Sam I Am

I won't even bother posting the specs on this because I photoshopped the snot out of it. :0)

I decided Rachel was probably serious about kicking out the slackers, so I figured I'd better get in gear and post a picture this time around!

Is this my best? Maybe not. But I do like the photo, and I am proud of it. So that counts, right? This is my son, by the way... totally in his element.

CC always welcome

my quarter machine hommies

this is my entry! a portrait of faith. I shot a wedding in a catholic church today. and i just love this image. i think it shows so many opposite feelings ~ dark, light... elumination and shadows... anyway. these two pics were a total toss up! i couldnt choose. the hommies i set up for this, the other was just a fav snap that i feel fits this well.

nikon d300 lens 14-24 2.8 iso 600 speed 400 fstop 2.8 cc

here are my quarter machine favorites... tiny little hommies. i collected these for a long time. it killed me that you can find racism in a quarter machine! (and i only claim that its racism because some of them came with tiny garbage cans, and spray paint accessories) and my dad always liked to talk like he was a "cool homey" so i decided to take thier portrait!

nikon d300 lens 14-24 2.8 iso 800 f-stop 2.8 speed 125 cc

Portrait

Ok, I'm back finally! AHHH!!! Life was SOOO busy with finals and working 3 jobs and all. I've been so swamped, I only finally got to pull my camera out this week. It felt good to get back to shooting photos, but I felt a little rusty and out of touch.

Anyway, this is a photo session I did for one of my friends new born. He was a sweetie to shoot and so good to let me put him in all sorts of poses. He had terrible baby acne though, and I tried to get rid of it in photoshop, but there was sooo much, I finally just let it be what it was. I still think he's a cutie. And sometimes I like that stuff (The peeling skin, the baby acne, etc.) in the shot, because it reminds you of just HOW new born they are.

CC always welcome.

Canon Rebel XTI
Raw
Iso 200
Window Light
F8
200

Picture of a Family

I had a family session today (a re-do, the last session was Horrible, and all my fault) and I'm happy to say we got some good results. This is not a typical portrait but I think it shows the spirit of this family and to me that's the most important part of any session. A couple more from the session can be found on my Photo Blog.

{CC} Welcomed and appreciated.

The Hubs

This is Taylor. He's fabulous. I'm lucky to have this guy for my very own. I love the tar outta him! I especially love those "happy-smile-eyes". If you want to see WHY he's such a Happy Boy in this photo: here's a link to my bloggy-blog of what we did today...

Breanna

This is my neighbor's little sister, Breanna. I only met her a couple of hours before doing this, and feel like I captured what I know of her. I was going for 'senior portrait' look, even though she's just a sophmore. I was bugged because the sun would NOT cooperate. There were clouds, but almost every time I took a picture, the sun would pop out. Go figure. But I did enjoy working with her. And her mom wants copies of the pictures (all of them), so I feel like I did okay. Other than cropping, this is sooc.

CC

Portrait of Cameron

So this is Cameron, my crazy 5 year old. Seems like he's never entirely serious and to be honest, I think he's fed up with doing pictures for Mommy! Lol. He never wants to just take a nice picture anymore, always got a different pose or crazy face to make. This is my son, completely shows his silly personality!

Portrait of Morning Sickness

This bowl has been my closest friend and ally today. It's also my explanation for why I don't have a better picture. I did the best I could under the circumstances!

Allston G.

I am glad to be the first to post since I missed the last challange. This is a portrait of my 2 year old son Allston G. and his faithful puppy that accompanys us everywhere. Allston has really bad asthma and has been really sick the past few months so we are very glad to have him feeling better. I love this picture it really captures who he is, from his extra pink lips to his green eyes like his daddys. He is leaning forward because he was ready to sprint away as soon as he heard the click of the camera. I am glad we did this challange because I got quite a few great pictures of my perfect boy.

Winners: SWEET

A wonderful job to all who participated!!!

