Say Hi to the New Family Photographer

Are you waving? *Waving back* You got it, it's me!

Every girl has a photography phase and my phase was in high school when I was living in Japan. I remember being at the park down the street and putting a dab of lip gloss on the lens of a disposable camera to create a dreamy effect after reading the tip in a magazine.

Fast forward a little over a decade and I started taking pictures in large quantities. I had gotten married, become a military wife and had my first baby. Jeff deployed shortly after Kailie was born and it was my job, not only to record my daughter for our memory, but so he could see her grow through those pictures thousands of miles away.

I started to have fun capturing her personality, different angle and poses and even entered her in a cloth diaper photo contest or two. Yet I still got professional photos done of her while he was away and when he was home so we would have gorgeous, frame-able keepsakes to treasure and display on the walls.

Then I get the ((dangerous)) feeling I often get...I can do that. If I had the right equipment, took some classes, experimented. Finally I got a starter DSLR for Christmas this past season followed by Photoshop CS5 for Valentine's Day and now I am eager to explore the real art of photography from aperture to ISO, white balance and shutter speed.

I am ready to toss Auto out the window and I have started this week to jump in, feet first, into manual mode. It has this thrill that feels risky and dangerous, yet puts me in control of the potential my photos can achieve. The only downside is that I will be the only one to blame when photos do not come out right, but I think that is a fine compromise for the great shots I look forward to capture in the years to come.

I have been reading about and been inspired by other photographers and bloggers lately that really pushed me to start exploring. We even got family pictures taken last weekend, which really got me excited to stop putting it off and just start. I cannot wait to get those in a couple of weeks after they've been edited-- hopefully you saw a sneak peek on Facebook. 

Below are some shots from my first day using manual mode at the park today. These are all completely un-edited and you can see the different combinations of settings I played around with. So much to learn, but I am pretty pleased with my first shot at it (and the more I get a hang of Photoshop, the prettier I can make my shots with some post-process editing)!

A little too bright

A little dark

Now we're headed somewhere

Good balance, but I lost him!

So what do you think?