Day 115: Hike at the wetlands

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.