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Love. Him and this picture.

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Photographobby!

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, and as you can tell by all the pictures on our blog, I have a new hobby! When I was planning our wedding, I looked at lots and lots of photography websites for wedding day inspiration. The more and more I looked, the more intrigued and inspired I became with all of the beautiful photographs. Before I knew it, I was dreaming of a dSLR camera, hoping that one day I might be able to take some beautiful pictures of my own.

Recently, many of you have asked what camera I use to take all the pictures on the blog. Well, Raul made my dSLR dream become reality when he gave me my Canon Rebel T1i on our wedding day. From Day 1 (well actually Day 3 when we were on our honeymoon), I was in love! While it’s a rather basic dSLR, I think it’s a great camera to learn from.

I have spent countless hours reading and watching and shooting, trying to learn as much as I can about photography. I aspire to one day actually have someone willing to pay me to take pictures, but I know that day is a long way off (if ever). I have sooooooo much more to learn and equipment to play with, but I feel like I’ve come a long way since September.

When I first started trying to learn about photography in the fall, I had no clue where to start. There are so many resources on the Internet—it’s rather overwhelming. I researched photography classes in Chicago, but decided that $400-$500 on an 8-week course that only meets for a couple hours once a week just wasn’t worth it nor was it something I could afford. So what did I do to get started?

1. Learned Some Photography Basics: I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon a website for an online digital photography course thru CreativeTechs. I took John Greengo’s “Digital Photography” 10-week course for $55. It was so worth the money. I learned so much from the course, and to Raul’s dismay and amusement, I developed a bit of a crush on John Greengo himself (see right).
2. Learned My Camera: I read the Canon Rebel T1i for Dummies book to learn about my camera. There are so many buttons, and I had no clue what they did. I was too afraid to press any of them, so I just shot in one of the automatic modes. This book helped to familiarize me with my camera and get me a bit more comfortable to play around.
3. Found Inspiration: If you don’t know about Google Reader, you are missing out! It allows you to subscribe to any website with RSS feeds, and it puts all of those articles/blog posts on one webpage for you to read. You can even subscribe to our blog (see that button over there to the right near the top?)! I subscribe to about a million photography blogs (and about a million other non-photography related blogs) so that I can find inspiration and learn new photography techniques.  I'm always learning!

Since getting the basics down, I have done a few other things to enhance my skills such as taking an in-person lighting class, abandoning my kit lens for a 50mm/f1.8, using different filters, and learning Photoshop Elements.  Still with all of that, I have so much more learning to do.

One thing I do want to say is that if you ever have the privilege of owning a dSLR, please take the time to LEARN how to use it. Yes, it will take "nice" pictures in automatic, but you can get so much more out of it by learning to shoot Manual, which is what I do solely now, setting my ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed for each picture (as well as White Balance, Focus Points, etc).  For those of you who may be interested in learning more about photography, one of my favorite websites is The Pioneer Woman. Ree has WONDERFUL, straightforward, no-nonsense posts about photography. The rest of her blog is wonderful too. In fact, you may have seen her on Good Morning America yesterday—she’s that awesome! I aspire to be her one day (minus the whole ranch thing).

I have loads and loads of other photography resources I’m willing to share if anyone is interested! And whether you like it or not, I'll be sharing loads more photos as I experiment and learn along the way!

Hope that everyone has a great weekend!

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Happy Friday!

Happy Friday everyone!  I enjoyed a nice, relaxing day today, considering it is my Friday off from work. It's been a week of few blog posts because I've been busy at work (shocker, I know!).  I've found that I love being busy, but by the time I come home, I'm utterly exhausted, hence no blog posts since Monday.  My hope is to not let my exhaustion get in the way of blogging.  Even though the audience is few, I enjoy sharing what's going on in our lives, and it's definitely liberating to write down feelings and thoughts whether anyone is reading or not (although it's nicer to believe that people are reading--don't be shy, let us know you're here by commenting on a post or two).

Anyway, as I was saying, I had a good Friday.  I slept in until 10am.  Oh, how I LOVE sleeping in.  Workdays I am up well before the sun rises and am sitting at my desk by 7am. Today I caught up on email, watched yesterday's episode of Real Housewives of Orange County (man, Lynne is a MESS), WORKED OUT (more to come in a future blog post on my quest to get back on the health track), straightened up the apartment, took Marty to our little neighborhood dog park, took pictures of him playing, came back, thawed since it was a mere 10 degrees outside, and played around with the photos on Photoshop Elements.

(I added some color pop and fun textures to this one)

(Marty playing with his Wubba)

While he was sniffing around the park, I took a couple pictures of our surroundings.  We live very close to downtown, as evidenced by this picture of the Willis Tower (aka Sears Tower aka BIG WILLY) from the dog park:

And just on the other side of the dog park are the Metra/Amtrak rails.

