Hello Henriette here with this months photo challenge:

No real techniques this month but tips on how to make photo’s for a photo a day or 365 project.

I see a lot of 365 projects going on in the gallery and eventhough I never participated I am a bit jealous of those who do.
I do envy your commitment to take that one photo a day and though it sounds so easy, I am sure it is not!
Where to find that photo opportunity every day and every time a new subject too!

So here are some tips for improving (if needed) or just to start your own project.

From an article by Jim Goldstein.
Whether you call it a Photo 365 or a Photo A Day (PAD) project the net result is the same, a photo for every day of the year. These types of photo projects are menacing at first thought, but provide a fantastic opportunity to explore and learn not just photography, but creative seeing and post-productions skills. Here are 11 tips to get the most out of any future Photo365 / Photo A Day project you undertake this year.

1. Maintain A Heightened Awareness
At every moment of the day keep your eye open with a photo in mind. Look for the obscure moments or observations that you might otherwise let go by with out a second glance. Training your eye and brain in this way is where a Photo365 / Photo A Day project can help you improve as a photographer the most. Taking great photography can’t happen if you never see or never know when to react.

2. Always Have Your Camera With You
Always have your camera with you through out the day. Don’t feel self conscious. Don’t get lazy. Don’t ever take a break. The one time you don’t have your camera with you is the one time you’ll wish you never left it behind. While Murphy’s Law is something you normally encounter from time to time, the frequency of taking photos every day means you’ll have many more opportunities to experience it. With a little discipline you can easily avoid Murphy’s Law moments.

3. There Is No Time Like the Present
Never say, ‘I’ll take a photo of that later.” or “I’ll take a photo of that on my way back.” Take the photo while the idea is in your head and the light is right. Moments of inspiration seldom come at convenient times and light conditions are seldom ever exactly the same twice in a day.

4. Train Your Eye To See Light
Learn how to get the most out of the light whether sunny, overcast, or any thing in between. Learning how to get the most out of high contrast and low contrast lighting situations is a great way to broaden your photographic opportunities. In addition experiment and make use of off camera lighting to supplement the available light to you. I learned a lot forcing myself to take photos in all different lighting environments during my Photo365 / Photo A Day project several years ago and it helped make me a stronger photographer.

5. Experiment! Don’t Stay In Your Comfort Zone
Break out and risk the bad shot to learn something new. Taking the same photos over and over again because you’re comfortable taking them will not improve your photography and it won’t increase interest in your work. Step out of your comfort zone to try new things. Doing this is not dependent on buying new equipment rather opening your eyes to new styles and new subjects.

6. Make Use of Weekly Themes
365 unique photos is a sizable goal. If you’re running thin on ideas think in terms of weekly themes. Take photos of a particular location, a color, portraits of family & friends, pet photos, macros, hidden letters, etc. Sometimes an infinite number of subjects are more easily pared down when thought of in terms of themes. Themes offer a sense of order and predictability providing incremental steps bringing you closer to your end goal.

7. Plan Ahead & Write Down Ideas
Rather than wait for inspiration to find you plan ahead and write down ideas for future photos in a notebook. This is great practice for normal photo shoots and will reinforce creative thinking. Reviewing previously documented photo ideas will prove to be a great resource when spontaneous ideas are few and far between.

8. Edit & Post-Process Every Week
In order to avoid backlogs edit & post-process you photos weekly if not daily. Getting into a rhythm on editing & post-processing is key to completing your Photo365 / Photo A Day project. For many taking photos is the easy part, but editing & processing the photos is the challenge. For every photo you publish you’re likely to have many others that don’t make the cut. Getting into a rhythm to select your final photos and processing them in a timely fashion will make the difference between success and failure.

