Stuff & Things

First, the Stuff~


~My tradeshow is in 2 days and I'm kinda wiggin' out.  I'm excited.  I'm nervous.  
More importantly, I'm trying to decide what to wear.  How does a 30ish, worn out, mother of four manage to look artsy and hip for 8 hours while still wearing sensible shoes?


~I launched my new photography website yesterday.  I've spent hours and hours earlier this week putting the "finishing touches" on it...yet I could re-do the whole thing if I look at it long enough.  I built my site on Creative Motion Design which has been fabulous and I'll be posting about that experience soon.  
If you want to check it out just click the Inspired by christy link at the top of the page (or the screenshot below).  And be sure to send over any comments or suggestions...but be honest!  I can handle the truth!  
Here's my splash page.  That's so cool that I can say "Here's my splash page":)

~ Princess "pretendidly" spit in Wild Child's cereal this week....which then resulted in Wild Child football tacking Princess and knocking her to the ground on our hard tile floor...which resulted in a huge knot on her head...then later that evening Rebel "accidently" knocked Wild Child with a mega huge tree branch (that was hidden under the bed?) and busted open Wild Child's forehead.  I didn't really need that this week:)

~ Mary Sue from Memory Round My Neck finally caved in to my harassment and had Heather (Rita's lil sis) build her a logo for her custom jewelry business.  It's beautiful and I wanted to show it off:

Heather designed the logo & text, I added the striped background.  I just love stuff like this~

Speaking of jewelry...now on to the Things~

I'm building Mary Sue's spring catalog so we took advantage of some sunshine last weekend and took some photos of her jewels at a park.  I thought it would be a nice change to all the indoor shots.  But I rarely take photos of things so, this may sound silly, but I was really nervous about taking these shots!

I like the emotion and drama that can be added to people pictures...I have no clue how to do that to jewelry!

I decided to stay pretty conservative with these, nothin' fancy, and just did some some basic adjustments.

Here's some before & afters...basically my edits consisted of light sharpening, lightening shadows and adding an S-Curve to pop the colors.  

 Before:

After:

If you've never done an S-Curve before it's pretty simple.  Go to Enhance - Adjust Color - Adjust Color Curves...then you adjust the sliders to make an "S" which usually does a pretty good job popping the colors.

Before:

After:

This next one was a hard one...I chose a background that was way too busy but the necklace is so pretty I think the final version will look good in the catalog:

After:

I'm so glad that I did this little project...I think I rely on textures or actions so much to achieve the "look" that I'm wanting...I need to sharpen my technical skills so that I can work on any photograph, not just the portraits.

But...of course...I couldn't leave the park without taking at least a few shots of my favorite things...people!

I got this cute shot of Mary Sue's kiddos and applied the same basic edits to just pop the colors...

Before:

After:

And Rebel gave me the typical "look"...which is just fine with me...

Before:

After:

I used a few textures on this one and Coffeeshop Color Tints Blue option.  When I'm wanting the "Mom, get your camera out of my face" look, Rebel always delivers!


I'll be sure to post next week all the tradeshow happenings!