The winners are: Crys with her super duper sweet surprise waiting for her on her front porch and Terry came in second with her sweet baby bootie shot. Brittney and Candace had many shoutouts too.

Way to GO winners!!!!

Scroll down for new challenge word...

Challenge: Portrait

The challenge this weekend is....

PORTRAIT

This one isn't necessarily meant to be "out of the box", or make you think really hard. Just take a portrait of someone you know, someone you grab on the street (hello, Katy!), or, if you want to, another portrait of yourself. Let's see if we can capture the essence of someone... and have fun!!

Don't forget to post by midnight on Sunday, and remember to post a picture you take after this challenge is given! Also, remember that this is the "last chance" for some of you to get in on the fun before you get kicked off. ;) If you haven't posted in forever, get your camera out and do this challenge! The numbers have been really low lately... let's see if we can get at least 30 photos posted this time! :)

Hello Mission 24 Crew

Hello everyone! My name is Jennifer Calderwood. I am currently a Masters student, but have recently found a passion for photography. Funny how life works out. Anyways, I have 3 children, 2 boys (Cameron, 5 & Briar, 10) and a step-daughter (Molly, 7). My husband is currently working in Iraq as a DOD & will be home for R & R very soon!

This pic is me, on the road as usual. I'm always driving somewhere, usually to South Carolina to look for foreclosures for my hubby!

I have heard about Mission 24 from two people already and, looking into my creativity, thought it sounded interesting and fun! Anyways, thank you for having me :)

Unscheduled business. :)

Hey everyone!

Just popping in to say hello and leave a couple notes of business. I know it's not Monday, our normal day for business, but I needed to just mention a few things.

1. I understand things get busy and sometimes it's hard to post by midnight at the end of a challenge. I get that. I do! :) HOWEVER, from here on out ONCE THE VOTING POST GOES UP, we will consider that challenge closed. Any pictures posted AFTER the voting post will be taken down. We need to keep things cleaned up that way so it's not one jumbled mess. I hope you all understand.

2. PLEASE don't post past pictures. I LOVE seeing everyone's talent...I think we all do. HOWEVER, this is not a blog just to display such works. This is to challenge ourselves to go out and CREATE a new piece of art based on the word we are given in the challenge. I know several of you have pieces that you want to show others, and you have a right!!! Maybe we will have a day coming up that we can do a showcase of some past work. But for our normal challenges, let's keep it new. :)

3. ALSO--if you have joined this blog but not posted in a while, PLEASE DO. We asked that everyone post at least once a month, which should be super easy. I mean, it's ONE time out of a minimum of 8 times. We are going to start clearing off the list. PLEASE CONSIDER THIS YOUR LAST WARNING. I have given LOTS Of time for people to have another chance at posting. I WILL give the Saturday challenge as the last chance for those who haven't posted in a long time. If you know you can't post for a while due to life circumstances, let me know. I totally know how that goes. :) But we really want people to be involved with this blog who WANT to be. :)

4. Along the lines of not being able to post, I am taking a break from taking charge over the blog. Many of you probably know I am 2,000 miles from home right now and visiting lots of family and friends. I feel like I have really dropped the ball with making sure everything is done on time with this blog, and I apologize for that. I feel like I can't give full attention to this blog and to my family that I rarely get to see. So, Mindy is taking over for me for the next few weeks. Hopefully having her take over that part will let me take part in the challenges again. :) Her email is on the sidebar if you have any questions. If you want to submit a word for Wednesday Challenges, shoot her an email and she can get that scheduled. She will be doing Saturday posts in my place. And I know she will do a great job with it. I hope you all understand!!

Okay, is anyone still with me?

I know this was long, just wanted to clean things up around here and get back on track. :) I hope you are all having a wonderful spring/summer....this is such a great time of year!!

See you at tomorrow's challenge!

Sweet Treat

I'm in the same boat. I took this yesterday afternoon but then I started preping for our camping trip (leaving in a few hours) and I totally forgot to post. SORRY!

CC always welcome!

