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What a handsome boy! 

Can't wait to edit his family's shoot!

Fall...

Beautiful Fall day...  Probably the last one before winter sets in.  

Photo Challenge - Backlit

Beautiful fall day!

Little League!

What I'm working on tonight.  {And, of course, I'm going to post my grandson!  He's growing up so fast!}

Surprise!!

My dad turned 80 this past August.  We wanted to throw him a surprise party {a hard thing to do for someone like my dad}.  He likes to eat early, so it was a bit of a struggle.  We almost had to spill the beans just to get him to the restaurant.  So funny! 

In the end, he loved it! 

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Yep, that's 80 candles on the cake!

So, what do you buy the man who has everything he could possibly want?  We couldn't come up with a thing, so we headed down to Brookstone to see what we could find. 

That's where we saw the "Living Memories Tree Gift"

My parents built a new home almost exactly a year ago so we knew this would be a perfect gift.  

It comes in a nice gift box with a customizable slate plaque.

You purchase the tree online and when it came in we all gathered together again to plant it. 

Dad chose a Pink Magnolia tree.  It will be beautiful once it's grown some.

Challenging Myself

Still working on challenging my creativity..

Challenge - Mostly White

ET {aka Elliot}

 See more here.

Family Day at Lagoon

Lots of family fun at Lagoon - It's what fun is!!

{still playing catch up..  This is from mid Aug}

Another Favorite Image

Finally finishing up this shoot.  You can see the rest here.

AJ's Birthday!

Ugh!  I don't know if this happens to everyone but, oh, it's so frustrating for me.  I've always considered myself a quick learner.  But when it comes to this photography stuff, apparently not.  

Maybe it's my age, I don't know.  lol

Anyway, I knew my daughter would want me to capture some shots of my grandson's birthday, so I made sure to bring my camera.  Even tho' it was a BBQ I knew we would probably do the cake and presents indoors.  So I also made sure to bring my flash.  What I failed to do (and what I usually do before paid/planned shoots) is look at my settings and make sure they are somewhat close to what I think they will need to be at whatever location we are going to be.  Then I only have to tweak them a bit to get the right exposure.  I strive, more than anything, to get it right 'in camera.'  I'm getting close, especially when it comes to planned shoots. 

But for 'fly by night' sort of shoots, like this one, I sometimes fail BIG time.  So suddenly, my daughter is saying, where is your camera?  And I'm rushing to put the flash on and get ready to take the pictures.  (remember I didn't look at my settings before hand)  I'm shooting away and for some reason, the flash is going off twice with each shot.  Wha???  Then when I look at the screen I'm noticing that the pictures are coming out either dark or over- WAY over-exposed.  At this point, I'm like, really???  So, I'm very quickly adjusting my settings as I go but it's still firing off twice every shot I take.  Finally, I just stay still and wait for that second shot.  I got a tiny little break toward the end and looked at every button on my camera and realized when I'd changed it from timer to single shot I hadn't turned it all the way to 'S.'  It was on 'CL.'  Once I changed that it quit firing off two shots every time.  In the meantime, I still had under and over-exposed shots throughout the whole event.  Sooo frustrating.

Perfect example..  loved his smile in this one but could not fix the extreme overexposure.  :(

That's when I was so thankful I shoot RAW.  Way back when I started I would shoot RAW and it took sooo long to process each shot I decided to go back to Jpeg.  Afterall, my fav photog (who is AWESOME) shoots only in jpeg.  I also kind of felt that shooting RAW was, well... cheating.  If you don't get it in camera you can just fix it in RAW.

So, I kept shooting even though I knew I wasn't getting it 'in camera' with the thought that I'd fix them in post.  I know that's a good thing especially in a situation like this, but I still don't like it.  I just wish this stuff would become second nature for me.  I just wish I knew how to get there.  

They still don't look as good as I would have liked.  But at least we didn't lose them.  That would have really upset me.