Callaloo Soup

Capturing Natural Smiles from Your Kids in Photos

I'm not a fan of posed photos. I try to avoid them as much as possible! What I want to capture is real life, as it happens. When Kieran is engrossed in doing something, I don't want him to stop to give me a cheesy grin, I want to capture the real smile or other expression on his face. Here's how I do that.

Catch him in action

This requires preparedness. Make sure you have your camera handy, and set to sports mode or a fast shutter speed. Now wait until your child is engaged in a fast moving or fun activity. You will need to take several photos, but I guarantee you will end up with some pricelss shots.

Like this one:

 

or this one:

 

Start a conversation

On the rare occasions that I take a posed photo, this is what I get.

Look familiar? That is the fakest smile ever!

To avoid the "this is my cheesy camera smile" phenomenon, I start engaging him in conversation. It could be about the activity we're currently doing, or just any topic I know he will enjoy. As we chat, I keep snapping. Invariably I end up with a perfect natural smile.

This was the scenario when I took Back-to-School photos last week.

First some monkeying around:

Then as we chatted about the fist day of school and other things he relaxed and I got this prize

Play a game

If all else fails, there's always peekaboo! At five Kieran will still laugh uproriously at this game, as evidenced by this little photo session next to a tree.

Just say no to posed photos! Help your friends do the same by pinning the image below.

 

Do you have any tips for getting gorgeous candid photos of your kids?

P.S. Want more great photography tips? Check out Real Life Photography, an e-book by Rebecca Cooper

How to Print Instagram Photos at Home

With the Holiday season coming up, and everyone getting together, I bet lots photos will be taken with camera phones. If you've always thought that's a pity because you then can't scrapbook them, let me reassure you! Lately the majority of my photos of everyday life are taken with my phone. It's the camera I have handy at all times, plus I am an Instagram addict. Once I figured out how to print those photos I was a happy camper!

Here's how you can do that too.

Access your photos.

I started out using an online application called instaport.me to get my photos from Instagram and onto my hard drive.

Click the image to see larger.

You log in with your Instagram account, and then the application grabs all your photos and exports them in a zip file that you can save to your hard drive.

Pros

1. Quick and painless

2. Many options for selecting photos e.g. you can choose to only download photos in a specific date range, or those with a specific hash tag, only your last 10 or 60 photos, or even just photos that you liked.

Cons

Photos are low resolution, so not the best for printing larger than 2x2. I used photos that I printed that way on this layout.

 

Once I realised the downside of this method, I opted for downloading my photos directly off my phone storage because those were higher resolution (I can print up to 8x8 with those). I simply used the Samsung software for my phone to access the storage and copy the photos to my hard drive. I use an Android phone, but I know that iPhone users can do the same using Apple Photostream .

Printing Your Photos at Home

This is what I do on my Windows 7 PC.

Option a: I simply open the photos I want to use in Photoshop, and resize them before laying them out on a new document. I originally designed a template for doing this, but found it was easier to just drag and drop my photos onto a blank A4 (letter) document and then print out. I try to print lots of photos at once to save on photo paper. Like I said above, I can print up to 8x8 with this option.

Option b: I also discovered that by using the Printer Wizard on my computer (in Windows) I can easily print 4x4 Instagrams onto a 4x6 photo sheet. To access the photo wizard open up the folder with your JPG images, select the ones you want to print, then select Print from the horizontal menu bar.

Once the wizard opens, select your paper size as 4x6 and make sure that the "resize to fit" box is unchecked.

This works really well with my Epson printer. You can play with yours to see if you have the same options.

And there you have it! Do you scrap your Instagram or camera phone photos? How do you get them printed?

We Got Some Snow & A Photo Comparison

I'm finishing up my Nokia Lumia 925 trial, and as luck would have it we got some surprise snow! So I took a bit of a photo walk this morning to test out the phone. I decided to compare it to my DSLR as well as my smart phone. I already know it is better than my current phone, but I was curious to see how it held up against the big camera.

These shots are straight out of the camera, I only sharpened the images for online use.

