The Birthday Girl and her Sister

Love Hanging Clothes Outside

Water Tower

Water

She was trying to splash me, I was just out of range, but I got some cool pictures.

Another picture from California

In our neighborhood in California.

I Love a Blurred Action Shot

Dresses were made for spinning when you are wearing one and you are a little girl. Of course when it takes your mom a few shots to capture the spinning you tend to get a little dizzy, but when you are five you will do things like that for your mom.

Sunset

I used the sunset mode on my camera, it feels like cheating because I think it adds to the orangeyness of the color of sunset. But this picture is straight from the camera and I do love the orangeyness and he black of trees against it.



Surely orangeyness is a word, I wonder how it's spelled.

Love Her

Those are some tiny shoes to fill.

Food

Food is so easy to take pictures of. This is one of my 2-year old's favorite things to eat right now! I hope she never stops loving it! I took this picture with super zoom.

My Cats

Here's our extremely affectionate cat, Crystal.


My cat, Jack, cleaning his belly, he has a bit of work to do.

Fireworks!

My camera has a firework setting and a night setting, but neither of those took a decent picture so I had to use my old friend the landscape setting. If I'd had a tripod I bet it would have made a difference!





I thought I could open my pictures on my computer and see what mode I was using when I took the picture, but it seems that is a feature I had when I was using Kodak EasyShare. I am at their website right now seeing if I can upload pictures to my gallery and then check the mode...

ViewMaster Fun

I love the ViewMaster, when I was a child my grandmother had one and she had the coolest reels for it! Today we found ours and then when we were at the store we picked up two sets of the reels, and here are a couple pictures.

One example of playing with focus.

I was using the Landscape setting, I use this for almost all outside photography. I feel I am acting too big for my britches by saying "all outside photography" so I will say, I use the Landscape setting when I take pictures outside. That sounds better.
Here I took a picture of the same thing, but one time I let the camera focus on the drain thing and the other time I let it focus on the trees beyond. I love doing that.

Strange shots are fun. Here's one.

Looking down into a slinky.

Close-ups

I usually wear my camera around my neck on a strap because I have sort of a history of dropping cameras. Sometimes for close-up pictures I have to take my camera necklace off. I did that for this wet leaf picture. I used Super Zoom of course, I love water in pictures, whether it's drops or moving water frozen in time forever with the click of a camera, I love water.


More water drops (droplets?) on grass, just sitting around, being round, looking like glass, magnifying things.

Faceless Children

I try not to post pictures of my children's faces. I realize the chances of someone seeing them on my blog or facebook or a message board and then finding them in real life and grabbing them are slim, but to me internet safety means a certain amount of anonymity. My husband gets emails at work reminding him about internet safety, so, you will almost never see pictures of my kids' faces online, which is too bad because they are cute!

I like this picture because I like reflections.



I like this picture because I like the angles of the sidewalk and street and cars parked on the street. That thing they talked about in art class in middle school, where things come to a small point further away. I don't know what it's called. I take a lot of pictures of my kids going either up the sidewalk like in this picture, or down it.


Going down the sidewalk.

Favorite Objects

I took both of these indoors on a cloudy day with both my kitchen lights on. The lighting would have been nicer on a sunny day with no artificial lighting.


My late grandmother's candy can. She kept mini KitKats and Reece's cups in here. I keep Hershey's Kisses in it.


My new chicken plate. I love chickens. For the 12 years I've been a mother much of my joking and goofiness has been about chickens. I have no idea how it started, but now chicken is a thing with me. I recently told my kids I want a Chicken Kitchen one day, I love saying chicken and kitchen together. My 12-year old rolled her eyes and laughed.

I like to take pictures of objects.

The main reason being, objects almost never come out blurry because they can't move on their own.

Here is a picture my daughter (almost 5) and I colored yesterday or maybe the day before.


This picture did not turn out well because I took it with Super Zoom late in the day when there was not enough light, so it turned out kind of yellowy, I hate that. Cheerwine is a pop that tastes pretty good, I'm not a big pop drinker, but I like it once in a while. They make it right here in North Carolina. I don't know if it is a big deal or not, but it is kind of cool that it's local.

A Few Rules or Tips

My mom has been taking pictures my whole life. Since the invention of the digital camera she has been able to take as many pictures as she wants without having to give a thought to the cost of film or developing-like the rest of us I suppose.

She has given me tips for taking pictures ever since I had this camera that had a round film and round negatives. I have no idea what it's called.

Some of my mom's tips that I follow are:
-get at eye level with your subject
-have your subject fill your picture
-don't take pictures of objects in front of windows
-look at everything in your frame

The great thing about rules is you can follow them, or not, but they make you think about what you are doing so you are not just pointing and shooting, even if you have a point-and-shoot.

What do I look for in a picture?
Angle. Lighting. Main subject of the picture. Focus, I have fun playing with focus, and I don't mean manually or anything technical or fancy because I can't wrap my mind around that stuff, I just mean looking at one thing or another and causing one of them to be in and the other out, of focus.

But I do not want this blog to be some big tutorial (or whatever you call it) on photography. I just want a site with pictures that have not been run through any kind of photo editing program. I have edited or changed photos of course, to see what I can get, but I use Flickr.com or Photobucket.com, or quite honestly the Paint application on my computer.

Ok, that is all for rules and tips.

Introduction

Hi, I am a 33-year old mother, an Air Force wife, and a college graduated. Those are the basics about me I suppose. I love history and reading, I love playing Scrabble, I love being outside provided it's not too hot or too buggy. I grew up in Wisconsin, spent my 20s in Nebraska and the Air Force has been moving me around for almost 5 years now.

I decided to start a new blog today. I was looking at a blog I love, and seeing all these stunning photographs by people with more talent and better cameras and better photo-editing equipment than I have and I just got tired of looking.

So, this blog will be photos that I take with my Fuji FinePix s700. My favorite setting is what I call Super Zoom, but the camera calls it Super Macro and defines it as Close-up shots to 1 cm (0.4 in). Natural light is my favorite lighting option.

Here we go.