If you tracked down a copy of my high school senior year yearbook, there’s a mini-interview with me where I declare I’m going to be a marine biologist when I grow up. I didn’t want to study dolphins or train whales or anything – I just really really liked the ocean. After just ONE college-level biology class I realized the actual sciencey biology stuff wasn’t something I wanted to make a career out of, but that didn’t changed how much I love the ocean one bit. It’s why we go to the aquarium at least once a week and why my kids have seen the episode of Diego with Baby Humpback Whale more times than any other episode and why Star Trek IV is indisputably the best (original) Star Trek movie. It might also have something to do with why I married someone in the Navy, but don’t tell him.

Sterling Publishing sent me – well, the kids – a copy of Shimmer & Splash: The Sparkling World of Sea Life a couple weeks ago and it’s been in heavy read and fake-read rotation ever since. Caroline likes to lie on the floor and open up all the cool fold-out pages while she points out all the animals she knows. “Look! Orca! Look! Barracuda! Look! Fishy!” (she’s only two, I can’t expect her to know the proper name for EVERYTHING yet.)

It’s more of a reference book than a story book, with interesting facts and information on various types of sea life from jelly fish to whales and everything in between. The pictures are very detailed and include cool stuff like life-size shark teeth and big fold-out pages. The drawings are gorgeous and life-like – besides the amazing color drawings there are pencil sketches of extras, like the anatomy of a sting ray. It’s like a visit to the aquarium without leaving our house.

I can already tell it’s going to be a much-loved book for many many years. I recommend it to anyone who has marine biologist dreams (past or future), loves the ocean or even just really loves beautiful drawings.

Sterling has kindly offered a copy to one of my readers. To enter just leave a comment on this post and I’ll draw a winner randomly on Monday. You can find the book on Amazon here, and check out the author’s website here.

Reading about whales in her narwhal shirt. LOVE.

I received a review copy of Shimmer & Splash for the kids but no other compensation was provided for this post. Links are not affiliate links.

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I’m not ready to call myself a great photographer, but I think I am ready to call myself a photographer – something I didn’t think was possible less than a year ago. I know enough about my camera now to make it do what I want 90% of the time and enough about photography and editing to feel confident taking photos for other people.

I’m still not willing to charge money for my time or work. Even looking back at these sessions - which were only a few weeks ago – I think “Ugh! The color is so wrong. Why did I edit them like that?! Why isn’t the focus sharper?? Why did I think these were good???” I have so so so very much to learn I don’t know if I’ll ever actually be good at photography.

I also think pictures of my own kids are easier (MOST of the time). I have more flexibility to say “Oh, look at the light! Quick, everyone put on your shoes, we’re going out to do photos!” Plus I can boss them around, predict their smiles, and bribe the crap out of them with lollipops.

But since I’ve been asked recently what camera and lens I use, what my settings are and other general stuff about photography I thought it might be worth writing this post. It is a weird mix of technical and non-technical stuff/terms because that’s how my brain works. Let me know if I’ve got anything totally wrong or explained it really really badly and I can try to fix it.

I do shoot in Manual mode, which is not the same as manual focus. Manual on the camera just means I control the aperture and shutter speed. I also set my own ISO but I usually let the camera choose the white balance. I’m not going to explain what all of those things are in detail since there are a billion blog posts about that already (see the link to Chookooloonks below, her summary is great) but I’ll explain what I do.

Basic info: My camera is a Nikon D7000 (excellent review & info here), which is a step up from my Nikon D90 but is still a crop-sensor camera. Basically that means on my camera an 85mm lens actually shoots at the distance of a 50mm on a full-frame camera. That “crop” applies to all the different lens lengths. The full-frame cameras are significantly more expensive and although I’d love to upgrade I can’t see myself spending that kind of money anytime in the near future.

Important note! If you’re struggling and not getting the results you expect, make sure your camera WORKS CORRECTLY. When I was super frustrated with my camera last Christmas it was because my camera was broken, not because I was an idiot.

A much-too-long explanation of how I take pictures:

After I grab the camera (about 50% of the time the battery is dead, so that’s the end of the picture taking) the first thing I choose is my ISO.