9. Add Notes to Your Photos
When posting daily photos online add notes as to what you thought worked or didn’t from your days photos. Post general photo shoot and camera setting info from your EXIF data, you’ll look back on this later to refresh your memory or to see how far you’ve come. Anecdotal stories are also great information to look back on. Understanding how, why and when you photographed your subject provides insight to your creative thinking that you can’t get from EXIF data.

10. Get Into A Rhythm & Have Fun
Make sure to have fun during your year long photo project. The moment it becomes work the more challenging completing a Photo365 / Photo A Day project becomes. Getting into a rhythm can help a great deal in lowering the perceived level of effort to get your daily photos in. Whether you’re heading out to explore during your lunch break, taking a 10 minute detour in your commute or even taking 365 self-portraits, knowing that you have time dedicated to get your photo(s) in takes a lot of stress out of the process. If you’re the more spontaneous type then build in an extra 10-20 minutes into your appointment schedule to stop and explore with your camera. As with life ones destination is often far less interesting than the journey.

11. Start Today
Here is the best thing about a Photo365 / Photo A Day project, you can start ANY day of the year. Most frequently people associate these projects with New Years, but there is no rule as to when you have to start a project such as this. While it may seem overwhelming take the plunge and start your Photo365 / Photo A Day project today.

Please read the posting rules too, especially about posting in the right gallery, thank you!!

1. Upload your photo (and LO if you have one) to the appropriate gallery, then please link it back to the challenge in the forum
2. Just one entry per person will be eligible for a point, one extra point can be earned for doing a LO with the picture and if you win the challenge you also gain one extra point
3. The pictures must be especially made for this months challenge
4. No double dipping with other challenges please

Here is my go on the challenge I saw these geese a couple of days ago when walking with Meike (my youngest daughter). They were afraid of us and luckily just before they swam away I could take this picture. I took tip 2 in consideration, always take your camera with you and also tip 3 there is no time like the present!!

Good morning, all! Linz here with a quick photography tip today. Sometimes changing the perspective of your photo makes all the difference in the world! This is something I do to change things up a bit or make my photos a little more dramatic. For example, I wanted to snap a photo of my son’s train set (for a page I’m planning in my head but have yet to actually scrap!). These are SOOC, so please excuse the not so great lighting. Notice the difference between the first and second photo. Which one do you find more interesting?

So don’t be afraid to do something different! Try standing above your subject or lying on the ground next to them. Experiment until you find something you like. These are often some of my favorite photos.

We’d love to see what you come up with using this technique. Just point us to it in the comments so we can leave you some love.

Hello there!

Maria here, with some random thoughts about inspiration and taking pictures.

Today we are going to browse through couple of photo galleries from all over the world and get some awesome ideas to try!

First of all, I would like to introduce you one of my favorite russian photographers – Tanya Garanina. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand Russian, just browse her blog to find some amazing shots!

She finds extraordinary angles and discovers beauty everywhere.

Here’s another link for you:  this photographer is from Moldova.  Sergiu Barancean is not a professional photographer, but his pictures amaze me!  Just look at these minimalistic landscapes:

I can feel the still air of an early morning by the river, can’t you?

And the last but not the least link for today takes us to the fairy tale of Indonesian forests.  Rarindra Prakarsa creates perfect scenes with fantastic colors and ideal composition.  Just look at this “Ordinary morning”.  I wish I could have one of those!

I hope you found your inspiration today!  Now grab your cameras and click!

If you have other favorite galleries, don’t forget to share!

Hugs,

Maria

Hi everyone, Monique (monsu) here with this week’s Photography Friday!

Most scrappers love taking photos! We consider ourselves to be the family historians and want to make sure we always have plenty of material to scrap with! But most of us also love the safety and anonymity of being behind the camera! I must confess I do too, although on most trips I will ask my husband to take at least one photo of me, if only to proof that I was actually there too! As he is not the most talented or motivated photographer (and I am not too confident about any image of me, LOL), I seldom like the pictures he takes of me enough to scrap with them!

