Posts Tagged "photography"

4 Tips for Sharing Photos of Your Children Online

Posted by Michelle on Oct 7, 2010 in Family, Media, Parenting, Photography, Social Networking, Techie Mama | 0 comments

Being a shutterbug, I couldn’t wait to show the world photos of The Little Empress. The very first photo of The Little Empress was posted a mere three hours after her birth.

We’re definitely not the only family to do so. A recent article on CNN talks about a study that shows that 82 percent of kids under 2 have an online presence.

While the Internet makes it easy to share photos of your newest family member with far flung relatives and friends, the fact remains that these innocent photos of your child can also be a privacy risk. Here’s a few ways to keep your little one’s identity safe from the very start.

Use privacy filters. Photo services like Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly and more have privacy filters that allow you to control who sees your photos.

Do not label photos with sensitive information. Sensitive information can include your child’s full name, birth date, birth place, etc.

Obscure any personal information that may be visible in the photo. New parents may want to rethink sharing the photo of their newborn the hospital isolette as information including the baby’s name, family surname and even delivering doctor may be in full view. Choose to share another photo that does not contain any sensitive information.

Ask friends and family NOT to share photos of your little one without your permission. This is harder to control — especially with excited grandparents — but (gently) explain why you would like to control where your child’s photos are seen.

BONUS TIP: It is popular on some parenting communities to share the names and ages of your children in your signatures. If you do this, use nicknames to identify your children rather than their names.

What’s Your Play #40

Posted by Michelle on Apr 7, 2009 in Photography | 1 comment

What’s Your Play is hosted by Laura at Dolce Pics. She provides a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot and the folks post-process it and share the results. More info here.

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Here’s my entry for What’s Your Play #40 -Water Wheel

Software: Lightroom 2

What I did and why:

I didn’t do too much editing on this aside from enhancing the colors.

* Deepened the shadows and brightened the high lights by tweaking the curves just slightly
* I loved the sky peeking through the trees so I boosted the blue just a bit
* I thought the ground was a little too yellow so I toned down the yellow to more of a brownish tone to enhance to earth
* Sharpened the image to bring out the detail in the rocks and trees
* Vignette to finish off

I didn’t crop this photo. The obvious crop would be to focus on the wheel. I thought about it but decided that I’d lose more than I would gain, especially because I loved the litle bit of sky but didn’t want to sacrifice the ground to do so. I like the scene as a whole very much, especially the frozen pond. So I figured that I’d enhance the feeling of the cold, crisp scene of a water wheel in winter than just a water wheel alone.

What’s Your Play #39 – Rings

Posted by Michelle on Mar 31, 2009 in Photography | 4 comments

What’s Your Play is hosted by Laura at Dolce Pics. She provides a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot and the folks post-process it and share the results. More info here.

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Here’s my entry for What’s Your Play #39 – Rings

Software: Lightroom 2 — one of the first times I’ve used LR and I’ve fallen head over heels in love with it. So powerful! So shiny! So… expensive. Ow.

What I did and why:

• I tweaked the color a bit, boosting the saturation and vibrancy in particular as well as the white balance. I had tried using an LR preset that I just didn’t find myself very happy with. Playing with the sliders and working with curves was more familiar and gave me a better result than the presets.
• I started playing around with the sharpening slider and was amazed at the difference it made in the detail on the rings. Wow!
• I tried a number of different crops but decided I liked this 5×7 one the best.
• After all was said and done, I added a slight vignette to finish it off. Whee!

Photo Friday – Lessons Learned

Posted by Michelle on Jan 9, 2009 in Photo Friday, Photography | 1 comment

My sister is my daughter’s godmother (ninang in Tagalog.) We didn’t get any really good photos from The Little Empress’ baptism and we got none of all of TLE and her Ninang. To make up for this, my sister and I took TLE to a local park to take some photos.

Focal length – 50mm
Apeture – F/1.8
Shutter – 1/164
ISO – 100
Equipment: Canon Digital Rebel XTi
Post Processing: Color correction, cropping in Photoshop Elements

This was the first time I shot outdoors. Once we got there, I realized that I was going to have a bit of problem with my white balance. I didn’t know how to compensate for the fact that TLE’s and my sister’s outfits contrasted so much. If I metered off of TLE, my sister was too dark; if I metered off of my sister, TLE appeared blown out. Also not helping was the fact that the sun was MUCH harsher than I had anticipated even though it was pretty late in the day.

Most of my white balance problems probably could have been prevented by bringing either a gray card or just a plain sheet of white paper for my sister to hold up so that I could have used that to set the white balance while I was shooting. DUH. Lesson learned on that one.

Despite some lighting missteps, I’m pretty happy with how this shot came out. TLE is still a bit blown out but I think the image works fine.

RAW Christmas memories

Posted by Michelle on Dec 26, 2008 in Photography, Techie Mama | 3 comments

Despite having had my dSLR for over 2 years, it has taken me until now to even begin experimenting with shooting in RAW. I knew the magic of shooting in RAW really lies in the post-processing power but I didn’t really appreciate it until I actually got a trial copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements and saw what you could do with RAW. Here is a really good example of what you can save by shooting in RAW

The straight out of camera (SOOC) shot was completely underexposed — my flash was running out of battery and hadn’t recharged when I took this shot. A quick adjustment of the white balance in PSE while opening the original RAW .CR2 file completely saved this photo (as well as some other photos that suffered the same flash malfunction.) I will never go back to shooting in JPG ever again!