This is for Katie:)!

I really appreciate all the compliments that I have received in regards to my photography but I have to admit that I read these comments in disbelief because truly I don’t know what in the heck I am doing.

There are a few things I have going for me though:)

1. An awesome camara
2. I have become quite proficient at digital editing (thanks to Jim)
3. I seem to have an “eye” for it. (So did my grandpa and my dad does too)
4. I have beautiful children:):):)

My love of photography is not truly a love of photography. It is simply a reflection of my love for the beauty of people. After waiting sooooo many years to have a baby, I was determined to capture every moment. When I was pregnant with Tanner it seemed so “unreal” and I didn’t want to miss a thing. I bought a nice film camara and took a gazillion pictures of him. Again, not because I loved photography but because I wanted to capture every expression and every outfit and every memory….etc. I treasured the pictures then for obvious reasons. The more pictures I took, the stronger the desire for more perfect pictures….I needed to capture what I saw so that I would never forget. I started upgrading my camara’s and by the time Ty was born, I had just bought a Digital Canon Rebel. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this camara. I also bought a small lighting set with umbrella’s that I use some as well as a backdrop bar. And yes Katie, I did buy a zoom lense but off the top of my head I can’t tell you what it is. Shows what I know. I mess around with aperatures and speed some but to be honest, I rarely have time to mess with settings while trying to capture kids because they are just too quick. The secret of my success is two fold. First take a million pictures…you are sure to get something! Second, buy great editing software so you can fix a lot of your mistakes (this in and of itself is a true art). I use Adobe Photoshop 7.0. That is actually the most enjoyable part of photography for me and I know a lot more about editing than I do photography. I do not get the greatest shots in the world all the time (though sometimes I stumble upon them:) but I do know what I am looking for and I can often get what I want even from pictures that don’t show much promise at first glance. For example, when I did Zandi’s photoshoot a couple of months ago, Aimee and I were both discouraged. At first glance, we just didn’t “see” it. I told her not to pay much attention to the pictures I had taken though because I consider the picture itself only a very rough draft:). I worked with the pictures and called her back so excited because I was able to “pull” Zandi out of the pictures in a way that made both Aimee and I downright excited:)! Here is an example:

This was the unaltered picture.

Notice the following changes: (1) zoom (2) lighting changes (3) changed coloration to half tone (4) background alteration

One of the many advantages of a high end digital camara is that the pictures are taken at a very high resolution. (I capture mine in poster size). That way, if I print out an 8×10, I am not having to enlarge the picture…it is actually a smaller version of the original. In addition, I can crop and zoom the heck out of pictures without degrading quality too much because of the resolution they were taken with.

All this to say, I am not a true photographer. It doesn’t matter in the end though, because despite the fact that I have no education in photography, one way or the other I end up making this work for me! LOL! For those of you die hard photographers that just read that, yes I do admit, it would behoove me to get an education and I would be happier with the end results if I did in fact know what I was doing but for now, I don’t have the time to figure it out. LOL.