But, as Cyndi wrote a few weeks ago in this What Matters Monday Post, you ARE part of you family and your family history and you SHOULD include yourself in your layouts!

You could of course choose to have your portrait professionally done, but my solution is: TAKE SELF PORTRAITS! The good thing is, you can take as many as you like, until you have one you can be happy with! I do have a tripod and a self timer on my camera myself, but I’ve mainly used mirrors and windows to do these self portraits! You can even hide behind the camera if you feel you need to! Or you can focus on part of you, and leave the rest slightly blurry!

So this week my challenge for you is: Be brave, find a well lit mirror in your house, make sure you’re on your own and try to take some photos of yourself! You will not receive any points from me, but your family will love seeing pages about YOU in the family album!

Here are a few examples of self portraits I’ve taken in the past: (How brave am I, showing these to the world!)

Hope you’ll have some fun! Can’t wait to see your images in the Gallery!

Hey everyone, Leslie (goldengirls2) here with your Photography Phriday post! I’ve got a simple little trick for you today to help add pop and contrast to all of you photos! I love playing with the different effects Photoshop has to offer to get fun new looks for my photos. One of the “go-to” techniques I use all the time is called “levels”. The best way I’ve found to describe it, is it makes you “darks darker” and you “lights lighter”. You’ve got a lot of room to play with this to get some really fun effects from drastic to just a slight color pop! Here’s how you do it…it’s super easy!!!

In Adobe Photoshop Elements, simply go to >Enhance  >Adjust Lighting  >Adjust Levels. You’ll get a screen that looks something like this…

Take the “lights” slider and slide it toward the middle…this makes your “lights lighter”. Now take the “darks” slider and slider it toward the middle…this makes your “darks darker”. Pretty cinchy huh? Here’s a little sample of a picture I took that was WAY too dark but after I did levels, it looks pretty good huh?

So, go play with YOUR levels….and HAVE FUN!!!! Have a great weekend!

I know, a little cheesy, but SOOOOO true!  Haven’t you every gotten lost in your spouse’s eyes or seen that mischievous glint in your child’s?  I know I have -  I see that glint EVERYDAY in my oldest son!  LOL!  Have you ever wanted to capture that “window to the soul light” in a photo only to have your hopes smashed to smithereens after seeing the final picture?  Me too!  Well, here’s a little tip I learned from Jessica Sprague (aka The Photoshop Queen, in my opinion!) with a little addition of my own.

This technique works best on a photo where the catchlights.  What are catchlights you ask?  Well, a catchlight is simply the highlight of a light source reflected off the surface of the eye. This highlight adds depth and dimension to the eye, and gives the eyes life in a portrait or snapshot.  So now that we know what it is here is how we give them a little boost and really show off those “windows.”

1.  Find a photo that shows that catchlights fairly well.  Duplicate your photo so that you’re not working on the original.  I chose this photo I took of my daughter on her 7th birthday.  She wanted to have a supermodel photo shoot!  Is she gorgeous, or is it just me?  I guess I could be a little biased, but I’m definitely proud of my contribution to this little cutie! ; )

It’s a pretty good photo, but I want her eyes to show more of what I see in them all the time.

2.  Find your dodge tool in PS or PSE.  It’s in the same spot as your burn and sponge tool in your toolbar.  It looks like a stick with a round thing on top of it.  The burn tool looks like a hand and the sponge tool looks like a sponge (how clever!)  If you can’t find the dodge tool right click on the hand or the sponge, whichever one is shown in your toolbar and the dodge tool should show up in the fly out menu.  Okay, now that we’ve all found our dodge tool. . . .

3.  Zoom WAAAAAYYYY in on your photo – so you have a good view of the catchlights in the eyes.  Set your dodge tool to “Highlight” and 100%.  Choose a small round brush – mine was set to 7.  Click a FEW times directly on the catchlights and you should see them brighten.  DO NOT click all over them.  Just do it in the lightest spots of the catchlights and you only need to click a FEW times – I probably did it 4-5 times.

