:: I won a giveaway!!

If you only knew how many giveaways I have entered, you would understand my excitement. I've tried to win just about anything under the sun (that I wanted of course) when my favorite bloggers out there held giveaways on their blogs. So, you can imagine my surprise when Rita, from The Coffeshop Blog, e-mailed me to say that I actually won something! And that something was $100 to use at Florabella Collection! If you have not visited her site before, she has amazing photographs...most have which have been edited using her photoshop actions and textures. Check her site out when you get a chance!

:: Snow days make you do crazy things!

Here it is, day 2 of keep-the-kids-home-and-make-mommy-crazy (or KTKHAMMC for short). Yes, due to extreme cold temps here in Colorado (4 degrees currently...at 3pm) schools have decided that it's best to keep kiddos home and let the parents deal with "I'm soooo borrrrrred!". As a result, I did something I normally avoid. I pulled out the finger paints. Going further, I also thought it would parlay into a fun photo session (inspired by this French photographer...but please don't compare techniques).

More photoshop fun...

with my new online BFF Rita and her CoffeeShop Blog.  I am a *very* novice photographer and am still working out how to manipulate my DSLR.  Every now and then I see amazing photos with beautiful edits and highlights and I wonder, when will I ever be good enough to do that?!  Well, by sheer luck I came across Rita's blog and found the "Actions" application which is essentially the manipulation of existing photos in Photoshop.  I had so much fun playing with it today I just had to post about it.  Here's some of what I experimented with (so far):

Here's the original picture of Argish...

and here's a brighter, softer manipulation of it.

I was going for a "Norman Rockwell" look here...

still missed the mark, but I love the depth and contrast!

The original profile shot of E...

played around and got this which reminds me of my old photos.

Same photo but in B&W with a glow.  Purdy. 

This was taken at the aquarium the other day...which is pretty good...

but adding some "pop" really made a difference.

For fun, here are a couple of E goofing around:

I love my new hobby. :)