. We've been noticing them on our walks in the evenings and they are present in large numbers.  Of course it also gets pretty dark out here so maybe we can just see them better.

I Googled "photographing fireflies" and turned up some pretty awesome results. See here and here. Now obviously I'm not this skilled but thought I'd give it a try anyways. So night #1 I set up my tripod and started messing with the settings. This is what I got:



Not terrible. But not really amazing either. Part of my issue was that most of the tutorials I read discussed merging multiple photos together. And I could not figure out how to do this effectively.

Night #2: I did more reading. Then went back outside and setup my tripod. I also adjusted my settings slightly. I've been shooting in manual mode, which alone is new for me. Based on what I read, my settings were adjusted to somewhere around  f/5.6, ISO 3200, 8 seconds. This was the result:



Much better. I should note that this is actually 8 different photos overlapped together. And the biggest difference from night #1 is that I learned how to overlap the photos properly. (Thank you Google.) I believe the proper term in Photoshop is "lighten blend mode."

It's this option here:



See I learned something tonight :)

Moneyball

My brother has been playing baseball every since he was little. We like to tease him about how he used to practice his Power Ranger moves while playing the outfield during his tee ball years. I haven't actually watched him play in a long time, but I like to imagine that, at twenty-three, he still does this.

  (Hi, little brother! <waves enthusiastically>) Moving on...

Now that he plays in an adult softball league he asked me to try and dream up a logo for the team. I've never really designed a logo before, but thought I could give it a try. The team name is Moneyball. 

So here we have it.

I was inspired by those images you see of a thrown baseball with a trail of flames. If you Google "baseball with fire" you'll see what I mean. I also downloaded a free baseball font to help me. You can download that here. Overlaying the 100-dollar bill onto the baseball was a bit more complicated. But it involved watching this very informative YouTube video a few times.

Still waiting for tshirts to be printed and really hoping they turn out okay.

Happy Easter!

Terrible Photoshopping job, but I couldn't resist...

Magic

There are things I really should be doing right now. I woke up early on my day off and I don't have much 

to show for it. 

For the last hour or so I've been learning a new Photoshop skill. Via Bower Power I learned how to enhance the eyes of my photo subjects. I might actually be able to apply this to people one day. But not today. Today I enhanced Meatball.

Amazing, right?

This actually was not super difficult. Most of my hour was spent downloading the Photoshop Actions to actually do this, which I highly recommend.

So far Pioneer Woman has given me a lesson in turkey brining and free Photoshop Actions. I like her.

Merry Christmas to Me

I finally got around to ordering my wedding collage canvas that I started back in November. Since I was ordering Christmas cards, it seemed like a good time to do a massive Shutterfly order.

Here it is. All 24x36 inches of it.

And a close up.

And hanging on our photo wall.

It's definitely large.

As for that Christmas card. Here's that. Although most people reading this have already seen it. Hi Mom :)

I'm certain people would rather see Meatball over Mike and I. And no, he is not actually wearing this hat. Lately I've been turning to Photoshop instead of props. Meatball would never sleep this peacefully with something on his head.

Thanksgiving Turkey

Poor Meatball. He never saw it coming. I've learned that sometimes it's more efficient to forgo the costume, and let Photoshop do all the work.

In real life Meatball would have never let me put tail feathers on him. Or a pilgrim's hat.

Of course, since I'm still slowing learning Photoshop (Elements) I had to seek some advice via the web on how to create a drop shadow. See here.

And now for some real turkeys.

I picked up a turkey today from Maple Lawn Farm. If all goes well, I may put up some additional pictures later detailing the cooking process.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Party People

Back here I mentioned wanting to do something with all of the pictures I made for our wedding favors. 

So here it is.

Can you read me? No?

They look like a small army. Also looks like wrapping paper. But that's okay. I plan to print to canvas and hang. A LARGE canvas so that you can somewhat distinguish the people. And the words. By the way, those words are our wedding invitation.

I ended up with a perfect square. But I am certain that I lost some people along the way. My record-keeping skills are not quite what I thought they were.

Next up is a wedding album!

Miniature Polaroid Magnets

During last week's heatwave Meatball and I spent a lot of time in the basement to keep cool. Browsing through blogs, I stumbled up this Polaroid magnet idea from Ambrosia Girl and thought it was adorable! What a cute thing to pepper the fridge with! And so began this project.

I graciously used the Polaroid template on the website and got started.

The longest part of this project was probably selecting pictures to use. I also, for some reason, convinced myself I needed twenty of these little magnets. (A few didn't make it to the end.)

After printing out the pictures, I pretty much followed the instructions on the website verbatim. I even glued the pictures onto the back of old sketchpad, since I have plenty lying around. The other super tedious part was cutting out all the pictures with an X-Acto knife. It could have been that mine was just dull, but it took forever. And my edges weren't the best. It was at about this point that I regretted, for the second time, printing out 20 photos.

 

Finally starting to resemble the final product. The edges on the board were painted with a white paint pen:

 

And lastly, after the paint dried, I "laminated" with packaging tape. Here's the final bunch!

 

And here they are, doing their job on the fridge:

Photoshop Fun

Although I use Photoshop quite a bit, I'm not very skilled at it. Luckily, there are some pretty informative tutorials out there. Like this one, that shows you how to delete people.... a handy skill!

I took my niece this weekend to get her ballerina pictures taken. Although I really liked the way this picture turned out, I didn't really like the other little girl that infiltrated the scene. So with some minor effort... ta-da! She's gone. The paint job is a little rough around the edges, but hey, it'll do. I'm learning...