I love colorful photos. And there’s no place more colorful than my friend’s house.

As promised I am posting some of the pictures I took that day.

The only one downside to this amazing view is the “no-see-ems” (sand flees) in the evening.

The always gorgeous Michelle

Loved this real moment!

Soon enough we’ll be the ones chasing a crawling baby

My friend Elena making crepes at my request

More family moments!

Linking up with

The paper mama
5 Minutes for Mom

I have been busy busy busy! Lots of drama in the past two days with some of the friends. None concerning me, but still: single people can be funny I took the day off today to go boating, but that got cancelled for reasons I won’t disclose. So no pretty pictures of beaches or mansion or people boo

But I do have my good to wow edit:

I do all of my edits in Lightroom. I only use photoshop when I need to use layers or major skin smoothing. To be honest, I cannot imagine using such bulky uncomfortable program full time. Lightroom not only stores and catalogs your photos but it makes it so fast and easy to edit multiple photos at once. I think anyone who tries Lightroom just doesn’t go back. It’s definitely the software of choice for professional fashion photographers as evidenced by me many times.

Speaking of Lightroom, if you guys are interested, there’s a promotion going on, where you can save up to $100 on Lightroom. So feel free to use the link below, to get the discount or try out the software.

Also, if you happen to have a functional .edu account from when you were a student, these two links will give you a massive discount off of Adobe software.
Something like 80% OFF Photoshop’s normal price.

Also, if you are new to the whole world of editing, you can always start with Adobe Elements like most people do.
This link will give you $20 off.

HOPE THIS HELPS ALL OF YOU THAT ARE MISSING EDITING SOFTWARE

Now onto my edit.

All I did here was correct the exposure level, used my favorite fill light and recovery at the same time to lighten up and bring the details back. Plus some contrast, shadows and saturation on certain colors and voila. Very simple. Cropped some people out of course.

Also, as I was going through my old photos for a 5 year monthly Blurb Book, I found this picture. Aren’t we so young and cute. It was 7 years ago – we were still newlyweds – and now we’re finally trying for a baby. How crazy is life?

Before I go right into this week’s challenges, I’d like to share a piece of sunshine that is my backyard. It’s my happy place. It’s always blooming, regardless of what season it is. The colors of the hammocks bought in Key West make even the gloomiest day awesome! When I had to study for exams, I’d would come down there and spend hours reading the material and enjoying the birds chirping, the fire burning, and the smell of the fresh cut grass.

What is YOUR happy place?

This shot is for Mellow Yellow Monday

Also, this is my first time participating in Ashley’s and Jill’s challenge “GOOD TO WOW”

I wanted to pick something family oriented and recent. This photo is of an adorable couple who just had their second baby, Alex. They are some of the greatest people I know. We were relaxing at the beach and, of course, Anna wanted photos (who doesn’t?), I snapped a few as they were walking ( I was limited by my 50mm).

This is the shot I will be editing this week:

So let’s me tell you girls! This week was a bitch!

It’s hard enough to get hubby all dressed up and coaxed into taking pictures ( and mine is pretty good about it), but I didn’t realized how difficult  it would be to get all the kittens in place and behaving.
I thought it’d take a few treats and they wouldn’t be looking at the camera, but I never imagined that they would literally scratch and run and mew the whole way through.
I had thought Travis ( the skinny black one) would be the easier one to handle, but he turned out to be a nightmare. I couldn’t keep him still for longer than one shot and then he’d run away and hide under the bed (poor boy).
Jake( grey fluffy one) behaved amazingly well and just hung around us at all times, super relaxed.
Casper was only there if there were treats present (or the possibility of them), pretty obvious what he likes by his weight.

So let’s just say the shoot was a huge failure. When I wasn’t busy holding cats to make sure they don’t run, I was triggering the shutter ( forget about delay, I had to set it on instant), or paying attention to my pose/face ( which was the last priority as evidenced by the majority of the pictures).

