Learning

My life has been full of motherly tasks since my husband and I have brought our two beautiful kids into this world. Somewhere along the way I stopped doing the activities in life that I enjoyed that made me feel whole. Recently, my sweet and thoughtful husband purchased me a SLR camera for my birthday so that I could work on improving my photography skills.

While in college I took Photography I as an elective and it was my absolute favorite class during my entire 4.5 years of college. I got to go inside a tiny room and learn how to take the negative out of the roll of film, and THEN insert it onto a round spiral ream in such a way that none of the negative touched itself. Winding the negative around the ream was always a hard task since you did it in compelete darkness and needed steady hands! It took me several tries the first time, but I became a pro at it and left the darkroom with my negative neatly wound on the ream inside a light proof canister. After putting an assortment of chemicals into the canister (it has a valve on the top so you can pour the chemicals in but light does not reach the inside), I would let it soak until it was time to open it, pour the chemicals out and clothes pin my negatives up to dry.

IF you failed at the task of wrapping the negative into the spiral and therefore if the negative touched, you would notice it right away on the negative as it would stick together, and in result you would have splotches where you should have seen your photo.

After the negatives were dry, I would cut them so that I had 5 pictures on a strip, and put them into a clear photo sheet in my binder. Then, the real fun started as I would go into the dark room and use the enlarger to crop and burn my negative into the photo paper. Finally, I would take the photo paper and ‘develop’ the photo by using lots and lots of trays filled with chemicals. Of course, this was a black and white photography class, but ohhh did I take some great shots. I got an A in the class and if it hadn’t been my last year of college, I am sure I would have taken ALL of the photography classes.

In this photography class I used a manual camera, so I learned to always use a tripod when taking pictures at night (to avoid camera shake), shutter speed, etc., etc. So, of course, when I decided to get back into photography, I knew I wanted an SLR so that I could take quick photos of my children without messing with too many controls.

Oh, I love this camera…

So, of course, one of my wonderful blog readers, Laura, told me about a wonderful site that has Photoshop Actions that will quickly touch up my photos so they are colorful, vibrant etc… there is even an Action to enhance the eyes… These Actions make my life so much easier, because with a click of a button I have instant results. Of course, the link with the Actions was from the Pioneer Woman’s website. I really don’t follow the Pioneer Woman, but wow… oh, wow… these Actions are TERRIFIC!!!

Also, I had been using Photobucket in the past, but Laura had a blog post about how Photobucket does not represent the photo accurately, but Flickr does… so, I will now be using Flickr.

Laura told me that I could really pop the colors on this photo of Autumn, so check this out… You will be AMAZED…

Original Photo