DSLR with the 18-55 kit lens

 

Canon with 50mm 1.8 lens

 

Nokia Lumia 925 in close up mode

 

And just for fun here is a photo taken with my phone: The Samsung Galaxy Ace

Yeah, no contest there right? I think Santa needs to get on this stat!

While I think the colour from the Canon is somewhat better, the Nokia photo is excellent! Not surprising with the Zeiss lens and 8.7 megapixels. And it is actually brighter than the DSLR photos.

The camera is also reputed for its performance in low light. Stay tuned for more on that.

Shot Around Town | Nokia Lumia 920 Trial

Yesterday afternoon we spent a pleasant couple of hours rambling around the town center, after having fortified ourselves with artisanal ice-cream! I pulled out the Nokia Lumia 920 Smartphone and took some shots as we walked.

My view as I enjoyed my Salted Caramel and Tiramisu scoops:

The large courtyard at the municipal library:

Above the entrance of the library. I love looking up to take photos:

There are some very very tiny streets here in town:

It's not a French town if there isn't a fountain crowned with flowers:

My favourite shot is this one of an old advertisement. It's at least 60 years old:

Yeah, I'm still enjoying using this phone camera!

I Can't Believe These Photos Came From a Smart Phone!

The kind folks at Nokia Connects reached out to me to ask if I'd like to try out the camera on the Nokia Lumia 920 Smartphone . I said an emphatic yes of course, since I am now a confirmed addict of phone-o-graphy. All accounts I read online pointed to this being an awesome camera, as it boasts a Carl Zeiss lens!

I was immediately impressed by the photos. That is once I got over my amazement at the size of the phone itself. It's a big one! It was easy to get to the camera itself and start clicking away. Here's some proof: some of my favourite shots so far.  These photos are unedited.......

Outdoors

Indoors

 

(Technically this was outdoors, but it was a well shaded terrace)

Close up

I'm still putting the camera, plus the video function through its paces, so I'll be back with another post in about a week!

So far though, I can say that it is way better than the camera on my current phone.

 

I'm sharing a free printable photo checklist today

Hi friends! A quick post to point you in the direction of a free printable checklist for summer photos.

Last week when I hosted at write.click.scrapbook, I shared some ideas for photos to take this summer. My brain went into overdrive, so I compiled even more ideas into a printable list.

You can head over there to get the link to download a free PDF printable in letter format.

Happy clicking!

 

Jumping into 2013

This month has been very fulfilling so far. I actually worry that I might already have taken too much on, but all of it makes my heart sing so I am just going with that feeling!

After much reflection I signed up for the 2013 edition of Ali Edwards' One Little Word Class at Big Picture Classes. I felt like I really needed something concrete to guide me in keeping my word present this year. Today I finally started putting my album together.

I decided to go for a very colourful album. I need more colour in my life! Of course it will all be against a neutral backdrop. Let's not get too crazy now.

About ten days ago I was incredibly lucky to win a place in Xanthe Berkeley's A Journey class - all about creating time capsules with video. I am so excited about this, as I have only dabbled a bit in video. I love her videos, they are such an excellent way to record a bit of daily life. Here's one she did this month

 

RANDOM HAPPENINGS - Jan 2013 from xanthe berkeley on Vimeo.

I am so inspired! In the class we will be working on four projects over the next 12 weeks. I have already thought up many more though. I am hoping to finally do something with the video clips we have of Kieran from his birth as one of my projects.

To start the class Xanthe has us fill out a pledge, a way to share our committment to the projects.

Watch this space for videos coming soon!

Finally, I wanted to give you a heads up about 30 Days of Lists. Have you heard about this project? Since March 2011, Amy and Kam have been leading this listing challenge: they provide prompts for daily lists for 30 consecutive days. Fun! The next edition will be in March and registration opens very soon. In the meantime you can sign up for the newsletter, to get all the information in your inbox.

Yes, I think that's quite a bit for this month!

