If you are looking for an amazing giveaway, visit the Inspire Me Baby site! Kelsey Anderson Photography is giving away a mentoring session! If you haven't seen her work, you must!  It's beautiful! I love it! Wish me luck! I hope I win!  Click Here to check out Kelsey's images!
Picture
 
Check it out here.
 
Picture
I wish I could afford to go to the Advanced Workshop in Dallas, Texas in November. It looks awesome. I posted some information below but for more information go Here.

You will learn: > Tricks and tips for great detail shots and posing clients.

> Amazing ways to help you understand lighting and how to make your clients look fantastic!
  • Natural lighting techniques for both indoors and outdoors
  • Off Camera Flash
  • Basic Studio Lighting
> Great tips on editing your photos!
  • Learn fast and easy Photoshop tricks
  • Color Correcting
  • Retouching faces
  • Use Photoshop actions to your best ability
  • Optimizing images for the web and printing 
> Workflow lessons to save you tons of time!
  • Lightroom bulk processing
  • Using presets and local adjustments
  • Creating Slideshows
  • Optimizing prints for web and press printing
> Ideas to give your business a jump start!
  • Learn fantastic marketing secrets to stand out from the crowd.
  • Forms and contracts you need to do business.
  • Balancing family with a start up business.
  • Blogging and what it can do for you.
You will get:
  • High-end magazine style photo shoots with adult and kid models. Great for building that portfolio!
  • Networking time with other photographers.
  • Your questions answered about the equipment you need or want to purchase.
  • Amazing door prizes and goodies! Over $700 worth of products will be given away and over $150 of AMAZING goodies in swag bags!!
  • Awesome girl time…  Discount shopping with Arlington Camera plus the most super fun surprises!!
  • Three instructors along with some amazing guest photographers you’ll enjoy meeting.
  • A light breakfast, yummy lunch, beverages and snacks.
  • Did we mention pampering?? (That’s a part of the surprises!)

Who Should Attend: Women who…
  • have a good understanding of their camera settings
  • are ready to go pro or have recently started a photography business and want to take it to the next level
  • want to better their photography and learn as much as they can fast.
  • want to build their portfolio with amazing photos
  • need to learn how to promote their business or re-think their business plan
  • want to learn more Photoshop or Lightroom tricks for their editing
  • need a day to themselves and creative inspiration to help turn their dreams a reality
If you get to attend, please let me know how it was so I can live vicariously through you!
 
I have had a lot more free time recently and still trying to catch up on photo editing from the past month. I am so happy to have a new little nephew named Jenson. I am bummed that I didn't get any newborn pictures of the little guy, but I did get some pictures of him at a family gathering a few weeks ago. He was about 7 weeks old in these pictures.
Picture
I love how he is smilling in his sleep in the picture.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Isn't he such a cutie? Can't wait to see him grow up and get more adorable pictures of him! I'm a lucky aunt!
 
Ashtyn is an adorable little girl of some friends who turned two on August 8. Well, she is currently in a shy stage so convincing her to let me take pictures was extremely challenging. Luckily, I had a lollipop to give her which helped for oh 5 minutes or so. We met at Sar Ko Par park in Lenexa, KS. She loved going down the slide. She's such a cutie! Enjoy your sneak peek!
Picture
Picture
 
I had the opportunity to photograph my husband's cousin's family. What a cute family they are with two adorable little girls! We met by Potter's Lake on the University of Kansas Campus in Lawrence, KS. Of course I love Lawrence as I went there for undergrad and graduate school. I didn't have this camera at the time so it was nice being back to get a few shots on campus as well as some of this beautiful family. Check out some campus photos and a sneak peak of the Woods Family Shoot!
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
 
Our friends, Aaron and Alexis, got married June 26 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a long and eventful drive there. We left Friday night and ran into a bunch of storms and tornadoes near the Iowa/Minnesota border. So we ended up stopping at a the Diamond Joe's casino for 2 hours to wait the storm out. I'm not a huge gambler and neither is Erik. But my father-in-law was in heaven. He loves the slot machines, so he didn't mind the little detour. I tried to like gambling but I lost $5 in a minute. What a waste of money :(  So we didn't get to the hotel till 11:30 p.m. at night. It was a long day. 

The morning before the wedding we went to eat and walk around downtown which was fun because I had never been to Minneapolis. We saw the Twins stadium and the Mary Tyler Moore statue (unfortunately didn't have my camera at this point). Then we went back to the hotel so I could get my camera and walked down to the Stone Arch Bridge by the river and the Mill City Museum to practice some manual shooting. I took a ton of pictures but here are a few. These are all SOOC or straight out of the camera. It's a beautiful area but it was HOT out.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Stone Arch Bridge
Picture
Mill City Museum
Picture
Train inside the Mill City Museum
There was an ice cream truck there and I stopped to get some water and a popsicle before walking back to the hotel. Check out some of my first shots using the manual mode on my DSLR camera.
Picture
Got a yummy popsicle at the ice cream truck.
The wedding and reception were at Nicollet Island Pavilion, which was a very nice venue. It was a little warm out but the ceremony wasn't too long. I got some good pictures of the ceremony and the wedding details! The program fan was a great idea. Enjoy the pictures!
Picture
Picture
Picture
 
Just got some amazing Lightroom presets from Kelsey Anderson Photography! Ever since I found her site, I loved looking at her pictures. So I bought some of her presets and decided to test them out on some old photos of mine. Check them out! Also to buy Kelsey's Lightroom Presets go to her blog.
Picture
Kelsey Anderson's Flamingo Preset
Picture
Kelsey Anderson's Black & White Preset
 
The other day I played around with Back Button Focusing, which is basically where you change the focus button to a back button rather than being on the shutter button. For information on Back Button Focus for Canons visit this site.  I learned about this from www.ClickinMoms.com, which is an awesome site. I've been having trouble locking my focus, so the ladies on there suggested to try this. I'm still getting used to it but need to try it out on a human being. My only issue is trying not to move my camera a little after I hit the back button and then pushing down the shutter button. Otherwise, I get some blur which I do not want of course. I want sharp pictures! I took pictures of my dogs yesterday using it. Cooper was an amazing model for me. Miley not so much. She just wanted to play and sniff the back yard. All of these were taken in Manual mode with an aperture of 2.5 and a shutter speed of 1/80 sec and an ISO of 200.  I also used custom white balance but feel like it wasn't accurate enough. So I had to lighten these up a bit in Photoshop because they came out a little dark SOOC. Here are a few of my favorites.
Picture
Cooper is so proper. Laying in the grass is one of his favorite things to do.
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
The only good picture I got of Miley
 
I finally had some time to play with some photoshop actions. I used a picture from my recent shoot of 1 year old Emma. I show you the before and after of the photos. The before shot has a few touch ups from Lightroom.  For the after picture, I used Coffee Shops Perfect Portrait Action and followed the directions to whiten the eyes, brighten the eyes, pop the color, and create a vignette. I also used the patch tool to remove the slobber from her mouth. Here are the Before and After pictures:
Picture
I think it turned out pretty well. There are still a few more things I could do to enhance the picture such as edit out the fly away hair and edit out the distracting piece of grass on the top corner but its still a cute picture of Emma!