As you can tell by these photos, I'm experimenting a bit with different styles, editing, etc. until I find my style.  I feel a little silly with so many different feels of photos, but it's all in the learning process.  Which brings me to my next topic...

Tomorrow, I am heading to my first ever in-person, live photography class.  It is on lighting, which I know very little about.  It's a seven hour long class, so I'm sure to learn a LOT!  Raul is looking forward to catching up on his DVR'd NFL ProBowl practices, Scrubs, and other shows that I don't watch with him.  Hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend!

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A Little Family Time

Today we met up with family to celebrate my cousin Hannah's 8th birthday.  Following her birthday party at Make-A-Messterpiece, we went out to lunch with her family, my grandma, and my brother and sister-in-law.  It truly is hard to believe how fast my little cousins are growing up.  Hannah was born my senior year of high school, and I'm happy that I've had the chance to spend many, many holidays with her and her family.  I feel like she is growing like a weed.  I look back at our wedding pictures and think she looks totally different in just a few months. Such a pretty girl!

I've become the annoying one with the camera and gladly captured some of the moments from our lunch.  Since I bought my new MacBook earlier this month, I have been playing with Photoshop Elements to take my pictures up a notch.  All of the pictures below have been edited, some more than others.  I've been doing a lot of reading and playing around with the program to learn what its potential is.  While my goal is to get great pictures SOOC (straight out of the camera), I thought it wouldn't heart to learn how to edit. If any of you out there are interested in learning more about photography or Photoshop/Photoshop Elements, please leave me a comment, and I'll gladly write a post about some of my favorite blogs and websites that I use as resources.

Now, onto the pictures...

The Birthday Girl

Hannah and her mom (my Aunt Laurel)

Cousin Emma and Sister-in-Law Jess

Hannah and Laurel

Cousin Emma and her static-y hair.  She insisted I take several pictures!

Emma peeking thru Raul's arms

My beautiful Grandma JoAnn

Cousin Christian

It was a great lunch filled with lots of conversation and beer.  They had 130 beers on draft which made the selection all that much more difficult, but we managed to try a few good ones!

Raul and I are spending the evening cheering on the COLTS!  We're looking forward to a relaxing Sunday, and I'm especially looking forward to my day off of work on Monday.  Hope that you all are having a great weekend!

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Marty the Model

To his liking, or probably not, Marty has become my model for practicing my photography skills around our itty bitty apartment.  He makes an adorable subject and can be calm or crazy or entertaining, whatever my lens desires.  

If you don't like pictures of adorable dogs such as Marty, I suggest you don't visit this blog again, because there are many more to come. Ha! Especially with my new hobby and desire to learn just about anything and everything about photography.  I hope to share a bit of what I learn thru this blog, but I figure I better practice a bit more before I go sharing any knowledge and pretending like I know what I'm doing.  I also don't want to put myself out there too much in case I suck at it.  But, I have to say, I'm pretty proud of this picture.  I might just have to frame it!

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The Pictures are Here!

Credit: Sarah Smith Photography (www.sarahsmithphotography.com)

We were thrilled to receive our wedding pictures this past week.  Stay tuned for more pictures and recaps of our first day in Newlywedland over the next couple weeks!

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"I got 44 Acres...

...and a bitch in every one."

The lyrics to Marty's song of the weekend sung to the tune of Jay-Z's "99 Problems".

We had an absolutely wonderful weekend! It seemed like the first weekend in months that allowed us to have fun with our own plans. We didn’t have to unpack boxes or take stuff to our storage unit. We didn’t have to run errands out in the ‘burbs. We even managed to keep our apartment clean for the week, so we weren’t left dusting and vacuuming. And to top it all off, the weather was absolutely BEAUTIFUL! Our October had been one of the coldest and wettest in decades, so having a weekend in November with highs in the low 70s was certainly welcomed.

What, might you ask, did we do on a Saturday with no responsibilities to attend to? Spend the day with our dog of course! We've felt that we've been neglecting him a bit.  Being away from him during our ten hour workdays is just too much, and with the weather turning and lack of sunlight, it's harder to get out with him for walks and playtime.  Soooo after some Internet searching, I found a forest preserve about 35 minutes north that had a fenced in area dedicated to letting dogs roam free—44 acres to be exact! It was exactly what Marty needed.

A happy dog...

We were definitely proud parents that day. Marty has always been the type of dog that when he gets away, he never wants to return. He runs and runs and runs and never looks back. Saturday was similar, he ran and ran and ran, but we were proud. He constantly kept us in his view, and if he was getting too far away, he would come sprinting back to us. You should have seen the smiles on our faces!

He made some friends...

And was constantly asking for water...

I also used the opportunity to play with my camera in Av and Manual modes (as you can see). The sun was a bit harsh, and I just couldn’t seem to get the exposure right. Oh well, practice makes perfect right?!

I’ll leave our Sunday adventure for Raul to narrate. I’ll just say that we were invited somewhere for free that made Raul (and me of course) very, very happy.  What a great weekend!

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