Favourites from my October Photo a Day Project

All year I've been seeing people take part in the Photo a Day challenge hosted by Fat Mum Slim. I've really wanted to try it, but you know how I am with dailies. Plus I don't have Instagram (I know!) But I took another look again when October started, and saw that I could also tweet my photos and upload them to Facebook, so I took the plunge.

I am happy to say that I am keeping up! Here are my favourites from the month so far

 

October 2nd - Lunchtime Play

October 5th - A Boy and His Shadow

October 10th - Sheer Joy

October 18th - Smiles at Sunrise

October 15th - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

October 22nd - Our playground

I'm already gearing up to do it again in November, and maybe I'll even join the 21st century and have Instagram by then.

Now I just hope that posting about it here won't jinx me! If you want to see all my photos, they are in this album on the Callaloo Soup Facebook page. You'll be able to see the photos without liking the page, but feel free to Like the page if the spirit moves you!

Have you ever done the Fat Mum Slim or any daily photo challenge?

Tuesday To Do | How to Take Brighter Project Photos in-Camera

Hello! I know that last week I promised you another washi tape tutorial, but sadly our weather has been grey and dim of late and unfortunately my step by step photos aren't as clear as I would like. As I was gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair, I remembered that I had a little photography trick stashed away to share with you.

We have big full length windows and white walls in this house, so usually I am able to get wonderful bright photos of my craft projects or Etsy items. However sometimes depending on the time of day, I do get some ugly shadows in my usual photo shoot spot. Like this

 

I didn't want to have to spend a lot of time editing these shots, but I really wanted to get these photos taken so I could spruce up the shop a bit. Then a little voice whispered "bounce the light". I've read before about using something white to bounce light back onto objects, have you? Well it is simpler than I thought.

I quickly looked around and grabbed the first thing I saw, a large white canvas, and propped it up to the right of the magazine (note, it occured to me to take a photo of the set up later on, that's why it's a different magazine).

Then I took the shot again

I couldn't believe the difference! Not only are the shadows less noticable, but the colours are brighter, and the background is whiter (that sounds like a laundry detergent commercial!)

So repeat after me "Bounce the light". I think a good surface to use for this would be some white foam board. It's cheap, light and can be stored easily. You can easily apply this technique to taking photos of your craft projects or scrapbook pages too!

Real Life Photography | A Review from Me

I just finished up reading the new e-book Real.Life.Photography by Rebecca Cooper published through Ella Publishing.

I'll just go straight ahead and say that I loved it! It's no big surprise since Rebecca was a frequent contributer to Simple Scrapbooks, as well as one of my team mates at Write.Click.Scrapbook, so we share very similar philosophies regarding scrapping and photography.

What I loved most about the book was Rebecca's practical approach to helping you capture photos of everyday life. Sure, she includes technical information as well, such as her camera settings for the photos in the book, but mostly she explained ways to capture real life as it happens. I am sure that we all have those moments we wished we were able to better capture, this book will definitely help you do that!

You'll get simple tips such as making sure your camera is not only handy, but also ready to fire, to more details like how to best use available light, and how to go about capturing relationships. Rebecca finishes up the book by covering how to use editing software to enhance your photos or correct slight imperfections. She covers simple editing techniques for correcting lighting and colour, and shows examples of photos enhanced with actions from Addy Lane.

The great thing about Real.Life.Photography is that you can start using the techniques right away. I wasn't even finished reading yet when I took these shots of Kieran.

I enhanced both shots using the Simple Fixes: Actions for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements which I bought bundled with Real.Life.Photography. These are the same actions that rebecca talks about in the book. Here's a look at those two photos straight out the camera.

I ran the Simply Boost action on both photos to make the colours more vibrant, as well as running the Simply Lighten action on the left photo as it was a little dark.

As we're heading off on vacation soon I am looking forward to using more of the tips in this book to capture lots of family photos!

If you want to get this book and the action set  (which is available for both Photoshop AND Elements), Ella has a special ending today for 20% off your purchase when you buy both items and use the code PHOTOFIX. I highly recommend them!