The Other Sweet Dream

Here is the other sweet dream I thought of putting up for the I Heart Faces challenge. I have two versions - a sepia and a black & white.

I Heart Faces - Sweet Dreams

I'm participating in I Heart Faces, weekly photo challenge. This week's photo challenge is Sweet Dreams.

I'm afraid my children are nothing but silly when it comes time for going to bed. Let me introduce you to my oldest daughter's favorite stuffed animal - Frilly. My daughter and my husband have a little ritual going on with Frilly where my daughter makes Frilly somewhat available for stealing from my my husband, and my husband finds amusing places where Frilly wants to hide. Frilly is forever set in my daughters mind as a symbol of her childhood, I think.

Out On A Walk

We had quite the frosty day here today and went out on a walk to look at all the frost, some of which never went away because of the shade. Here are some pictures of our walk. Some of the pictures I took today, I'll have to save for next week's I Should Be Folding Laundry's challenge, which is to take pictures of lines. But, here are the ones of my girls and a very friendly steer (to boot). I'm missing my middle girl again. She's love to stay locked up in her room playing (and away from the light), so I miss getting her picture a lot this time of year.

Fix It Friday - I Heart Faces

I took my hand at Fix It Friday from I Heart Faces this week. Here is my before and after.

Before

 

After

 

Christmas Collage

I decided to try my hand at making a Christmas Collage from scratch. What do you think?

I'm always very interested in collages, but I prefer to make my own artwork and not have to purchase parts for collage making. If anyone knows of any quality collage tutorials that don't involve buying artwork, please pass them on.

Happy

Beth over at I Should Be Folding Laundry, challenged us with the them of "Happy" this week.

Sweet Sisters make me happy. What else can I say?

Next week's theme is "Lines".

Pictures From Thanksgiving

This is my sweet husband. Unfortuneately, he wouldn't give me a serious face and was trying to make faces into the camera. This was kind of an in between shot - in between the silly and the normal face.

This is my littlest one. I love the rich colors in the background.

My step-daughter.

My oldest daughter.

My oldest daughter.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any of my middle daughter from that day. I didn't mean to leave her out.

Such A Little Cutie

I've just got to quickly share this picture of my little cutie. This is WHY (in addition to nice crisp landscape pictures) I got a quality wide angle lens. My little cutie can come right up to me and I can capture the moment.

And here is a adorable little ritual my toddler calls, "up plate, plate." She cracks me up.

Lovely Day

It was a lovely day here today.

Rain

Rain can be pretty too. Even on mostly dreary Northwest days with weather forecasts of 100% rain.

The Oregon Coast

My honey and I went to the coast for Veteran's Day. (We were married on Veteran's Day.) I took some pictures (of course) and I wanted to share some. I hope you enjoy them. It was an AWESOME time to go to the beach. It was almost completely empty. And between brief rain storms, there was a lot of wonderful sun and sky drama. While it isn't WARM per se it wasn't any colder or rainy-er than at home. At least not during this trip. I think it was Providence. :)

Cropping For The Feeling Of The Photo

Texas Chicks Blogs And Pics recently had a blog entry discussing cropping. Of course we all crop. But, the topic of discussion was cropping for the essence or feeling of the photo. So, I thought I'd do some crops of my own. Here are my crops:

Yawning

 

 

Daddy and Daughter

 

 

Bagel Girl

 

 

 

Vintage Effect

I worked through a great
tutorial tonight on adding a vintage effect to your photos. Here is the tutorial from Verle's Blog. Here are some directions in a nutshell:

• Do some modified cross processing and up the contrast to create a really strong image. (Not new to me.)
  
• Run an edge darkening vignette by going to Filter >> Distort >> Lens Correction and adjusting the vignette there. (This was not new to me.)
  
• (Here's where it gets interesting.) Go to Hue/Saturation and check the "Colorize" box. Move the Hue and Saturation sliders around until you get a Sepia you like. (It dawned on me as I did this that this must be how some Photoshoppers get that real chocolate brown or true Sepia pictures more than by using Photo Filters.) Now for a vintage look decrease the Sepia opacity to 50% or so.
  
• (Something else I did not know.) Old photos have a pinkish cast to them. So, add a magenta pink solid color filter and decrease it's opacity to 5% or so.
  

Turned out great I think. Go to her tutorial for more thorough directions. Here are my photos (followed by their originals).

My Middle Daughter

I had my camera with me tonight when we went to Red Robin, not because I regularly plan on taking my camera to Red Robin, but because I had it with me and didn't want to leave it in the car. So, despite the deep shadows and somewhat bright, but spotty and inadequate lighting in Red Robin, I took some pictures. No flash. I really liked how this one turned out of my middle daughter (motion blur of her hand and all). It's a great likeness of her.

Autumn

I am participating in I Should Be Folding Laundry's weekly photo challenge. This weeks theme is Autumn.