(ISO was the very last thing I figured out, so I’ll elaborate a little. I read a post by Chookooloonks a long time ago (found it!) about ISO and her explanation has stuck with me better than any other – think of the ISO number as light catchers. The higher the ISO, the more light catchers you get so you can shoot in darker conditions. On a super sunny day you don’t need many light catchers but in a dark room you need a lot. And when you have a lot of light catchers they show up in your photo as “grain”. With a low ISO you need to get the light into the picture another way, either through a longer shutter speed or a wider aperture.)

I like to keep it around 200 outside and around 1000 in the house, but it’s easy to change by intervals of 100 if my photos aren’t coming out.

Second I choose my aperture, or f-stop. That’s what makes the background fuzzy or not fuzzy. A low number means less of the photo is in focus. A big number means more is in focus. Up until I got my new 35mm lens* I liked to keep the f-stop around 3 or 3.5 (5 on my kit lens/macro, since that’s as low as those go) but on the 35mm I keep it around 2 or 2.5. A small number means I’m letting lots of light into the camera so I can keep my shutter speed low, plus it gives me that nice blurry background I think of as the hallmark of fancy photos.

Ok, so my ISO and f-stop are set based on where I’m shooting. That brings me to the part I’m embarrassed about: I cannot keep track of my shutter speed. I never remember what the fractions mean. Never. Instead of choosing a shutter speed I rely on my light meter in the camera, which I have set on spot metering (Wikipedia link for technical stuff). I just spin the shutter speed dial until I hit the center mark on the meter in the viewfinder and I’m good. If it’s a really bright day or strong light I might intentionally underexpose by a stop or vice versa, but mostly I try to hit dead center.

After I think my settings look good, I focus the camera on my subject. I have my camera set on single-point focus, where I choose one of the 13 focal points manually using the little dial on the back of the camera. My camera actually has 39 possible points, but I found scrolling through all of them took too long. Choosing my focal point lets me compose the photos off-center, another thing I think makes photos feel fancy. I get my one focal point right over the most important part of the picture and then I shoot. BAM! Photo taken!

The really fancy photographers are so confident in their technical abilities that they don’t look at the screen on the back of the camera to make sure they aren’t totally screwing everything up. I am not fancy. I definitely check. As I follow the kids or my subject around I adjust my settings (most often my shutter speed, then my ISO, then my f-stop) and I’ll check the screen again, but if we’re staying in one place I just click click click until I’m sure I have a shot with everyone looking/smiling/doing something cute/whatever.

During a session I usually take around 400 photos. That’s a lot. Way too many. Especially if the session is just my own kids hanging out in a park again. It’s a bad habit but since the photos are digital I figure I can always delete them once I get them on the computer.

Once I get home I almost always immediately move the photos to my computer. Then I edit. I shoot in RAW, which means I have to at least convert the photos to JPGs before I post them anywhere. I open my photos in Lightroom, mark the ones I think are worth converting, and then adjust for things like exposure and white balance. Since I don’t adjust white balance in-camera most of the time that’s my most frequent edit. I’ve started doing some creative editing in Lightroom too, sometimes using presets from Clickin Moms or MCP Actions. Lightroom itself comes with some really nice black and white presets and I like the way RAW files convert to b&w better than the JPGs. I’ve never taken a class or read the manual so what I know about Lightroom comes from just messing around with it.

After I like the basic look of the photos I use the export function to convert the photos to JPG and automatically open them in Photoshop. In PS I do more creative editing (sometimes very, very badly – I really need to take a class). I have a lot of Photoshop Actions and I go through phases where I LOVE some of them and then HATE some of them and then LOVE some of them again. The most useful one is a web-sharpen/resize action that I got through a Clickin Moms class I took, but for creative actions the ones I won from a Marissa Gifford giveaway can’t be beat. I don’t do skin-smoothing or eye-brightening or head-swapping or anything fancier than maybe some pimple-removal, although I’m pretty decent at cloning out stains and crumbs on the kids.

My final step is saving all the files, first as a full size photo then resizing and sharpening for the web and saving again. I recorded an action that does all of that for me so it doesn’t take very long (God bless Google for showing me how to do that!) and I usually just leave the computer to do it when I go to bed at night. Very last of all I upload web-sized photos to Flikr (if they’re my photos) or Facebook and Dropbox (if they’re for a friend). I usually get the whole process done in a day, although the bridal portraits took me a whole weekend because there were SO MANY – I shot the location, the bride, her family and the bridal shower all at once.

