Anyway, in the meantime, I had the privilege last Saturday of going down to Old Sac to meet up with a former student (he’s attending a different school for his senior year) to take his senior pictures. I think we spent most of the time making fun of each other, but all in all, it went pretty well. I’m not done with the post-processing yet, but I wanted to toss up a couple that I liked from towards the end of the shoot.

I had so much fun with the light — I couldn’t have asked for better portrait-taking conditions. :-)

The aforementioned eyes. :-)

.

She looks like she's using the flower to hide a grin. I love it. :-)

.

I love baby feet -- they're just so dern cute! I was trying to get them to make a heart shape, but she wasn't having any of that. :-)

.

And don't even get me started on how stinking cute that dress was. OMG. :-)

.

Here are the last of the pictures from Thursday’s photo shoot — the full gallery is here. I love all of these pictures. Thanks again for letting me take them, Holly! :-)

.

It’s tough to have such a cute model. I mean, I didn’t even want to take pictures–I just wanted to make him smile and giggle and pinch his cheeks. Even now I’m dying of the cuteness as I post this picture. Holly and Simon, you have one heck of a cute kid. :-)

.

Chrissy, 12 months

.

Chrissy, 26 months

.

Lily, 10 days

.

Lily, 11 months

.

Chrissy and Lily, May 2009

.

Chrissy and Lily, April 2010

.

But for the photo shoot I did of my coworkers grandkids a couple of Fridays ago, I knew I’d need more than just a couple of quick adjustments in DPP to get anything I was really happy with. The shoot’s conditions were less than ideal (rain caused a move indoors, I didn’t have a wide enough angle lens to capture two small moving objects in a small living room so I spent a lot of the shoot with my back pressed against the wall, and I suck at using my flash, but I didn’t have much of a choice since I was indoors and the lighting wasn’t great.)

Photoshopping these things was fairly time-consuming. I’m not that great with Photoshop to begin with, and I’m stubborn and picky, so a job I thought was going to take 3-4 hours instead took around 8. (But hey, I finally understand what curves are in Photoshop and how to use them! Go me!) in At 4:30 this morning I finally hit submit on the blog post prior to this and turned off my laptop, more or less happy with what I had (and slightly paranoid that I’d look at the pictures in daylight and realized I’d over-processed them… Hey, I’ve done that before!)

But as the day wore on, I glanced at them a couple of times, and I was still satisfied with what I’d come out with, so I decided to post a few before and after pictures just so y’all could see just how bad they were when they came off the camera compared to the final product.

I don’t normally openly solicit comments on here, but if you wanted to comment on this particular post about what you thought worked and didn’t, please do. :-) After this post, I’ll have one more post with pictures from this shoot, and I have kind of a fun one planned for that. So stay tuned… whenever I get around to it. :-)

Click the link for more…

.

.

.

.

.

.

IMG_5566-2, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

This was the last picture from my photoshoot of my coworker’s granddaughters during spring break. Shortly after this, hunger- and naptime-induced meltdowns ensued. I love this picture, though. :-)

.