Sweet: Sweets for my Sweetie

I didn't get to post this in time (even though I took it on time), but I still wanted to post it.

Every year after Easter, I buy a ton of Cadbury Creme Eggs because my husband loves them. I hide them from him, and then give him one at a time throughout the year as he "earns" them. Usually it's for doing something really nice for me, or being especially great when I've had a bad day.

CC

(See my runners up here.)

Voting: Sweet

We had some totally SWEET pictures this time and I don't know about you... but I HAD to get some ice cream (and cake.... and a Snickers bar) at the end of looking at these!

Let's VOTE!

Now, here's da way we gonna do.... Only vote for your FAVORITE picture... just the ONE. Shout-outs are always welcome!

Our most recent winners are: Katy with the One Year Older Bday Cake And Mindy's Beautiful Newborn Baby photo





(addition: It's 12:26am here in Idaho when I posted this... but if you're still wanting to post tonight... please feel free-- I just want to go to bed and mornings are a tad crazy for me so remembering to post this in the morn... not too reliable! Sorry if there's any confusion!)

Sweet Baby Lettuce

Yes... I know this is a bit lame. But hey, it SAYS sweet. Right on the package! ;)

Sweet as honey

Sadly, this isn't eligible for voting 'cause I took it over the weekend at a local farmer's market. I'll gladly take cc on it, though. It's sooc, iso 100, f/5.6, 1/100 sec.

Bittersweet, That's Life

Finally back from my vacation which was sweet and came home to this in the sink which is obviously not. Just kind of sealed the reality was back in full swing.

I will do a make up for the more challenge as well cus I had it taken just no internet to post it. I call this "More Rum" or well in her case more lollipops.

Such A Sweet Tooth

I have had SUCH a sweet tooth lately. So today, I let Emma pick something from the bakery at the grocery store. She chose this little tiny sprinkly cake. She loves it.

Sweet little baby butt

I went down to the lake today in search of a cute baby playing in the lake... I was trying to hide since I had my telephoto lens on, I didnt want mom's freaking that some stranger was taking pictures of thier babies... luck was on my side when I spoted this sweet little girl playing at the edge of the lake and her mother's back was to me so I began shooting quickly! I love love her sweet little diaper padded baby butt! Her bathing suit is cute too!

Home Sweet Home

Oh how much I love this picture. I know it isn't the best picture in the world but it is one of the sweetest sights to me. Those are the steps to my house. And that box, oh that box brought home my wonderful camera. Which is now repaired free of charge and both of my cards after re-formatting are in perfect order.
As for the picture, in PS I hand selected the box out, cut and then pasted it back in. To create a second layer. Then I selected the background and made it black and white. I tried doing the box black and white too but it needed to color to make you see it.
-CC- Always welcome. Oh it's so good to be back!

Just so you know, the Service Center had to replace the CF Drive Deck. Which is the part that writes files, and reads files from the memory card. The whole thing was faulty. So there was no way they could fight the warranty. I'm not sure they would have Sony has been really good during this whole ordeal. The tech even called me the day he finished to let me know it would soon be in the mail. And they sent me the tracking code to follow it home. I am very happy with these guys.

Such a Sweetie.....

Yeah RIGHT! Today my delightful daughter came along with me to a park so I could shoot some sweet smelling flowers (I think that Brittney and Susan and I were on the same wave length today!). My little Sweet child decided that all she could manage to do was throw tantrum after tantrum.
She was NOT liking that I was taking her picture either. (Her arm is up in mid-swat to push my camera away). I love that the clouds look as ominous as her attitude!

I love that all I had to do to this picture was download and add a border. I love how it turned out!

Sweet Kiss

I'm a non-shy lame-O. Here's why. While walking about, trying to find something SWEET... I found these two. A cute couple on a walk, holding hands and smiling- it was irresistibly sweet! So I wandered over, introduced myself and told them I'm not a creep, just wanting to get a shot of something SWEET. We had a laugh, but they happy to help me out. I asked them to kiss, hold hands and do some gazing-deep-into-each-other's-eyes. I had fun.