WHEW. If you read all of that, you’re amazing. And probably confused, since it’s obvious I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I think my biggest challenge right now is finding my own style – I tend to fall in love with a new photographer every day so sometimes I want all my photos to look faded and dreamy and sometimes I want them all to be tack-sharp and brightly colored. I’m an over-editor. But like I’ve said before, I’m trying to learn and the best way to do that is practice…so if anyone wants to act as my guinea pigs let me know and I’ll drag you out to run around in an orchard for two hours and you’ll get a couple dozen photos. I’ll even bring lollipops.

*My Lenses:
Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-S DX
Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF
Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SLD DG Macro Lens
Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX
I also rented a fancy 85mm f/1.4 for the bridal portraits but didn’t love it.

There are no affiliate links in this post, so everything I recommend I can honestly say I truly recommend.

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My friend Molly had a bad day this week. She took over-tired kids to the grocery store and they had a meltdown, which is what happens when you bring over-tired kids to the grocery store. Sometimes you just need to buy some damn milk, you know? And sometimes your kids are happy, well-rested, well-fed, and total angels right up until 20 seconds before you hit the checkout counter and THEN they have a total meltdown. Weathermen – who are wrong like, 80% of the time! – are better at predicting stuff than parents. At least if you walk outside and get wet you can reasonably assume it’s raining. Ask a 3-year-old how they feel and you’ll get a response like PEANUT BUTTER TICK TOCK PIRATE SHOELACES. That is not helpful in judging store meltdown likelihood threat levels. (It’s basically always threat level double red anyway.)

Your children having a meltdown in a store doesn’t make you a bad mom. It makes you a MOM. Not getting everything one hundred percent right one hundred percent of the time doesn’t make you a bad parent. It makes you a PARENT. That’s why parenting is a THING. If kids came out of the womb as fully functioning human beings they wouldn’t be kids, they’d be turtles. Miniature versions of adults left alone to fend for themselves. God, I bet being a turtle mom is the BEST. No one hangs around the sunny log at the pond judging that one turtle whose offspring always have dirty shells and swim in circles screaming “Poop! Butt! Fart!” all the time. No, we get the grocery store full of judgement and withering looks and people laughing at us while we struggle and plead and do the the very best job we can to not raise monsters who set your house on fire some day.

Remember this: every single person who is judging your parenting used to be a baby. They crapped their pants. They threw up on themselves. They ate something disgusting off the floor. They drove their parents crazy in all the ways your kid is currently driving you crazy and probably 4,365 other ways your kid hasn’t even thought of yet. Even if that dude laughing at you while you wrangle a vicious rabid badger disguised as a toddler into your cart never has kids of his own, he used to be a little shit too. He still is kind of shit for laughing. Someone should go laugh at his mother.

NEVER FORGET: You are doing the best you can with the incredibly raw materials you (or someone else) grew in their very own human, imperfect body. Go easy on yourself. Go easy on other parents. Go easy on your kids, even if it means you have to lock them in their rooms for 20 minutes while you bang your head against a wall. Just be sure to teach them to go easy on each other. And remember – no one will die if your kid screams the whole time you’re buying that damn milk.

I asked her to smile for a photo – something she’d been doing for the past 20 minutes.

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I bought this huge canvas at A.C. Moore a few months ago. They were running an great sale on canvases – I think I bought it for less than $20 – and I’ve been looking for something large to hang over the fireplace basically since the day we moved in 6 years ago. I’ve hung collections of things, put giant vases on the mantel, made banners and art before but nothing has ever really filled the space the way I wanted. I knew a 3×4 canvas would finally be the right size but it’s been sitting in my basement for weeks now while I brainstormed what exactly I should do with it. I am decidedly NOT an artist, and although I found some cool DIY art on Pinterest I wasn’t in love with any of the ideas (and wasn’t confident in my ability to execute them).

While I was talking with my IBFF (internet best friend forever) Amy, she suggested doing silhouettes of the kids. She actually made one and blogged it almost two years ago (and shouts me out in the post, because seriously IBFF!) so I used the same basic idea – took a picture of the kids’ profiles in front of a window, printed them and cut the shape out carefully. But because I wanted to make GIANT painted silhouettes I had to figure out the rest on my own.

