Refurbished Hobby to Capture that Cutie Pie

My little girl is 7 weeks old this week, which means I basically haven’t slept in 7 weeks. It’s not all bad though, sometimes she’ll sleep for four hour stretches and its luxury. Other times she wakes up every hour and wants to eat.  That’s pretty much when I feel like I’m being tortured.  The thing is she’s sooo dang cute I can’t even be mad about it.  Being a new mom has its ups and downs. No sleep would be the downside, but the upside is when my daughter looks up at me with those big little eyes and talks… And by talking I mean cooing and gurgling at me. It’s the cutest thing to watch. She’s inspired a new hobby in me, and by new hobby I mean old hobby taken out, dusted off and ironed out. Photography is a lot different today than it was when I was a kid. Twenty years ago photography to me was taking my box 35mm camera and snapping photos of the sunset. And I'd never know how the photo's would turn out until the film got developed. I'm sure my daughter will one day respond "What? You had to wait 2-5 days to look at your pictures?" Today photography is all about Photoshop and digital image clarity. My camera today gives much better image clarity than my old 35mm did back when I was a kid. And it's more fun to mess around with Photoshop than spend hours in a black room developing photos and hoping whatever I shot would turn out great (not that I spent time in a black room, but I had my fantasies that one day I would).

My daughter has become the subject, or rather the victim of all my rigorous picture taking.  She’s now used to the clicking of the camera and actually gives me smiles and coos on cue, instead of looking strangely at this weird black thing in my hands. The problem with being the photo taker is there’s never any pictures of me or even my whole family. So it’s awesome when a third party volunteers to take some portraits of all of us (thanks Trudy!). It’s also nice because my husband complains less when someone else is taking the photos. Usually when I’m the one taking the pictures he usually mutters something about he had to go and ‘marry a film major photography person.’ I had fun playing around with Photoshop and was really happy with the results. Their professional quality and I may just blow all my savings on printing these puppies out. Their way good, I’ve missed my calling in life, or rather… may have just found it. Trudy took the first photo below, and I took the liberty of photoshopping it (the second photo). And yes, there's nothing sexier than a man holding a baby!

BEFORE

AFTER

Its amazing what digital photos allow you to do! Below is a quick hue edit that adds a little something more to the photo. Granted not all photo's look great with this effect.

Below are a few of the photos I’ve taken, as you can see she is just too adorable to not photograph. I won’t post too many at the risk of being one of those parents who can’t stop showing photos of her kid to the general public. Haha. But these are my favorites of the thousands I’ve taken of her already. The first is just the raw photo, no edits. The second I made the colors a little softer.

     
       Another thing I’m great at is putting pictures to music for special occasions like weddings or other random reasons for needing to put photos to music. It makes it fun to watch and creates a mood to go with the photos. Here is just a little tidbit of what the videos look like. 

All in all my creative side is coming out now that I have more spare time to think between the feedings and diaper changes (naturally!) I'd love to start working on projects for hire, its something I love to do and its real easy to photo shop with a sleeping babe in your arms. It just takes one hand! I have been learning to do a lot of things one-handed lately :)