Wow, would you believe that I'm caught up with my kid's photos! So this week, for my Jessica Sprague mid-week assignment, I'm having to resort to going back and scrapping photos of me as a kid. I plan to do all those photos digitally and put them into a Heritage Makers book.


Anyhow, the assignment was to use white paper and I combined it with another challenge to use an advertisement as inspiration. The ad I used is here and the layout is below.

Ahhh, Tara tagged me again! I'm gonna have to start tagging her before she gets a chance to tag me.

So here it is:
5 things in my refrigerator:
1. cranberry juice
2. pepperoni sticks
3. butter
4. monterey jack cheese
5. honey mustard

5 things in my car:
1. garbage
2. baby stroller
3. sunglasses
4. loose change
5. baby wipes

5 things in my purse or backpack:
1. phone
2. wallet
3. brag book
4. glasses
5. kleenex

5 things in my closet:
1. clothes
2. shoes
3. dirty laundry
4. purses
5. camera bag

5 things in the world I want to see before I die:
1. my kids grow up
2. italy (rome, florence, venice)
3. egypt
4. the mediterrean (again)
5. new york city

I hadn't planned to get up for the lunar eclipse but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) one of my kids crawled into my bed at 4:30 waking me up.

I could see the moon right out of my window while lying in bed and I thought, darn, now I've gotta get up to get a shot :)

Shot taken using Nikon spot metering, no noise reduction, tripod and remote shutter release.

This is a 100% crop but no editing otherwise.

On the advice of Scott Kelby, I purchased David Ziser's Digital Wakeup Call DVD. David Ziser is a well known and successful wedding photographer who teaches techniques at various seminars across the States. The DVD was fairly inexpensive $69 and I figured I'd easily spend that on a local photography course should one be available (which it isn't) and while the DVDs are wedding oriented, I figured that weddings mostly consist of portraits and group shots which is what I am interested in.

Anyway, the DVDs are very informative. You get around 4 1/2 hours of instruction (David talks with a powerpoint presentation but also demonstrates with his camera on screen) and I made 21 pages (these are small page, mind you) of notes.

David starts by talking about the wedding photography industry in general but quickly moves on to a discussion of different views of the face, basic lighting, composition, various techniques such as speeding/dragging the shutter and why you'd do this, on and off camera flash lighting as well as multi strobe, lens selection. He continues the DVDs with a discussion/demo of several software programs including his own photoshop dashboard, Fotofusion Pro. Finally he concludes with a discussion of how to market yourself in the wedding photography business.

The DVDs are well done, he is a good presenter that makes the subject matter interesting. There are plenty of diagrams and sample photos to illustrate his points. Also included in the package is a CD with several photoshop training videos (that I haven't watched yet).

I would give Digital Wakeup Call 10/10 for training and information about wedding photography (and portrait/group photography) and recommend these DVDs to an intermediate/advanced photographer (they are not beginner level). Great value for money!

David's blog can be found here
You can purchase the DVDs here

Here is my digital layout for Jessica Sprague's Midweek Assignment. It uses a quick page from the Beautiful You digital kit that was FREE on the CK website earlier this year and has been made available to all students of Jessica's course.

Was rootin' around on my hard drive and found this layout which I had started but hadn't quite finished. So I quickly finished it and am posting it.

The layout uses the Splish Splash digi kit by Rhonna Farrer available for FREE on Two Peas.