Supplies:

Canvas
Spray paint
Craft paint
Paint brushes (at least 1 small and 1 large)
Cardstock
Printer
Scissors/craft knife
Box
Pen
Clothespin/tape/paperclip/whatever you need to get the angles right
Smartphone with flashlight app (or a very strong flashlight)

Instructions:

I took my canvas outside to paint it, which wasn’t the best choice because it was pretty windy and I ended up with spray paint on my back door. Eh, not the first time.

Ignore the tree shaddows

I picked blue for my background colors since I was hanging it in a blue room but any colors would work. In a kid’s room a whole rainbow would be really fun. If you were just doing 1 silhouette instead of two you could do it vertically.

From top to bottom: white base paint for a picture frame, kitchen stool, nursery project, picture frame, kid-size cabinet, and failed lamp shade project. All found in my basement with enough left for this project.

I lined them up from darkest to lightest and worked from the outside in on the canvas. Then I went back and used the white to lighten anywhere it felt REALLY uneven. This is what it looked like in the bright outside light:

I’m not going to win any painting contests but I like it (and E was surprised I had made it myself – he thought it was actual art). I let the spray paint dry for a few hours – there wasn’t a lot of paint so it didn’t take long – while I talked the kids into posing for their profile photos. They were both in cooperative moods so it didn’t take long.

Try to get a picture where your kid’s nose DOESN’T blend into the background. It still worked fine.

To make the cutting edges more distinct I lowered the blacks slider and converted the pictures to black and white in Lightroom (totally optional). Then I printed them out on cardstock (I happened to have brown, but the color doesn’t matter) and cut out just the silhouettes as closely and cleanly as possible.

Then came the hardest part: figuring out how to get that cut-out silhouette big enough to trace onto the canvas.

My first thought was I’d just hold one up next to a lamp and trace the shadow, sort of like a super-simple version of a projector. Unfortunately, a regular light bulb doesn’t direct the light strongly enough to make a crisp shadow. I tried to make a DIY projector with a cardboard box taped over the lamp but it still wasn’t clear enough.

I tried asking the internet and my husband and they both suggested I find an overhead projector so I called the library and after a lot of shuffling departments and waiting on hold they said yes they DID still have a projector and if I wanted to bring my canvas in they could set me up in one of the conference rooms on Wednesday. That would have been a good option if I hadn’t figured out an at-home solution. I got impatient waiting for Wednesday and during a little more Googling I found a tip that the flashlight app on a smartphone makes a really bright, direct light.

So I made this:

That’s my iPhone with the flashlight app turned on, propped up against a book inside an empty box, with the silhouette clipped to the end with a clothespin. I set it on the coffee table and pulled it back until it the shadow was the right size on the canvas. You definitely need a dark room to make it work right, but luckily the sun goes down around 8 pm (I think it’s called “night”?) so I didn’t have to move the canvas.

I traced it with a regular ballpoint pen, being careful not to move the canvas. I should have used a level and a measuring tape to space the two silhouettes exactly right, but I just guessed based on the color stripes on the canvas. Then I switched out Caroline’s silhouette for Evan’s, moved the canvas (it seemed easier than moving the light projector set up) and traced Evan’s. I adjusted the distance a little to make his silhouette slightly bigger than Caroline’s but not so much the finished product would look unbalanced.

I used black craft paint to fill in the silhouette shapes. I used a medium brush to do the major edges and a tiny brush to do things like their bangs and Caroline’s eyelashes. I filled everything in with a medium sized brush and went back over the edges to make sure they were colored in fully. I messed up both their noses a tiny bit and noses are very important in making a silhouette that looks like your child, so be extra careful. I did NOT wait long enough for it to dry before I propped it up on the mantel, so I got a black paint drip on Evan’s side. Luckily the cheap craft store brand of paint was easy to peel off the spray painted canvas so I fixed it. The other option would have been taping up the silhouette and spray painting over the mistake.

The last step was finally taking down the train station banner from Evan’s birthday party and putting a nail in the wall to hang it up!

Aaaand then take some pictures. I’m happy with how it turned out. High fives for easy, inexpensive artwork!

Ta-da! I’m so excited to finally have something to fill that space after six years. Total cost: $25 for the canvas sinceI had everything else on hand and approximately 45 minutes worth of total work. Let me know if you try something similar, I’d love to see your spin on it!

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