Famiy Pictures

I used polyvore.com this year to keep organized for what kind of look I wanted to do for family pictures.  It made it so easy to keep it straight in my head and know what I did/did not need to buy.  Also made buying very simple as everything I pinned to my board had a link to the site to buy it at.  We already had a lot of this stuff because I LOVE mint.  Anyway, this is the collage I made and went by.

 And here are a few of our pics.  I'll add more when I can find that darn chip.  I love Randi Davies' work.  She is one awesome lady and photographer.

Photography Class at TVCC

So I started back up at school this past semester.  I enrolled in a photography class at TVCC.  I'm not going to lie, I enjoyed the practice of taking a lot more pictures than normal in 3 month's time, but I did not feel like I learned very much from the class.  It's just a community college and I have taken lots of free and paid for courses online for photography learning, as well as read many blogs on various photography topics.  But I've always wanted a straight up A to Z lesson on photoshop and photography techniques.  I feel like what I know is patches here and there and that makes a lot of gaps in the subject. 

The class advertised to use photoshop, but used a very basic "Elements" version and to make matters worse, it was outdated by 7 years.  So it didn't help me learn my photoshop CS6 program that I got for my birthday two years ago.  And very little instruction was given, it was mostly just a class to get people taking pictures.  Something I did already.  But it made me dive deeper in online research to do the best that I could do on each assignment regardless of if it was expected or not.  It did also, however, halt ALL blogging for the entire semester as I had way too many pictures to go through with less time to do it.  So I'm writing those blog posts in January and post dating them back to when they happened in catch up.

We were supposed to take pictures of things that told about ourselves for the first bit of class.  I snapped the following pic at sunset of our kids on the way home from having our family picture taken to show that I'm a mother of 3...

My sweetie, Todd, and his Heart 'n Home stuff.

A pic of my old camera with my 24-70 to show my love of photography. 

Love fitness. 

I had fun stitching together several pics to get this.  I can't actually deadlift anymore, for how long I don't know.  But for a long time deadlifting was my favorite thing ever and I could deadlift over 300 pounds.  For now I coach more than I do anything myself.  But I didn't know how to take a picture of that other than showing my certificate at the bottom.

An assignment to spell EARTH with photographs of random things shaped like letters.
(Piano keys, scotch tape, faucet handle, window, egg beater.)  I LOVED this assignment!  Really made me look at everything in my world differently.  I was seeing letters for WEEKS!

The final cuts for my "mimic" assignment.  I chose Scott Kelby.  Seriously one amazing photographer but better still, he knows photoshop so well.  He's the master of it- all the best books and courses on photoshop are by Scott Kelby.  I love his art, though the pics I used aren't my favorite.  He's a travel photographer mostly.  That and football.  I lucked out to happen to be heading to the coast during this assignment.  But most of his great works are vistas from France and all over exotic places of the world that I wouldn't be able to shoot let alone mimic.

The "Is it Real" assignment.  Some pretty funny photoshop spoofs came of this assignment in class.

Writing my name in the dark with a glow stick.

My sister-in-law was nice enough to be my model for a "day in the life of" assignment. It had to be an adult and not myself.  I'd already taken plenty of pics of Todd.  So she let me take pictures of her after CrossFit doing things she might do on any given day:

 The next pics were "Earth pics"- taken on our field trip to Hagerman, ID.  Not ideal shooting situations being the worst time of day to take pictures (bleached out color from harsh mid-day light and the time of day when the waterfall was in the shadow of the mountain), but everyone did the best they could.

I seriously want a macro lens.  Just sayin'.

My final was a slide show.  Here it is. (I added the link below in case this doesn't work.)
Once you open it up you can click on the settings symbol and change it to 480 P which will look a lot better.

http://youtu.be/EmGh3H7lysM

I'm glad that I took the class for the time and effort it caused me to give to the subject.  That did help me improve a little.  But I wish our community college gave higher level art courses than they do.  For now, it was my taste of going back to school before transferring to BSU next year.  My goal there is to chip away at a graphics design degree with a minor in photography.  I really want to master all the uses of photoshop.  Make my own t-shirts, be a pro at flyers/cards/invites, for personal artistic endeavors, and to be prepared to do marketing work if I needed to.  Over the last decade I've learned a lot of skills and taken on new interests or hobbies like drafting and fitness coaching and what not. But nothing hits home for me as well as photography and photoshop creative work.  Everyone has some sort of creative outlet.  That's mine.

Labor Day in McCall- Guys' Golf Trip

Todd went to McCall for his guys-golf-trip this year.  It was over Labor Day weekend and the brothers only wanted a couple of days to play constant golf all day.  They drove up the motorhomes (Kris has one too) and had the families drive up Saturday to spend the rest of the Holiday weekend with them.  It was a nice short trip and fun to be with everyone.

  Billy's girlfriend, Kristin, was staying there in her step-dad's cabin that weekend and let us tour their cabin as well as one they were selling.  This made us all want to see more cabins!  There are some beautiful cabins up there.  We played at the park in the White Tail resort where she was staying.  Everyone's talked about owning cabins some day so we all seem to enjoy touring them and dreaming up what we'd ever want.

These are pics from Todd's golfing portion of the trip:

We had camp fires and s'mores, some swimming in the river along our campground, went to a resort to watch a movie in a private theater that Kristin hooked us up in for free, went to dinner, and cooked at camp as well.  One of my favorite parts was carpooling up with my sister-in-law, Jenny and the fun conversations we had given the time together.  I forgot my camera on this trip so I was stuck with my phone camera.

The cousins all watching a movie in our motorhome (extensions out- it doesn't look this open while on the road).

The last day we all planned to go to Golden Fork Hot Springs.  (I LOVE hot springs.  They are so helpful for my health condition).  But upon taking down camp and driving out, Kris' motorhome wouldn't start.  After over an hour of jumping it with cables and fiddling with all sorts of things under its massive hood, they got it started but were too leery of parking and turning it off again so they just drove straight home.  Billy chose to follow them to make sure they were safe and for some reason everyone else opted to just go home at that time too.  No way I could not go to a hot springs when the opportunity was there.  Our kids were pretty grumpy at first at the loss of recent prospects of playing in a hot spring with all of their beloved cousins.  But even with none of them there, they "warmed up fast" and were cheery once we'd been there a few minutes.