I Found Some Sunshine

At Balboa Park

and in the Balboa Park botanical building.  (So gorgeous!)

And in the cloisters.

And then we found more sunshine the next day at the LDS Temple in La Jolla.

The classic shot of this building taken with the world's dirtiest camera lens.

 And then we went and found some sunshine in the best place to look for it.

It was a good weekend.  (and no that's not me or anyone I know catching the waves.  But they do look cool don't they?)

Picture time

I can't believe I had to do this.  I took senior pictures . . . of my own kid.  Not that I wasn't always planning to do it, but, seriously, she shouldn't be this old yet.  I tell her she's much too young and she's not allowed to call herself a "senior" until August.  I still did senior pictures for her on the beach while we were on vacation last week.  We won't get another chance.

 This is the stair access to the beach.  We were at Lincoln City in Oregon.  Which totally explains the fact that she is not in a swim suit.  The suits came out once the whole time we were there.  They have a joke on the Oregon Coast:  What do you call someone swimming in the ocean?  A tourist.

 I know these two are not traditional for senior pictures but I love them anyway.  My husband suggested that she walk away and I get a picture of her with the foot prints leading away.  It was supposed to be symbolic and stuff.  

 Now that I look at these again, I totally wish I had gotten down low and taken them from that angle.  So if you have your senior on the beach and you want the sappy, symbolic picture, brave the wet sand and get the shot right.  It would look much cooler.

 She hates this one, thinks it makes her cheeks look fat.  I think she's adorable.  She doesn't believe me.  We're a classic mother daughter pair.

But this one is my favorite.  Look at her laugh.  That's my Sarah.

Prom

Two weeks.  Two weeks of stress and headache and I never, ever want to see tulle or netting again.  But it's done and she looked lovely.

That skirt right there was 90% of the headache.

 Just to be silly I asked her to do that pose that models in Vogue do all the time.  You know the one, where they put their hands on their hips and pop the collar bone.  She forgot the somber pout.

 Of course, it made her laugh.

The skirt gave me fits.  I just don't have enough experience to know how to support the rosettes properly.  I put all sorts of heavy weight tulle and netting under that skirt and I still could barely get the pouf on that side.  She gets to wear the dress again in April and May so I have time to get it figured out.  

There was a lot of tulle.


Edited to add:
We took some more pictures of the dress this fall and I thought it might be fun to add them to this post.  In case you missed my earlier discussion of it,  this dress is an original.  We drew the design and devised a pattern by working with three other patterns and my own design work.  The design was dramatic and playful--a perfect fit for my daughter.

 a little more natural pose and you can see the pick up on the side that showed the netting.

 a view from the back.

and another tulle shot.  It's not the best picture, but oh that tulle!  It killed me, it did.

A Photography Rant

Never use your flash. Right?   Wrong.


That single most used piece of photography advice available on the internet is garbage.  Any photographer who spouts it is an amateur.  If the photographer you've hired for family pictures uses it, you might want to rethink hiring them.

Have you ever seen a professional photographer at a wedding without a flash on their camera?  That's because they know something those amateurs do not.

Flash lighting exists for a reason and that reason is not every subject comes with perfect lighting. Sometimes you've got back lighting, or overly strong side lighting or just plain not enough lighting.  If you have to use a tripod because your shutter speed is that slow, chances are a human being in the photo isn't going to be able to hold still well enough either.  That's what flashes and strobes and hot lights are for.  They fill in and add enough light so you can take the picture.

This doesn't mean that I think we should all go back to the deer in the headlights straight on flash.   What you should do is learn to use it.   There are a ton of really great tutorials on the internet about flash photography.  Instead of telling yourself flash is evil, do some research.  Practice.  Figure it out.  Your camera flash can be one of your best tools if you know what you are doing with it.

For example, this is my sitting room.  This picture was taken without a flash using a tripod.  Notice how dark the chairs are.  There's no detail because of the high contrast from the back lighting.  I could mess with the contrast levels in photoshop and try to come up with something acceptable.  But why?

When I could just get my accessory flash and bounce it off the ceiling (with a Lightsphere attached) and get the lighting I need.   

Some of you may say you like the first photo.  Fine, but you have to admit that when my purpose of taking the photograph is to show the furniture and the room, the first photo doesn't cut it.

I'm not going to tell you I'm a flash expert.  I'm definitely not going to claim that all photography on this blog is fabulous. (The vast majority of is is far from not fabulous because I am fabulously lazy.) I will say this:  learn to use your flash.   Buy accessories for your flash so you can use it to best effect.  Then learn some more.

Anytime you lock yourself in the box of "never" doing something with your craft, you lose.  Don't say "never."  Say, "learn."  And for heaven's sake, check someone's credentials, including mine, before you follow their advice.

Small Camera Bag Hack

I have an SLR camera with a very large bag that holds most of my equipment.  It's a backpack style, which is nice to carry because I can bend over and lean while wearing it without worrying that the bag is going to swing around and whack somebody.  As long as I wear both straps I don't whack people, I mean.  Don't ask me what happens when wearing just one strap.  It's not pretty.

The problem is that it's a very big bag that is very heavy.  This summer was very busy with lots of trips.  The full size bag would be way more equipment than I needed and I knew I couldn't hike 26 miles in it.  I needed a camera bag that would carry just the camera and one lens.  Ideally, I would have had a Crumpler sling bag, but since I didn't want to spend $50, I was out of luck.  

So I made my own.

I started with a $3.99 mini backpack purse from Salvation Army.  It had the right size main compartment and a little zipper pocket on the front for an extra battery, flash cards, and ID.  The heavy duty nylon canvas would put up with the abuse of a hand cart trek, a trip to the beach, and all around travel.  It's not the prettiest, but hey, you can find a prettier one for yours.

The grey block in the picture is the secret to this project:  high density foam.  Regular foam probably isn't going to do it.  You need the the super good stuff.  This is the product they use to protect lots of delicate equipment and my husband just happened to have a little bit in storage.

I sat the bag on the foam and traced around the base with a pen.  This was a little bigger than the foam needed to be, so I cut it just a bit smaller and rounded off the corners.  I made two of these.   Then I traced around the lens that I wanted to use in the bag.  This time I cut the foam out a little larger than what I traced.   In one block, I cut the circle all the way through.  In the second block I cut it only halfway down.  That was a pain, and it's not pretty, but it works.

I made sure the two foam blocks lined up at the lens hole.  Then I shoved them into the bag.  The camera fits in the bag lens down.  Like this:

On the sides, I cut spare blocks to fit around the body of the camera.  It would be best if one were to glue the foam together into the proper shape.  I'm lazy and have no clue what kind of glue to use, so my foam is still in pieces.  Nevertheless, this bag has been perfect.  I took this with me on my 26 mile hand cart trek.  My camera came through with nary a scratch or bump even after a torrential downpour and ridiculous amounts of dust.   It went to the beach with no problems as well.  Not that I went around dropping the bag in the surf, but it did well in the salty, humid air.  

If I were to upgrade this, I would probably try to find a leather bag.  Then I'd actually glue the foam and hopefully cover the whole foam block section in a nice printed fabric for contrast and fun.  Otherwise it's been great.  Today, my camera goes with me to a cross country meet.  I love taking the lighter bag.  My back thanks me too.