I think they did too.

~Sweets = Weakness~

For those of you who show restrain I admire your strength. I however, am weak when it comes to sweets. It doesn't help when your hubby gets home and says, "don't you want to go get donuts?".....Yummmy :)

The Sweet Smell of Roses

The rose bushes in my yard are beginning to bloom and man oh man do they smell, you guessed it, sweet. This was a fun picture to take. I was taking a picture of some of my other roses and looked over to see the setting sun shining right on this little beauty. I couldn't resist. I set my camera to spot metering to give it the dark background and shot away. 50mm, f/2, 1/2500 sec, iso100.

CC welcome.

Challenge: SWEET

Hello all!!

sorry it's late... just thought we'd rattle ya by posting a few hours later... are ya rattled?

Today's Challenge word is SWEET
I'm sure we're all getting into the Dog Days of Summer and can easily find many SWEET things to snap up... the problem is narrowing down all those options, am I right or am I right? Ok, now be CREATIVE, KOOKY and have FUN! Remember... "Would I frame this?" "Am I proud of this?" and "Does this represent the Challenge Word well?"

Now, Go have at it!

Tuesday Tutorial

Sorry I'm a little late in the day, I have been out buying things for my 25 day cross country road trip thats coming up

Here is a quick before and after. It's hard to show on here but try it on your pictures and you will see some small but really nice improvements on your pictures

For todays tutorial I just wanted to show a few basic thinks on Photoshop that I do on every single picture I fix up. You have to look closely to see a huge differance but they are little things that really help

Here is my picture right out of the camera.

On the top bar click on Image (2 buttons to the right of the File button) then adjustments then Birghtness/Contrast slide the contrast bar up to about 8 (Sometimes I do it a little higher, depends on the picture just play with it and see how much you like. I like doing this better than saturating, sometimes you will have to adjust the curves again after adding contrast.

Then click on Filter-sharpen-Unsharp mask. Make the amount 27 the radius 10.5 and the Threshold 0. This just makes all the edges sharper and more defined. When you do it to your picture go to the history and look at your before and after that will show you the biggest difference.

Then I just burned the edges a little bit and I think it just makes a nice picture a little better. Try it out see how it works with your pictures

WINNERS: More

Good morning! I hope you all had wonderful weekends full of fun and happiness. I know I did. I'm pretty sure a lot of you did, too, because we didn't have very many people vote, but that's okay.

Most fun goes to Katy with her birthday cake. She was the hands-down winner for this category!

The votes for best overall were pretty spread out, but Mindy won this category with her beautiful newborn photo.

Congrats ladies! Stick around for a tutorial later in the day!

APOLOGIES!

Hello! I just realized it's Monday...and that made me think about how I forgot to post a feature photographer...and Mission 24 business...and I haven't gotten to post pictures or comments...

And I hope I have not let you all down.

PLEASE forgive me for being so in and out right now. I am visiting family...lots of family...and we have yet to really settle into one place right now. I am sure things will calm down at the end of this week...but until then, please forgive me for getting so off track!

No big news to bring up today...at least not that I can think.

So....keep capturing those awesome shots and I will be back later this week!
Rachel

VOTING: More

Good morning, and welcome to today's edition of VOTING! Great submissions by everyone. I'm tempted to choose "yummiest" as a voting category today because we had a lot of food-related submissions, but it leaves too many people out of the running. Here's what we've got instead:

Most fun
Best overall
Shoutouts


AprilF and Teryn won the last challenge, so let's give everyone else a chance this time. Get your votes in by midnight, and have a fabulous Memorial Day!

More: Can't wait to have more

I'm noticing a trend. There's been lots of food this challenge. I've got more (no pun intended).

Saturday was my husband's birthday. He hates that I do anything for it, but I made a special cake anyway. It turned out that he was actually really looking forward to eating it, and once he did, he couldn't wait to have more. Between the two of us other friends, the cake is already gone, but it was pretty yummy.

