Emily Steele Photography – Blog

Happy Memorial Day, everyone.  I hope you’re enjoying your 3 day weekend and barbecues and such.  Our special event for memorial day weekend was to go strawberry picking!  So, for snapshot monday, you get 2 snapshots.  Consider it a buy 1 get 1 free sale

Here’s Daniel, taking his first taste of fresh picked strawberry.  He ate quite a few.

And I know this is going to make you want to go out and get some strawberries right now.

That’s less than half of what we brought home!  We temporarily lost our minds and picked 16 lbs of strawberries!

Something different for the Picture of the Week today:

These flowers bloomed outside our old house.  I took this photo a long time ago.  Right after I’d gotten a new lens, and I’ve had that lens for almost 2 years now.

I spent the first half of the afternoon today thinking I had to make a blog post.  Went out to get the mail and bring up the recycling bin, and thought, “it’s Tuesday!  Not Wednesday!  I have to do a blog post tomorrow.”  And then I remembered I didn’t do one yesterday.  Oops.  Not sure where my head was yesterday!

Today’s snapshot is from this weekend.  We went to Child-Fest, where we had the pleasure of meeting Elmo and Abby from Sesame Street (and their puppeteers, Kevin Clash and Leslie Carrara).  It was a fun Saturday.  Daniel is a gigantic sesame street fan (he even invited Abby and Elmo over for playdates) and while I don’t admit it too frequently, I’m one too.  Actually, I’m just a gigantic Muppet fan.  I love all things Muppet.  So it was pretty special for me too to meet these superstars of the preschool set.  Possibly even more exciting was I got this:

That’s a really bad pictures (from my cell) of the inside page of my copy of My Life as a Furry Red Monster signed by Mr Clash and the furry red monster himself.

It’s really hard for me to get a decent picture of my own kids.  This becomes a stressful event every fall, when I remember that I need to try to get a picture of the boys for christmas cards.  See, I want great pictures of them, but I hate to “outsource” since, in theory, I should be able to take a picture of them myself.  They’re just too comfortable with me for it to work well most of the time.  In 2008, I struck gold.  A picture of my (then) 13 month old and (then) 4 1/2 year old, looking nice, and smiling, really smiling at the same time.  Then, lightning struck twice, and in 2009, I got not just one, but several decent pictures of the 2 of them.  This is my favorite:

This captures my boys, as brothers.  They get along so well, for the most part, and they’re (almost) always giggling and being silly together.  There’s the occasional squabble, and sometimes the little one will decide to hit the big one, but for the most part, they love each other to bits, and play together amazingly well, and I thank my lucky stars each day that I have two boys who are such great brothers.

This weekend we went to Wine in the Woods.  Always a good time.  Every year, they have people dressed as statues, and they’re always willing to pose for pictures.

They amaze me, because they look so realistic – until they move.  Though I do always wonder how long it takes to get all that paint off them!  Can’t imagine that’s fun to apply or remove!

And yeah, my kid looks like a goofball in that picture.

Here’s this week’s picture of the week:

I photographed this little sweetheart when she as just 12 weeks old, and then again when she was a year old.  Love her curls and oh those eyes!

So, yesterday was Monday.  Totally blanked on that and forgot to do Snapshot Monday!  So now I guess it’s snapshot Tuesday.

Last week, my son’s nursery school class took a trip to the petting farm.  And Daniel was brave enough to feed a goat.  But he’d only feed the pygmy goats.  He wanted nothing to do with the bigger ones.

When I proof images, I do so as a 5×7.  The printed proofs I bring to your ordering session are 5×7s.  It’s important to remember as you choose your print sizes that not all sizes crop the same.  An 8×10 will lose a little “real estate” from a 5×7, for example.  Generally, I try to leave enough space around the important elements of a photo to accommodate all sizes, but with some close crops, that’s not always possible.  Take these examples.

This picture has enough space around the subjects that all the crops are appealing and contain all the important elements.

This image is a much tighter shot.  And you can see how the change in print size can really affect the feel of the final image, especially in the square crop.  The square crop is still a lovely image, but it has a very different feel from the 5×7.

Of course, as I prepare your order for printing, if you’ve ordered an image in a size that’s going to greatly affect the final outcome of the image, I’ll bring it to your attention and show you what the image will look like in it’s final size.

Special thanks to Kayla Renckly for the inspiration and template.

I’m in the middle of a computer upgrade right now.  My old one was 5 years old and dying a slow and painful death.  It was time to upgrade.  Got the new one, spent a week or so finding all the files I needed to move over, then days installing new programs, etc.  And now I can’t get my monitor to stay calibrated.  Fun!  So rather than digging a picture of the week off my hard drive (external, and the new machine likes to forget it exists…) I’m going with one I already have uploaded.

This is from a session last fall.  Lil’ man D is 3 years old, and he and his twin sister are in the nursery school Daniel goes to (though not in Daniel’s class).  We had a great time together, full of laughs and silliness.  I snapped this shot in the middle of a bunch of family shots.  D was sitting right in front of his parents, and I just got close up and got just him, with those beautiful eyes and fabulous smile.  It’s one of my favorite images from last fall.

Snapshot Monday time.  My younger son, looking cool with his star shaped shades and his Woody pajamas (which are, coincidentally, the same ones he’s wearing tonight).  Add this to the pile to show his future prom date.