April
A.K.A. - the often chilly, rainy and sometimes snowy time
in-between Ski season and Garden season;
The time I dream of warm, sunny days, spring breezes and vegetable gardens;
But leave it to the boys to take April for all that it is,
The perfect time to get bundled up & explore one of their favorite ways.
A.K.A. - the often chilly, rainy and sometimes snowy time
in-between Ski season and Garden season;
The time I dream of warm, sunny days, spring breezes and vegetable gardens;
But leave it to the boys to take April for all that it is,
The perfect time to get bundled up & explore one of their favorite ways.
Funny how they told me they were going outside to work on "trail maintenance,"
Not sure how much of that was actually achieved - good thing April is just beginning.
Hope your weekend is full of this much fun!
-Erin
Boys will be boys, is all I can say:) Glad to see that they can take advantage of not quite spring weather. You have trails? Mike would love to have trails! The girls love going for 4-wheeler rides with Mike. He's been doing it often now that his re-dug stock pond is filling up. The weather has been beautiful here allowing us to get the garden almost all the way planted. Mike is very excited about it!
ReplyDeleteTrails in the woods, yes, plenty of them all around; our well is on a trail 5 minutes hike in the woods our 27 acres is quite the maze :-)
DeleteWow, it’s warm enough for your garden! Can’t wait to see it. We still have frozen ground here. We can’t even break ground (excavate) for the new barn because it’s still so frozen. Nights are still around 20 degrees with hard frost most days. But here in NH Spring is really a May event so I guess I should know that by now. This summer a smaller garden for us. With building the big barn and finishing our addition too much going on around here for a big garden. Next year, big plans for a larger garden in a new site, I hope…
I'm sure you are getting impatient to get started on your barn and home projects. I can't wait to see/hear more about it. I really wish Mike and I could reside our barns to make them all uniform and fresh looking. But he says there's no point in investing that much money when we need to put it elsewhere. We really did get lucky this winter because I'm pretty sure the norm for us this time of year would be much like yours.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear that you took my advice on Flickr. You won't regret it. I love how easy flickr is to use. If you haven't already, you can download the Flickr Uploader onto your iMac which allows you to upload several images at a time while also choosing which set to put them in and whether you want to make them private or public. Even if you make them private on Flickr, you can still share those pictures on your blog. That's what I end up doing most of the time.
Now that you've got a DSLR you may also want to consider shooting in RAW and getting Adobe Lightroom to import your photos directly from your camera, edit them, and then upload directly to Flickr. It has made photo management and blogging go so much faster. You see when you import your images into LR, you can view all of them right there together to decide which to keep/edit. Photoshop doesn't have this capability. I used to have to use Adobe Bridge to go through my images and choose which ones to edit and then open only a handful at a time in PS. Took forever! Also shooting in RAW gives you much more flexibility. The RAW images are basically like working with negatives, so you can fix exposure and white balance much more realistically than in PS. If an image is way under or overexposed, PS can only get you so far before you may just have to scrap a bad image, but LR can save even the most over/underexposed images without losing image detail. The same goes for white balance. LR has amazing capabilities at saving poorly colored images. I used to shy away from taking pictures inside at night or inside a fluorescent lit room because I knew I couldn't get rid of the yellow cast in PS and increasing exposure would only result in too much grain. I can completely eliminate all that in LR. It's awesome!
There are presets (like Photoshop actions) you can download to do all kinds of effects on your images such as black and white conversions, vintage conversions, color toning, etc. You can also crop, do spot touch-ups, eliminate red-eye, sharpen, remove grain, add vignettes, and so much more. I purchased the student version of LR for $80. You would qualify since your kids are in school. I rarely use Photoshop anymore, only for graphic design these days or to do head swaps and such. You can download a demo version to use for 30 days to see if you like it. I actually downloaded a demo onto my sister-in-law's iMac when I went to her house in FL to shoot her daughter's senior pictures. That way I could edit the pictures while I was at her house and be done with it before I went home. Editing an entire set of senior pictures in LR took me a fraction of the time it would have taken me in PS. I can speak enough about the power of LR. I just wish they had it when I first started shooting with a DSLR. Oh, the hours/days/weeks of editing/uploading it would have saved me.
Erin-
ReplyDeleteI had written this huge comment about why you should get Adobe Lightroom, and now I see it's not here. I have no idea what happened. Sorry about that. But seriously, look into getting LR now that you've got a DSLR. You can get the educational version for $79 since your kids are in school. That's what I did. You can edit white balance/color/exposure/saturation/etc., crop, use presets (like Photoshop actions), remove spots, sharpen, reduce noise, add vignettes, and so much more. Plus, they've added the capability to upload directly to Flickr right from LR. It has saved me hours upon hours of time versus using Photoshop. The one thing that really sold me on LR vs. PS was that I could view my entire library of images in LR and then after editing one image I could sync several images to have the same edits. I really only use PS anymore to do graphic design or head swapping/similar type of edits in images. I purchased a set of video tutorials for LR (Photography Concentrate) that helped me understand it so much more. I was really only using it to do my color/exposure editing and the occasional funky preset conversion and then upload to Flickr. Now I know I was missing out on so much more. It's really an amazing piece of software that I wish had been around when I first looked into photo editing software.
Jen,
Deletesorry about that, not sure what happened! I was just looking at which adobe to buy - thanks for your advice. I'm definitely going to look into LR. Hoping they have it on Amazon with Prime - Easter Present for me (hehehe :-)
Happy Easter