Watermark Explanation

I am a member of a photography forum online where recently some photographers pictures were stolen and copied onto a ladies website advertising them as her own. It's hard to believe someone would do that and make money from the hard work and talents of others. As a result almost all pictures on that forum are to be watermarked. Most are professional photographers and have theirs watermarked anyways, but not all are professional (such as myself) and are marking their pictures as well. Some of those pictures carry over here so now all pictures get marked.
The scrapbook page pictures are marked as well, but please feel free to scraplift. I probably got some of the ideas from someone else anyways. I am more just concerned about my actual pictures ending up on some strangers website without others knowing where they really came from. Hopefully this helps.
Facebook just came out with and had to retract a policy which stated that all pictures and content on their site was their property. Myspace has similar policies. I know these have to do with advertising and covering themselves, but just another reason to watermark.
If anyone knows how to disable the right click feature on pictures please let me know!!!

Christmas Card

   

 

This was our Christmas card this last year. It worked out well as kind  of a baby announcement/Christmas card.

The front was a pocket made out of the design paper I sewed onto the back. The picture of the kids and the letter were tied with the bow slid inside. And cute little Scott became our Christmas art for the front.

ISO 200 f 2.5 ss 1/160

This is a bigger view of the picture on the front.

Strawberry Picking

This is a recent page I finished up from this last year. It was a take off from one of Becky's Sketches.

Uchee Creek

Here is a closer look at the one I posted over on the family blog. This is one of the first times printing the pictures a bit smaller. Most are 4 x 3, the main one is 5 x 7. I love being able to fit so many on a page. 12 pictures, yea!

Abby

ISO 200 f 1.7 ss 1/250

Here is a picture from this summer of Abby I just got around to editing. I had to try it out in black and white and color. There are two color conversions I tried. They are similar, but I would love to know which you prefer out of the three. I love these pictures of her. They show her cute little curls-love the humidity for that, and beautiful eyes. I love that I can see my own reflection in the catchlights of her eyes. Very cool.

 
For the photography gurus: This was taken with natural light (no flash) around 8pm in the summer- so around sunset. The sun was camera right quite low in the sky. The light was fading quickly and I was in partial shade so the white balance was a bit off-it had a sort of blue tint to it. I was able to adjust that in photoshop. I usually leave my white balance on auto on my camera and it does a fairly good job, but sometimes its very hard to read the light especially when it is changing quickly like when the sun is setting. Learning to custom white balance in my next task.

Abby has very fair colored skin so I needed to overexpose by a stop so her face wouldn't under expose. Your camera is going to see her light skin and think" this is too bright I better not let in as much light" thus giving a perfect exposure reading in camera, but her skin would end up looking kind of gray/underexposed instead of light like it really is. The general rule is overexpose 2/3-1stop for light skin, underexpose by a half to a full stop for dark skin. With dark skin your camera is doing the opposite. It sees the dark skin and think that there should be more light added, thus giving an unnatural looking skin instead of a beautiful chocolate brown color.

So if you are shooting in manual mode-have the little ticker at the bottom so it reads one stop to the + side. Each little line is usually 1/3 or 1/2 a stop (check your camera menu for that) so it's actually a couple little lines to get to a full stop. The stop usually has a bigger line. Something like this + l 11 l 11 o 11 l 11 l - I hope I explained that good enough.

In overexposing, I blew the whites in her shirt. (the whites got so light there is little to no detail left in the white areas) White is tricky to photograph. If you are having to adjust too much to get the face exposed correctly and all your whites are blowing, then you need to either move your subject to get more light on their face, use a reflector to bounce some light on their face, or use some sort of flash (my least favorite). In this instance I had to choose which I was willing to lose. I decided to expose for the face because it was my main focus of the picture anyways, and lose the detail in the shirt. I think it still works great even with the shirt issues. If I would have blown areas in her face I probably would have pitched it or just kept it for her scrapbook.

Brooke in black and white

When I post my pictures I will try to post my settings below it for those that are interested. Please, feel free to leave any constructive criticism. I am just an amateur and would love to keep learning. Your thoughts are the only way I'll get better. Even if you don't know a thing about photography, it's always great to have a new set of eyes look at something. Everyone has an opinion about what they think looks good, I'd love to hear yours.
This is a black and white of Brooke. For most it isn't the greatest picture. For me, it speaks volumes because it just shows who Brooke is. I am all about evoking emotion when to comes to pictures.

ISO 200 f-3.3 SS 1/4000

One of the main reasons I am posting it, is because I think it lends well to a black and white. This was taken in color and converted in Photoshop. I am still working on my conversions. Sometimes darker black and whites work, other times a more softer black and white is called for like with some of baby Scott. I still don't think I have found one method I love. The main point is that this picture works well as a black and white because it has extremes in lights and darks (the light sand and her darker hair), but still some midtones in between so as not to be too harsh.

It's all about the lighting when it comes to black and whites. Front lighting is great for portraits, but sometimes can be too flat for a black and white because it doesn't add much dimension to a picture. Having the light come from the side (camera right) the light accentuates the form of her hand, the texture of her hair, and even the water on her arm. Black and whites love texture.

This was taken full sun at about 4pm. Not a super great time for pictures because of the really dark shadows you can get on peoples faces. The way she is positioned worked okay to eliminate those shadows though. This was just at a fun day at the beach, nothing special, but with a little extra thought as to where I was standing, it made what could have been a bad dark- shadowed face picture into something a bit better.

A Creative Outlet

My parents named me Monae and intentionally spelled it M-0-n-a-e, not M-o-n-e-t, thinking I would never learn to spell my name right and others would misspell it as well. As life has passed, I don't think they imagined that I would have grown to have a love for art, thus ironically living up to the Monet name.

Claude Monet was an impressionist painter in the 19th century. An impressionist painter was one who had open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

The word "Photography" literally means Photo (from the Greek word Phos) -LIGHT, and Graphics (from the Greek Graphicos)- TO PAINT, thus meaning "To paint with Light"

The blending of a great artist and photography makes my site represent what I love. To use ordinary subject matter, showing movement (usually my kids who are always on the move), showing the passage of time as I see it, and hopefully capturing my world in unusual visual angles- all as I am "painting with light".

"The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself." -Alan Alda

This blog is a place where I can share those discoveries. Some will be photographs, others will be scrapbook layouts, and some just things around me I felt were in need of a little creativity. Enjoy!