Epcot Butterfly Garden Favorite

Last week, we were very blessed to take a great vacation to Florida. We flew out Monday and returned on Saturday. I was very excited about the whole Disney thing, but my favorite spot is Epcot's Butterfly Garden. My family went on a ride and let me just take my sweet time in there. I was a little disappointed because I had to leave my 70-200 2.8 lens back home due to it being in the shop to be fixed. But, now that I think about it, it would have been really heavy to carry around when I'm trying to have fun! These were taken with my 55-200 5.6 and I am really happy the way they came out: I will have another post following this one of all the butterflies photos I took. 

Blog Board Try- I like it!

Actually, no, I LOVE IT!!!

My Son and His Special Day

My Beautiful Daughter

My daughter was lounging around in the kitchen one day being a typical teen with her cell phone, ipod and whatever else they do now days...love it! Learning to capture the small things in life : )
Here it is in black and white:

Edit Me- Week 2

What a cutie to edit this week! I've been reading and looking into newborn photography to see if its something I would be interested in getting into and adding to my portfolio. Very timely image to edit.

What I did:

• Cropped in CS5
• Auto contrast
• Ran Pure's "Fix All That Red, Baby" & "Haze Baby" & "It's All About the Bling, Baby"
• Len's flare in the window
• MCP's "Resized and Sharpened" for the web

Here's another edit- just cropped differently

Edit Me- Week 1

This is my first post of the Edit Me Challenge. Perfect because I really wanted to work on my editing skills this year. Being a part of the Good to WOW challenge showed me how helpful the blog challenges can be! I look at my photos from a year ago and can see quite a bit of difference- but most importantly, learning to shoot in complete manual mode was the real turning point- even in manual white balance using the Kelvin settings! Love it. My goal this year is to take my photography even further by learning more and editing without over doing it and continue to build my portfolio to eventually open a business.
Here's my edit:

• Opened in CS5, cropped, ran "It's All About the Bling" from Pure Actions
• Then, ran "Mini Fusion" by MCP, bumped up the contrast in the action
• Used the cloning tool for the glare on his cute little face
• Opened in Lightroom to burn the edges and a little saturation on face

My Heart

2011 Year in Review of a few photos of my children- I just found a TON of free story boards and have been playing around with them- wow! I think I may post more!