4.  Zoom back to see what it looks like.  If you need to, add some more.  You might try lowering the exposure to 50% and seeing what effect that gives you.  Play around!  That’s why you are working on a duplicate of your original – you CAN’T mess it up!  See how much brighter the catchlights are now?  Gorgeous. . . but I think we could do a couple more things.

5.  Grab your elliptical marquee tool and select just the irises of the the eyes. If you hold down the shift button while you are selecting you can add to the selection.  It was pretty easy to select just the irises but if you need to make more than one circle to do it just hold down the shift key (add to selection) until everything you want is selected.  Now do the other eye too, while holding down the shift key.  Hint:  If you make a mistake and want to deselect a portion use the Alt button instead of the shift key.  With the selection active (ants marching) I hit Ctrl+J to make my selection a new layer of it’s own.

6.  Now with your new layer active in the layers palette click on Filter> Sharpen> Unsharp mask.  In the new window Jessica Sprague recommends entering:  Amount 85%, Radius 1, Threshold 4, but that really didn’t look too different to me so I entered:  Amount 85%, Radius 9.8, Threshold 4.  Just play around with the sliders and see what looks best.  Don’t go overboard though – you don’t want it too sharp! I really just wanted to bring out the different colors in her irises.  See the difference?  It’s subtle, but it’s there.

7.  Merge the two layers back into one layer.  That’s as far as Jessica’s tutorial takes us, but I like to do one more little thing.  Grab your elliptical marquee tool again and this time select the entire eyeball (whites and irises).  Try not to get get the eyelids and eyelashes but it doesn’t have to be perfect.  I just kept making little circle and oval selections (while holding down the shift key) until the entire eye was selected.  Then I did the same thing with the other eye (still holding the shift key.)  With the selection active hit Ctrl+J again to make a new layer.

8.  Ctrl+click on the thumbnail of your new entire eye layer.  Ants should be marching around the eyes now, and click on the half-black/half-white circle in your layers palette to create a new adjustment layer.  From the fly out menu choose brightness/contrast.  Another window will open.  Adjust the brightness slider until you get that “window to the soul” look you want on your photo.  Mine was about +15.  Again, don’t go crazy here.  A little goes a long way – you don’t want alien eyes!!  Click OK and merge the layers back into one again if you’re satisfied with the final outcome.

It doesn’t look like a HUGE change but it definitely makes a difference in the whiteness of the whites.  Look at my before and after shots side by side.

Such a difference when you look at them all together, huh?  *patting myself on the back*  Now it’s your turn!  Go and practice so we can all see those gorgeous eyes and catchlights in your next LO’s!  Have a great weekend–Jeni!

Hi everyone–Jet (Henriëtte) here.  Thank you all for sharing your most beautiful sunset pictures with us, I for one really enjoyed them!  It was soooo hard to select just one winner with so many gorgeous sunsets to choose from, it was a tough decision, but there can only be one winner and that winner is:

bcnatty with this stunning picture:

I love the composition, the silhouette and the sunlight on the water, just gorgeous!

Congrats bcnatty and thanks for playing!!! The $5 gift certificate will be send to you soon.
And now for this months challenge:

As always it is a challenge where no SCRAPPING at all is involved but just making pictures is the only requirement to play. Each month I will choose a subject for the picture;
this month it is: the wildlife in you back garden (or a bit further away)

These frogs live in a big pond a couple of villages away.  I love how the one frog’s cheeks are blown up like he is having chewing gum.

How to play:
- Make a picture that has something to do with the subject, you can be as creative as you want, just make sure it has a connection with the subject.
- Post your picture in the gallery and link it back to this forum post.
- You can submit as many pictures as you like!
- I will choose the winner at the end of the month and she/he will receive a $5 gift certificate to our fabulous shop!

Thanks for playing and keep those pictures coming!