Onegav

The girls are home!!!! Yippee!!!!!!!!

I haven’t seen Livvy and Izzy since Friday morning last week, and it was so good to see them again today when I got home from work, I missed them loads.

They finished their tea, and we wasted no time heading straight out for a walk in the woods and a trip to the play ground.

Livvy, has finally lost her first tooth! She’s been waiting for so long bless her, and yesterday it finally happened, she is super excited about the tooth fairy coming.

I asked her to pull a face to show her toothy gap off, which she did. Izzy, thought this was great fun and so she had a go too, although none of her teeth are loose of course.

So good to be back out enjoying the countryside with my girlies, and the house feels so much better with them here, it feels like home.

Of course, it’s really nice to have time alone with Holly, we both enjoy it, but, we both miss the girls loads when they’re away visiting.

A couple of less fun images here now, and really what I was doing was experimenting with image sharpness.

My style of edit as you know, involves a lot of big flat shadows, and whilst I love that look, I also love nice crisp images too, so I’m trying to find the balance I like between the two.

I set to work, stood on top of the climbing frame in the play ground, much to the girls amusement, to capture as much sharp detail as possible in camera, ready for post processing later.

I saw the sun starting to dip behind the trees in the distance, and although the composition was secondary to the detail experiment, as it goes it looked superb!

I loaded my 18-55mm lens on my camera, set it on my tripod and used a narrow (for me) aperture of f/16, and used a three up three down exposure bracket, and saved only the RAW files, to capture the images in one instant.

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, and over the moon the tooth fairy is visiting Livvy tonight.

Learnings – I kept calm even with the glorious sun set and the girls laughing at me perched on top of the climbing frame. I set the exposure bracket perfectly, and saving just the RAW worked beautifully to capture the three images almost simultaneously. The final piece of the puzzle, a 2second shutter delay, to avoid any camera shake.

During post processing, I avoided taking the shadows down as flat as I would normally; I normally flatten the darkest shadows by 8.6%, and paid a lot of attention to keeping the highlights sharp.

I’m really pleased with the outcome, and I think with a few tweaks in camera, I’ll have found my groove nicely.