I actually am really not satisfied with this picture as a picture. I didn't really like much of anything I took this time, but this is pretty good (and fun) of my husband, who hates having his picture taken.

CC

(Oh, and here's the recipe if you want it...I don't like cake at all, and I like chocolate cake even less, but this was excellent: Root Beer Float Cake)

One More Day

Some days I wish that being a 'Mom' as a job didn't entail cleaning, errands, chores, things to do other than just playing with my kids, but unfortunately life doesn't happen like that. Life is messy, time is always running out, and good intentions often fall by the way side.

This challenge really got me thinking. If I could have more of something, what would it be? The words to the Diamond Rio song, 'One More Day' came to mind.
I think the one thing that I truly would want more of, is more time with my sweet family. .

This picture is taken at sunset just as a storm was rolling in. .
One more day in the books.

More Time with my girls

It's only 9:00 on the west coast so I hope that I am in time for posting. We have been so busy all weekend and I didn't get out and do some photography like I wanted to but I knew my girls were coming for Sunday dinner tonight. I always want to spent more time with them so my photo shoot was all about them. They are all grown up now and live away from home so I love having as much time as I can with them. Missing from this picture is our oldest daughter who lives in Hawaii.

More photos in one

I decided to use this challenge to learn to do something that I have wanted to do for a long time: panoramas. This is two photos stiched together with Arcsoft Panorama software. It was so easy to do, I can't believe I didn't try it sooner!

22 mm, F 16, 1/60 sec, ISO 200

For choose your challenge, I did a challenge that I missed earlier: vintage. This is my friend's antique dresser that has been repainted red. I love the colors and the drawer pulls. I can't decide if this photo would be better with more of the pulls in focus or not.

50 mm, F 4.8, 1/50 sec, ISO 200

CC please.

More water

Everything in my yard needs more water than I seem to be able to give. It's ok though because the warm weather is worth the work. We got a nice spring shower today so I didn't have to water anything except my neighbors flowers that are under their car port (they are away on vacation).

This picture is of the water spewing out the the faucet outside in my flower bed. I love the colors and the look of the water. I played with it a lot in photoshop in filter galleries and I can't remember exactly what I did. I know I sharpened it and added contrast.

More Old Stuff

I love old farm equipment. You probably already know this. Today we visited with some great friends of ours and they live on a huge farm full of cool old stuff. It was a great day.

f/1.8, 1/1000, ISO 200

More Sand Please!

Give me more Beaches to relax on!

set-(f5.6, ISO 100)

P.S.-Border, Sig, Crop.

~More than meets the eye~

I love these old places that you pull up to hesitantly..hoping not to disturb anyone, hop out of the car..camera in hand and slowly look into the broken windows...and find......treasure!!! I find such joy in finding these little forgotten momentos of the past...I always wonder why anyone would leave stuff like this behind.

I want s'mores!

Like every other family in the valley, we decided to go camping for Memorial Day weekend... and it was worth all the work (and coming home early because my kiddos had the pukes!) because of this:

Perfectly toasted, golden mello perfection! My hubby is a genius when it comes to s'mores! And I want MORE s'mores!

I loved the fire in this shot! Edited in Photoshop with the Vintage action (that's right, I finally took the time to figure out actions, and I'm in L-O-V-E!)

-CC-

***Update*** I've just noticed that when you click on other people's pictures they get bigger, but mine DON'T! Any ideas why and how to fix it?!? Thanks!

Heaven Help Me

I want MORE babies!! Maybe I better not do these newborn photo shoots anymore...

My friend just adopted a beautiful baby boy, and they couldn't be happier! They got the call on Monday evening, and he was born Wednesday morning. 5 lbs. 14 oz., and sweeter than sweet!

More Popcorn, Please

50mm, f/4.5, 1/60, ISO100

4 kids with only 2 popcorn holders results in a hearing a chorus of "Mo-Mo" with an occasional "Peeese"