Throwing Marshmallows

I finally get to cross one thing off my “big” to-do list (as opposed to my daily ongoing to-do list). I have finally finished my first Blurb photo book!

One of my Christmas presents to our parents was an IOU for a great photo book of the boys. I had planned on doing a fairly easy to pull together book from QOOP but then around Thanksgiving I discovered Blurb and realized that even though it would take more time to pull together, I just had to do it.

What I love about Blurb is the variety of layouts that you can choose for your book. In most of the other photo books that I had looked at, you pretty much just got to choose how many pictures on a page, maybe a few captions and that was it. Blurb’s layouts give you far more flexibility than that (and if you know photoshop, you can even design your own layouts). The layout options make it really stand above the crowd as far as photobooks. It became much more of a creative effort, as opposed to merely a compilation of photos.

The free software was very easy to use (although it is a resource hog). I am currently uploading my completed book and will order 1 sample copy and hopefully if all goes well, will be able to order the ones for our parents really soon. I can’t wait and am a bit nervous. It is one thing to see it on the screen, another thing to see it in print!

I had not planned on it taking quite this long, but between things like Christmas, birthdays, homeschooling, planning two seminars, getting a new laptop and other stuff, life happens I guess. I will say that I was good…I have been wanting to move on to another creative project I have in mind, but I made myself finish this before starting something new.

I will say that I really enjoyed this process…it was hard for me to consider it done…I kept finding more edits and adjustments to make. I am sure that next time I will do some things differently. But it is done and ordered, so now all I can do is wait and see how it turns out!

Back in November I found out about an online backup service called Mozy. For $5 a month, you get unlimited online backup. The software is easy to use. The intitial backup did take an extremely long time to run (I left it running overnight and even then it took a few days if I remember correctly) but since then the backups have been fairly quick and I have been able to run them in the background.

I realized that with all my photos, I really needed something that was idiot proof (i.e. automatic). I had been doing manual backups to an external hard drive when I remembered (maybe once a month?) I realized that this was extremely risky (and time consuming to do) so the idea that Mozy would take care of all that for me was appealing.

Over the past month or two, my computer has been acting really sluggish. I kept getting disk full errors and it did not matter how much clean-up or compression I did, I could not consistently get enough free disk space. This is not surprising, as my photos take up a lot of room and I have been playing around with Photoshop Elements editing features more lately. This means that I eat through a lot of hard drive storage. I was outgrowing my computer.

To get more room, I moved 4 years of photos (1998-2002) off my hard drive and onto my external hard drive. This worried me, because they would no longer be included in my Mozy backup. But I figured that I did not do much with that drive, so they would be ok. However, I was soon getting Disk Full errors again.

Yup. Time for a new computer, and with my 40th birthday coming up in June, an early birthday present seemed a perfect way to rationalize it. But what kind should I get? I have always been a PC person. No particular reason, probably because that is what I used mostly at work and what I was comfortable using. But back in February (in time for his birthday), Jeff, the ultimate PC and Microsoft guy, came home with a Mac. Seeing as how most of what I do is photography related, I decided to make the switch.

So two days ago, Jeff brought home my very own MacBook. I have been having fun playing around with it, figuring out how to transfer licenses, getting everything set up, moving files. And then disaster struck.

I was using my external hard drive to copy files between my computers and I unplugged it instead of “ejecting” it (this seems to be a mac thing). When I connected it again, it had an error saying that it was not readable! I tried rebooting, connecting it to other machines, to no avail. I have no idea what happened. But it seems to be dead.

Now this would not have been too big of a deal except for the fact that I had not copied over those 4 years of photos yet! Those photos for which I did not have another copy! Jeff said that he would take the drive into the office and see if he could salvage them, but I had no idea if that would work.

But then I remembered Mozy. I was not sure how long they kept copies once files were deleted from your computer, but I figured it was worth checking. And lo and behold, all the photos where there! It was easy peasy to restore them to my PC where they are now sitting while we try to figure out how we are going to transfer the rest of the files. Whew!

Needless to say, I strongly recommend Mozy, especially if you have irreplaceable files like photos. Don’t wait until something crashes.

And now I need to get back to setting up my Mac. It is taking a bit of getting used to…some things are definitely different but so far I like it. And can I say how awesome it is to have a HUGE hard drive again?

Stephanie (who has not copied over her signature file to the new Mac yet!)

I came across the Arrow of Time today and found it utterly fascinating! (HT: Photojojo) An Argentinian photographer, Diego Goldberg takes headshots of each member of his family on June 16th of every year. Starting in 1976 (just he and his wife) and continuing through 2007, it shows not only how his family grew, but how they aged as well.

Be sure to check out his three boys…each one has a year when they make the jump from looking like a “boy” to looking like a “man”. I also got a kick out of how much his wife’s hairstyle changed and how much his did not.