So here are the best shots and the tips:

This is the type of image I had in my head. Expect for I didn’t think we’d have to have an iron grip on our black kitties.  The plan was to have then sitting calmly on our lap. No such luck! Knowing it would be hard to manage three cats, I made sure to shoot Jakey first and then clone him in. Disclaimer: Hubby looks super goofy here, because honestly we were laughing our butts off trying to pull this off. This is THE ONLY shot that worked, so whether he likes it or not, I am using it.

TIP 1:
Don’t expect to get a perfect shot. Feel free to rely on cloning to make group/family shots possible and easy

TIP 2: If photographing pets, have someone stand behind the camera and make weird noise to get the pet to look up. The weird pet noise was my husband and Jake was hypnotized. It was hilarious!

Since cats were being impossible and I loved the colors and the lighting of this area, I took an additional photo with just the two of us (not trying to hold onto our cats for dear life).

So then we decided to move onto the bed to see if that would work better and be a bit less formal. I think we got a few ok shots there.

TIP 3: Use treats when it comes to cats, dogs and little kids as a way of getting them to stay where you want them to stay

We really didn’t have much time to pose with all the commotion. So these two were the only actual poses we managed to do.

A few more shots:

And finally the outtakes:
You can clearly see what Jackey thinks about this whole photography deal!
Oh and check out how freaked out Travis was ahahaaaaaa!

So let’s see your masterpieces!

<a href="http://selfiemagic.com/category/selfiesaturdays/" target="_blank"><img src=" http://selfiemagic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gif-banner.gif" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a><br />

LINK UP

This is going to be a very different week. Today I cannot give you many tips because this particular topic is very new to me.
I have taken what could be considered “family self-portraits”, but our family consists of 2 people: me and my husband. And I’ve already covered the COUPLES SELFIES.

Recently as I was thinking about our family that will be hopefully expanding in the future, I realized that before i even realize it, there will be three of us. So I wanted to make sure that I cherish the times that we have now. And what occurred to me is that while I have a million photos of me and hubby, I do not have a single photo with our WHOLE family together, which would include our 3 cats.
I mean, really, with all my self-portraiture, I have NEVER taken a picture with me, hubby and cats.

I don’t want to look back and not see our life without our kitties, before it becomes the three of us.

So that brought me to this week’s theme: FAMILY PORTRAIT

I am sure that just like me, you have few to none photos of your whole family together taken by you. And why not, it’s so easy! Now that you’re all a few weeks into the selfie challenges, you should have the skills to pull this off.

So the challenge this week is to take a FULL family photo. I am talking hubbies, kitties, doggies, fishies and all. I know it’s going to be a challenge to make sure pets are in the picture, but I think we owe it to ourselves to make this happen at least once, at least for this challenge.

So since I am just as new to this, as you are, I encourage you to share any tips you might accumulate during your family selfie shoot when you link up next Saturday. I will then put all the tips together for a tutorial ( and of course give credit to those who shared the tips). So this will be our little collaboration. We all will be learning as we go and I’m very excited about putting together all of our experience.

A few general tips:

• make sure all your settings are done, your camera and tripod are set up, your remote (or timer) is working before you drag your kids/pets into this.
• use a simple location that you have good access to.
• hubby should serve as a point of focus for you ( if you’re using a remote). Once you’re focused properly, have him gather up the kids, help him get the pets.
• MAKE IT QUICK {hubbies are impatient, kids are even more difficult, and pets are impossible- you have 3 shots if you’re lucky).
• use treats to get cats and dogs to sit still.
• make sure your light is abundant and your shutter speed is fast.
• read my tips on taking couples selfies.

I’ve been really excited about taking a REAL FAMILY PHOTO  for a while now and have been waiting for this week’s theme.

So let’s do this for ourselves and for our families { even though they don’t really appreciate our picture taking }

{photo taken by Leeka}

LINK UP