Take a lesson from a three year old, If you do not push the boundaries now and then you will probably miss the best view! 

The light was perfect, the kids were amazing. An afternoon in the park with the Fortunati family was a perfect way to spend the golden hour. We all piled into the car and headed off to the park. With blanket in hand we found a perfect little spot for family portraits.

Erin: 'what photo shop or photo software do you recommend for regular people like me?'

Before I get to Erin's question I thought I would go over a before and after of her munchkin, Brody. When I was taking this image I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted the image to be focused on Brody and I wanted to get him blowing the 'wishes'. I wanted to capture them flying through the air. When I opened this image I was thrilled because not only was the depth of field and light quality exactly what I wanted, but I managed to capture two dandelion seeds floating through the air. I took the following steps to create the final image: First, I cropped the image, I really wanted the image to focus on Brody and those lips and the dandelion so I cropped out the distracting red stripes on his shirt. Then I adjusted the white balance, the original image was taken in the shadows and as a result it looks a little blue, so I warmed it up a bit. I then bumped up the contrast and adjusted the curves and levels. I really wanted his red lips and freckles to show and so I made those pop a little. I then cloned the dandelion seeds to create the trail. The whole image was sharpened and voila. I considered cleaning up his fingers, but then decided I wanted to keep them a bit dirty, it shows the kid in him.  

Now, to answer Erin's question... I really am not sure. The problem is that I jumped right into professional photography and had to learn the beast of a program that is Photoshop (I just got CS5 by the way and it is A-mazing). If you are looking for something free, I would recommend just using the tools available in flickr or picassa. I am sure they have gotten better, but they let you do things like crop, rotate, and maybe even enhance the images a bit. If you are a little more serious I would consider Adobe Lightroom. Not only is lightroom a great indexing tool, but it also allows you to do probably everything that you would want to do to your images.

I hope that helps!
   

Some people love the smell of cinnamon rolls or freshly baked cookies. Maybe even roses. Me, I LOVE the smell of horse breath. As a little girl I would run into the barn and find my horse chewing on a mouthful of alfalfa. She would reach her head over the top of her stall and gently nudge me with her muzzle. I loved how her whiskers would tickle my cheek. Then, we would stand there, smelling each other. I loved the sweet smell of her breath. She would blow her deep horse breath  on my face and I reveled in it. While out on a shoot recently I saw this woman riding through the park. Childhood memories of long summer afternoons with my Mariah came back to me. It is amazing how quickly life changes... 

It was a warm (scorching actually) day in Atherton. The ladies of  the  Rho Delta Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority invited me to come to their annual Wine, Food  and Croquet event. They had a special request for on site printing, I had never actually done this before. I figured it would be a good learning experience and agreed.  Thankfully, Shelly decided to come along for the day. I don't think I would have survived without her there to print the images for me! So, what I learned is that for charity events you do indeed sell more images if you print on site. The downside is that the printing process takes FOREVER and is pretty labor intensive. It is definitely not a one person task.  Here are a few of my favorites from the day...