Wedding Bells

This week's theme is Wedding Bells!

Since I just shot my cousin's wedding I thought this theme would be a fun one to participate in.

Of course I was scared out of my shorts to actually be responsible for someone's entire wedding album, but with a bride this beautiful, how could I go wrong?

Check out the I Heart Faces website to be inspired by all the Wedding entries this week!

Fix It Friday!

Here's my contribution to Fix-It Friday at I Heart Faces.

I've actually not "fixed" anything...just had fun changing it around.  

With a guy as cute as this one there's nothing to fix!

Here's the original:

I worked in photoshop elements and softened the skin just a bit with Coffeeshop PowderRoom2 - and brightened the eyes just a little, not much.  

- then I ran the Coffeeshop Vintage action on it. 

- then I added a texture

- then I just kept clicking on the blend modes and playing around with opacity of the texture

(sorry, I wasn't keeping track...didn't think I would actually end up posting this!)

Here's my edit:

You can check out all the great edits at I Heart Faces!

Let's Hear It For The Boys!

Here's my entries for the I Heart Faces weekly Photo Challenge.  This week, in honor of Father's Day, the theme was Let's Hear It For The Boys!

You'd think with 3 male creatures I'd have archives full of fabulous boy shots.  I spent lots of time last week looking for the perfect boy shot and got nothin'!  Then this weekend I snapped this one of Wild Child in one of his calmer moments and just absolutely love it. 

 It's completely technically wrong...it's very noisy, his hair is "blown" out with no detail, the sun flare was not intentional and the color was realllly bad. 

All that aside, isn't he just beautiful?  (please don't tell him I called him beautiful!) 

I snapped another technically incorrect photo of my brother and his dog but it makes me happy to look at it.  This one is for the Adults category.

If you haven't checked out the I Heart Faces site you need to take a look. It's a great place for inspiration and even amateurs like myself can join in the fun!

You can head straight to their site by clicking their cute little button...

Hair Help

I was browsing thru some photos from earlier this year and I started noticing a similar fashion look my creatures have been sporting.

Really...do you think we need a little help in the hair department?  

Maybe just a trim?

How could I not have noticed this??  

These photos were taken in public places.  

Places where other humans actually saw my children and their hair.

Humans who knew that those children belonged to me!

OMG!  Where is their mother?!?!

You Need A Blog

Do you have family or friends who live far away?

Do you feel it's your duty to bless the world with photos of your adorable, yet slightly annoying offspring?

Do you have a special interest or hobby that you just can't get enough of?

Do you have a business that you want to let people know about?

Do you like to talk uninterrupted?

If you answered yes to any of my extremely detailed and intelligent questions then You Need A Blog.

Sooooo many people have told me they'd love to start a blog but were intimidated by the whole thing.  I'm  here to prove that starting and maintaining a blog is within reach for even the most technologically challenged of us.

First, the Disclaimer:  I am not nor have ever and will not ever propose myself to be a blog expert.  

I can simply show you what I did and you can take it from there.  

First you'll need to choose a blog host.  There's lots of them out there and I think the most well-known are Blogger and Wordpress.  I haven't tried Wordpress but heard they're very good and have lots of flexibility.  I started mine thru Blogger, it's FREE and it's basic.  You can find the Blogger home page here.  It looks like this:

When you sign up for your account and provide an email you just follow the steps from there.  It guides you right thru the process.  There were some things I didn't understand when starting mine so I just left those items on the "default". Can't go wrong with default!  

The fun part is putting together the "style" of your page.  The colors, graphics, photos...whatever you want to make your blog fit your personality.  This is also the Major Time Sucking part of the process.  It's literally endless the possibilities of styles available for your blog and I completely ignored the needs of my family for hours on end  just browsing thru websites looking at all the templates and playing around with the colors on my own template.  If you want more than the basic blogger template then check out this site.   It has tons of FREE templates to easily copy and download right into blogger.  

Of course it's hard for me to imagine a blog without lots of PICTURES.  You can load pictures into your blog from the very same screen that you type the text and just upload them like you upload any other attachment.  You can even choose the size you want to display the picture...although my opinion is bigger is better!  A photo like this one is just screaming to be BIG!!

You can also link photos from photobucket or flickr.  They're both free photo hosting sites that allow you to upload your pictures a little larger than normal.  You really need to take an hour or two and play around with the site and just have fun.  Don't worry about messing it up or doing it wrong.  Anything can be deleted or fixed or whatever it is you need.  I've experimented with lots of templates and posts that I "published" then deleted just to see how they'd look. 

I do have one piece of advice:  when you finally get your blog template looking just how you want it download the template to your computer!  There's a link on the Layout page of blogger under the Edit HTML tab that says very clearly to Download Full Template.  By doing this you can experiment with new templates without worrying about losing your favorite.  I really really really really wish someone had given me that advice when I started my blog!   Let's just say I learned it the hard way:)

If you're not ready to dive into the whole blog thing at least there's hope that you can still enjoy reading other people's blogs.  I tend to stalk photography related sites and have picked up some fabulous tips.

Coffeeshop taught me how to do this cool, grungy thing...

Erin taught me how to defog my photos with just a few clicks in photoshop elements....

I downloaded this funky template at House of 3....

and Pioneer Woman has great FREE actions that helped me make this lovely lady even lovelier...

My friend Rockin' Soccer Mama just started her blog today and is already adding templates and pictures and totally rockin' it up. Us busy moms (and everyone else) seriously need our creative outlets!

So go create and share your wisdom with the world~

Roughin' It

Due to some intense peer pressure (you know who you are!), my family decided to go camping last weekend.

All 6 of us.

Plus 1 tall, hungry nephew.

In a tent.

With the dog!

In case you haven't caught on, I wasn't exactly thrilled about the prospect of becoming one with nature.  I'm not what you'd call a nature lover.  But with 4 boys and only 2 girls, we were bound to lose a battle sometime.  So I put on my game-face and prepared myself for 3 days of The Great Outdoors.  

I was prepared for lots of this...

and of course for this...

and I was even ready for this...

But unfortunately, I had not quite prepared myself for this...

These were "the facilities" of our campground. I use the word campground loosely. They provided the ground and we paid to camp there. What you can't see in this photo is the teeny, tiny little hose hooked up to the black barrels that held the water. (The shower was described as "solar heated" by the "campground". I'm running out of quotes.) That teeny tiny hose let out a teeny tiny trickle of water for us to shower with. And if you tried real hard you could see right thru those boards and figure out who was showering. I took my shower right as it was getting dark! I spared you the pleasure of having to look at the lovely port-a-potty that sat right beside the shower.

You can imagine my excitement when I realized that was my fate for the next 3 days.

But then we had a few moments like this...

and these...

and this one was really nice.

And even a non-nature-lover like myself was very impressed with God's creation at Hocking Hills.

The waterfalls were gorgeous and there were huge caves everywhere. The kids found a cave way back in the trail with the waterfall running over and decided to do what kids do....jump in!

You can see in the above photos Rebel goes in first (man he needs a tan!) then Wild Child runs thru...then he falls...then Overachiever laughs his head off when his brother fell in the water! It was kinda funny.

The hiking was great and of course the kids were in Heaven...there were hills to climb, rocks to throw, water to jump in and neat things to walk on.

Old Man's Cave was so cool. I still can't comprehend how they got all those steps built in the middle of nowhere!

(I have no idea what they're looking at!)

So overall, I survived my first venture roughin' it and will even admit to enjoying myself a bit. Basically, as long as this crew was happy...

...then this one is happy. (yes, that's happiness written all over my smoke filled face!)