After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ Aldous Huxley
I’m contributing a photo to a photobook to give to the mother who has lost her child. Which one is your favorite?
You can read about Elijah here.
I took my camera to work with me yesterday in hopes of taking some photos at lunch. I never got to that. Before I left for work, I snapped this photo of some dew on a leaf. Then I left my camera at work and couldn’t take any photos of the kids.
On a photo forum I post and read on, someone posted a photo for an edit challenge. It was an amazing photo to start with, but she wanted to see how others would interpret the photo. I find it fun to edit someone else’s photos because it usually inspires me to try new things. The one thing I didn’t do on these that is usually part of my base edits is add a vignette. I’m trying to get out of my ‘standard’ routine and do things a little different. Not easy when I have a preference for a certain style.
Original
My base edit and crop (adjust white balance, exposure/fill light, warmed the photo, and popped the colors a bit by increasing the blacks).
I took my base edit and did some other interpretations. Here are my favorites.
Using a modified PW soft fade to make it feel a little more aged.
Then taking the soft fade and running Nelly Nero’s Candy Floss, but modifying to my liking. I like the sweetness this adds to the photo. The only thing I don’t like is that the faces and hair get a little overexposed.
Taking my base edit and running Nelly Nero Classic BW and modifying to my liking. Again dealing with some overexposure in the hair and skin.
Then taking the Classic BW and adding Nelly Nero Lucky Dip with modifications to age the photo a little more and warm it up a bit.
Cooper started it.
Then Charlotte mastered it.
Then they played together. (These are so sweet to see…there are so many moments between them like this. I just love how they are truly sharing with each other in these.)
I had a great idea to let the kids burn off some energy at the school across the street and let them play with their remote control cars. I didn’t plan it so well and one of the cars had dead batteries. Plus there was soccer practice going on and lots of people out an about. The kids were way too distracted.
This photo is far from perfect, but I love the light in her hair.
This is how I corral the kids when I’m by myself: “Mommy’s going to get you! Here I come!” And off they go in the direction I want them to. Sometimes if they run in opposite directions, I make them chase each other. Seems to work every time.
Again practicing on non-human subjects, I have been completely fascinated with this tree that I pass when I go running in the evenings. It’s like Christmas in the middle of spring. I love the silhouette effect in the late evening with the amazing droopy flowered branches, but I obviously don’t have my camera with me when I run. I figured since I was there with the kids I could get some photos and I also learned how to do some backlighting.
And some random ducks
We took a family hike to the wetlands about 2 minutes from our house on Sunday. It’s a completely flat hike across the street from the beach. It was a beautiful day and I had so many great photos that were a blast to edit. So many options!
I started out shooting in aperture mode, but I didn’t have the control to properly expose my subjects, rather than exposing the background correctly and underexposing my subjects. I switched to manual and was very pleased to see how many great photos I got, considering the sun was practically straight above us (the worst kind of daylight for photos). Maybe I am learning a thing or two!
I’m going to put tons of photos in this post, but many of them are just different edits of the same photo.
Yay for getting them both to look at me! No photo merging in this one. The first edit includes some slight curve adjustments and then a modified Nelly Nero Summer Vintage. The black and white is a modification of PW Heartland. I prefer the b&w on this photo.
My edit (curve adjustment, color pop, white balance adjustment, white balance adjustment) is the first one. The second one is a modified Nelly Nero Spring Melody and the last is modified Summer Vintage. I don’t like the strange colored sky in the spring version but I do like the ‘fresh’ feeling it has. I love that they have a very similar stance in this photo.
Modified springtime melody in the first and modified summer vintage in the second (closest to what it really looked like). I had to walk backwards to get this, but I think it turned out super cute. I had my kit lens on the entire time and I like the distortion I got with the smaller focal length.
This one reminds me of the scene in Titanic (modified summer vintage).
Modified summer vintage. Difficult to take these shots because it was a drop off on the other side of the fence. I also didn’t want them copying mommy and going where they shouldn’t.
Loved how tightly he was hugging daddy. Modified summer vintage. 
This was a tough photo to edit because it was right after I switched to manual mode. It was really underexposed and had some harsh shadows. I did all of my normal adjustments and then used the Range Compression layer on PW Heartland action to get rid of the shadows. Then I modified the Heartland action to get the B&W version. (First is straight of camera.)
He was being shy with some other hikers. Stronger summer vintage, but still modified.
Charlotte loved the fence and I was trying to get a different perspective. I love the look on her face.
Charlotte found a hole in the ground and decided she wanted to blow into it. Literally blow into it. So goofy!
And this was how she looked walking back to the car. 
These photos were my favorite for the day. It captures their personalities perfectly. The first one Cooper is like ‘huh?’ and Charlotte has the air of ‘I can’t be bothered right now.’. The second one is perfect because Charlotte is very intense, emotional, and has her thumb in her mouth. So her. And Cooper is off in his own little world completely oblivious to the rest of us. So him.
And because I spend so much time shooting my children, I rarely challenge myself to take photos of other things. Here are my attempts at taking photos of some of the nature on our walk. Considering this is only the fifth or so time I’ve photographed flowers, I’m impressed with how they came out (even before the edits). In these I used a variety of actions from both PW (modified fresh and colorful) and Nelly Nero, either Candy Floss, Gold Flake, Summer Vintage, or Spring Melody. All modified to my liking. Again these were all taken with my kit lens zoomed to 105mm.
