Hard Choices

For a long time I've wanted to get a photo or two of my own printed up onto canvas. I've shied away so far because of the costs and not too sure where to go. Well yesterday while shopping in Romford, Essex I came upon a new business called Photo 2 Canvas and they were offering fairly good prices, good enough for me to enquire about and to then decide I'll get some. The problem now though is deciding which two photos I want to print up. I've narrowed it down to wanting photos of Callum in and prefably ones of him on his own and I'm pretty certain this will be one of them:





But choosing that second photo and having to wade through over 2,500 photos is a hard job. There are a few other photos that my husband Daz and I are very fond on but personally I am not sure how they will look transferred onto canvas. Then there are photos that I would have printed up but I know from experience of printing them onto photo paper that the quality is not good enough which is a shame.

This photo is one of Daz' favourite and at the moment may well be my second choice.




However there is this photo which a few people we know have said they like:




Then I think should I maybe just have one potrait photo done and then say a still life photo that I've taken printed up, like say this photo:





Like I said it's a hard choice. So if anyone does read this and fancy having a nose through my photos and leaving a suggestion I'd be happy to hear what that choice would be.

Project 365

At the end of last year I decided to this year embark on a photo challenge. Flickr where I host pretty much all of my photos has many wonderful groups and there are plenty there with challenges, most notably the 365 Days group. I did a few times last year try to do those but the main part was that you had to have yourself in some form in the photo and that I found hard to do. This year though thanks to an online friend I heard about the
Project 365 Group. This sounded more up my street as I didn't have to be in the photos. So here I am Day 22 into Project 365 and enjoying it but also finding it challenging to find something to photography. It's making me think more about what I want to photograph and how I'm going to go about photographing the days subject. Now all I have to do is keep at it for a lot more day.

If anyone wants to have a look you can find my photos in My Project 365 Set. Each day I add the photo of the day to the set so you can easily keep up to date with how I am doing.

I just hope the weather picks up soon as I'm starting to run out of things to photograph around the home.

Christmas Greetings.

Tis the season to be jolly and all that malarky. One of best things about Christmas is getting the biggest, live tree that we can fit into our home, getting all the decorations out, putting the christmas tunes on and then all of us decorating the tree and house. Sure I had an argument with a five year old over putting decorations in the correct place on the tree but I was at least grown up enough to apologise to Callum ... once Daz had pointed out my childishness lol. Sadly when I looked at the photos I had taken I realised I had knocked the focus onto manual without knowing and pretty much all of them have come out blurred. Still there is always a silver lining in a cloud and I came across this.


As online friend Tyler says "it's got a great impressionistic, almost painterly quality to it. I know you said it was an accident, but it's a well-played accident." which I have to agree with, he has summed up what I like about the photo. Of course now I've seen the error I made with the previous photos I'll have to re-take some more which no doubt Callum will moan about "No No No no more photos please Mummy. "

Photos From Today.

I decided today that it was about time I experimented more with the manual settings on my DSLR as I haven't really done this so far, yes I know bad bad bad me. I'm still learning what all the different settings mean and I'm still mighty confused, but that is nothing new. Here are some of the shots I took today. With each photo I've mentioned if and what editing I did. I hope you like and as always thank you for popping by.




Titled: Callum
This photo I as per the others used flickr's picnik editing tool. I converted to B&W and then cross-processed it. I quite like how it turned out. If you want to see the original please visit here.




Titled: Life Lines of Autumn
With this photo I used flickr's picnik, the basic editing tools they have are quite good, I cropped, rotated, straightened and then framed the photo.




Titled: He Loves Me He Loves Me Not
Just framed on flickr's picnik, the basic editing tools they have are quite good.

C is for Child and D is for Dog F is for Flower and H is for Halloween

As some may have noticed I've been very lax in keeping up with my blog lately, I really don't know where the time has gone and even though I've had a bit of time to take photos it hasn't been that much. So not wasting any more time here are some of my latest photos. Fingers crossed I'll be able to get back into posting more often and hopefully joining in again with Sky Watch Friday.

Oh and you may notice as some of the photos of Callum the child and Dash the Dog progress that the dog's size seems to get bigger, turns out that Dash is just like Callum in the "doesn't stop growing" syndrome.

