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. :-)

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

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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. :-)

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

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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! :-)

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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. :-)

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Chrissy, 12 months

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Chrissy, 26 months

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Lily, 10 days

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Lily, 11 months

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Chrissy and Lily, May 2009

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Chrissy and Lily, April 2010

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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…

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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. :-)

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Pic from today. I call it “mistake with fill flash.”, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

I’ve got a great flash–Canon Speedlite 430ex. The problem lies in the fact that I really don’t know how to use it. I can muddle through the settings well enough when I have time, but when I’m in a pressured situation (say, like when I’m working with a hungry two-year-old and it’s cold and rainy and windy outside) I’m not nearly as careful as I should be. Hence the reason I have 15 shots from a photo shoot today that look similar to this. Sigh.

Believe it or not, they were actually worse–I shoot in RAW, thankfully, so I underexposed this as much as I could and tinkered with the contrast and stuff. But still… it’s a LOT more high-key than I like.

Oh well. Live and learn, right? I’ll have some other, BETTER pics from this shoot later on. :-)

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1.) I actually wrote this post last week, but it broke my website, so I took it down.

Well, it didn’t really break my website, but it broke the HTML, and everything was displaying all wonky. So I spent two hours beating my head against the wall and getting nowhere before finally giving up and writing the darn thing in Windows Notepad. Yaaay 1993. :-p

2.) While I’m writing this post on Thursday evening, you’ll actually be reading it Friday evening or later (I have it queued to autopost on Friday evening), when I’ll be on my first of the four legs of my trip to Rome! Whoohooo!! I’m taking my laptop, so I do plan to post at least a few pictures while I’m there. I’m going with two of my most favorite non-family-members ever — John and Joel! So if you see two weird guys in my picture, John’s the dark-haired one and Joel’s the towhead. And since I have two companions on this trip, maybe I’ll even get myself in a picture or two. :-)

Anyway, these pictures are from a fairly short photo shoot I did of a coworker’s granddaughter this past May — I’m still working on getting my backlog of pictures from last spring and summer onto this website.

As a sort of experiment, I’m going to post large versions of a few shots I like, and underneath next to somewhere near them I’ll post clickable thumbnails of the same picture edited a couple of different ways with regards to color. I’m kind of partial to the low-saturation and black+whites shots myself (the low-sat ones have kind of an antique look that I really like), but it seems like other people I’ve shown them to prefer the more saturated ones. But this is why I solicit opinions — it’s nice to get a feel for what other people like. :-)

As always, click for larger versions. :-)