I guess as homeschoolers, this is something that we might want to think about…if our kids were in school, we could get the “school pictures” which would chronicle our kids as they grow. I think that there is something to be said about taking pictures in the same place each year…

I have accidentally done this a bit over the years:

Taken in 2003 (the boys were 6 and 3 years old)

Taken in 2005 (Boys were 8 and 5 years old)

Taken 2007 (Boys were 10 and 7 years old)

I think that I want to do something a bit more consciously…I will have to think on that. I had hoped to take pictures at the end of every summer on our dock, but so far have only managed to remember to do it for two years…

Taken 2004 (Boys were 7 and 4 years old)

Taken 2006 (Boys were 9 and 6 years old). Two years sure does make a difference! And for the sake of full disclosure, I forgot to take the picture at the end of the summer so ended up taking it when we were down for Christmas!

I also have to remember to try to take the picture from the same angle…I think it would have a better effect…

Hope that you all enjoyed my walk down memory lane…which seems very appropriate since Kyle turned 8 years old today! Happy Birthday to my little guy (who is not so little any more!)

For a wonderful photographic look at this holiday season, check out the Tis the Season Photoblog. They post a new holiday photo each day, sent in by a variety of people.

Very nicely done and a great way to treat yourself during this busy holiday time.

Enjoy!

I took this picture at Hain’s Point back in April. The statue is called The Awakening and I really loved this shot of Kyle.

But what makes this picture really cool is the fact that it originally looked like:

See those annoying kids in the yellow in the background? I took them out using Photoshop Elements! How cool is that? They really ruined the picture, so I decided to try my hand with the clone tool for the first time. Basically it lets you pick a portion of the photo to copy over another…so I copied the mulch and the background buildings and tree to cover up the annoying people.

This really saved the picture, because cropping the people out would have thrown the balance completely off.

Yes, I am easily thrilled. Especially when it comes to cool things that save my photographs…

~Stephanie

A little bit ago I talked about how I was enjoying using Picasa. At the time (ok, so it was only about a month ago!) it seemed to be what I needed…nothing fancy, easy to use. I had tried other more complicated photo software but I just did not have the time to figure out how to use it.

Well, that was then. This is now!

Not June over at These Go To Eleven told me about Photoshop Elements. Under $100 and at the time, Amazon was also running a $30 rebate and it sounded great. More editing options and Not June just raved about the photo organization features.

All I can say is wow! I will admit that I am a bit intimidated by the full-blown Photoshop but Elements is just perfect and Not June was so right about the organizational features. Actually I haven’t even used the editing features yet because I have been having so much fun organizing. From what I have seen it has a fair number of advanced editing features (you can do layers and masking and tons of advanced editing and special effects) but so far seems very easy to use.

The fun part for me so far has been going through all my photos (all 5000+ of them) and categorizing them. I had previously tried to do a little bit of this with folders but mostly I just saved by date. As I needed them, I would pull pictures out into separate folders…which meant a lot of duplication and having to remember where photos were saved. Now I can use tags and set up collections (for events etc). The flexibility is incredible. So cool.

I especially like being able to view the photos by date rather then by file location. And I have realized how many of the dates on my pictures are off! At one point I must have had my camera set wrong because I had tons of pictures for May, June and July 2007 yet none for 2006! So it is taking me a little while to clean things up, but it is going to be incredible.

The only thing that I am having to really get used to is moving files around…it can be hard to remember if I am moving the actual files on my computer or just in Photoshop. It can be a bit confusing, but I am getting more used to it the more that I use it.

I seriously doubt that I will grow out of Elements any time soon. Thanks so much Not June for the recommendation!

Of course, this is yet something that will have to compete with my blogging time…has anyone out there figured out how to add more hours in the day? Or reduce the amount of sleep I need? Anyone? Please?

~Stephanie

And it is stretching my left-brainedness…you see I want each post to have a general focus (makes more sense for categorizing and if I want to refer back to it…) and this one is going to be all over the place!

First off, Marjorie had just an awesome, awesome post up over at Life Without School: How Much Is Enough. I have lots I want to say, but don’t have the time right now. I share her confusion and her sympathy for the “reluctant reader” she witnessed at the library. I really want to find some time to explore this a bit further.

JoVE posted about how she played around a bit with taking pictures. Looks like she had a lot of fun. I know that I have been. I also wanted to pass on a good resource for learning more about photography. Digital Photography School is a great blog for amateur photographers…well written, very accessable (you don’t have to know tons about photography to understand it) and a variety of topics. I have learned a lot just from hanging out there. I especially love the tips I have gotten on composition.

OK…I had a little bit more, but I think that I will put it into a separate post…

~Stephanie

I have recently started playing around with google’s Picasa and have been having a lot of fun! It is no photoshop, but for right now, it is just what I need. Not to mention that it is free!

I had tried another program PhotoPlus but found it was way to complicated and I just do not have the time I need to really figure how to use it. So I figure that I will stick with Picasa to do the basic stuff and when I have some time, I can try to figure out how to use PhotoPlus.

Picasa allows you to organize and edit your photos. Nothing too exciting, but enough to play around with and get started. You can fix red-eye, add fill light, play with contrast, saturation, fix crooked horizons, sharpen the focus and do lots of special effects like black and white. I really like the interface and found it really easy to get up and running.

Like I said, it is not near as powerful as Photoshop, but for right now it does exactly what I need.

It allows me to take a picture like this:

And turn it into this:

Or this:

Or this:

And did I mention that it is free?

Now I just need to figure out how long to keep the backups that it makes…I am going to start running out of disk space soon…

~Stephanie