Callum at Pirates Grove, Paradise Wildlife Park

Callum at Pirates Grove, Paradise Wildlife Park

Callum and Dash Playing with toy cars

Cuddles are the best!

Callum loves getting wet

Unlike poor Dash

Now I always thought nothing would be harder to photograph than my son Callum, the boy doesn't even keep still in his sleep but alas I've been proved wrong. Yes the dog is harder to photograph. Well correction he is now, when he was much younger he loved posing but now he either wants to lick the camera or bark and growl at it. I can't even sneak up on him when he is sleeping and the dog and child photo I so dearly want still alludes me. I will just have to perservere I think or I will have to see about those photographers that do child and pet photos, if I can find a link one of the photography magazines the other month had an article about them, fantastic shots!

See how well behaved he is here, if only that was all the time. It's been interesting seeing how Dash has grown and changed, much like it has with Callum. With Dash he's now getting those springer spaniel spots they are so famous for having and his puppy fur is becoming thicker. His jumping is also becoming higher. As was told to us by our vet (but we knew anyway) he is an intelligent breed of dog and is taking well to training I only wish I could train Callum as well. lol.


Well that is enough rambling I'll leave with a few more photos.






























































Thank you for visiting and as always my photos can be seen on my flickr photostream, just follow the link.

Photo Books

Firstly I would like to say a big thank you to those of you who have been kind enough to come visit and leave comments, they are very much appreciated.

Now onto Photo Books!

At Blurb they deal in helping you turn your photos into a Photo book. You can keep it private and have it ordered just for you or you can have it public and others can view and I assume buy it too, although I don't know if you earn commission or anything. Sounds like a fun way to store some of your favourite photos and you can add text and make you own cover and back cover too. Also they come in Hard Cover or Soft Cover. I think they are a very nice idea to have as maybe a keepsake of your child's life or that once in a lifetime holiday or just something that you like.

I've been toying with the idea of doing one for my son Callum and choosing certain photos at times of his life from birth to present day.

Fun With Photos

In this day and age there are so many sites on the old web that you can just upload a photo of yours to and they can change it into anything!! Yep anything! From a jigsaw puzzle to a business card to a poster or a movie magazine cover. Some of the ones I've used that I've found fun and easy are:

Big Huge Labs

Dumpr

Moo

Qoop

There are lots more out there but these are the ones I tend to play around with the most, plus they are all linked to flickr which is where I host most of my photos.

Big Huge Labs gave me and some friends an afternoon of fun on the net with the Motivational Poster Toy where you could create masterpieces like this:





Or there is the Hockneyizer Toy where you can do this creations:



With Dumpr I was granted creations such as these with the effects:


Amazing Circles:



Alien Vision




Moo I used to print up and have delivered the Minicards which I have so far used as tags on presents, to quickly write down my contact details on and I'm in the middle of creating a small mosaic with some. There are countless uses for them and the service and quality provided are top notch.

Qoop I haven't used and awful lot, I did use at Chrismtas time to play around with a Calendar but I never ordered it but it was an easy site to use.

Like I said there are lots more of these sites out there. If there are any that you use and would recommend feel free to let me know and I'll go check them out, I'm always up for a spot of photo playing.

Selective Colouring

You know that little thing where you have a black and white photo with a splash of colour, well that's selective colouring. Until last year I didn't know what it was called or how to do it but thanks to some wonderful people at Photography Blog I learned how to. There are many ways in which to do this but I've found a free software programme called GIMP which allows you to do so and then a talk through guide at Create Blog which is easy to follow.

Here are some examples of what I've done. I've posted the original photo and then afterwards with the selective colouring.





This photo I did using a trial version of photoshop, it involves layers and you cutting out from the original colour photo the areas you wanted (in this case my nieces red top, the Union Jack on my nephew's trousers and the orange in the back of my son's shoe), then changing the photo to B&W, creating a new layer, pasting over the colouring bits and merging together, well I think that's how I did it, was so long ago. Very long winded and you need a very very very steady hand. Still I like how this turned out and to me gives an age old effect to the photo that makes it feel timeless.

Another photo I did (this time using GIMP) was this one.





The GIMP way was a lot lot lot easier to use and if you made a mistake easier to rectify.

I have other photos I've done, all can be seen in my flickr account which is linked to at the side. I just need to find other colours other than red to selective colour.