3 Sisters – 6

With eager expectation, I awaited for PicMonkey’s collage application. It’s been available for a few days already, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it out. It didn’t disappoint.

You can create your own collage in seconds, literally, and for free using PicMonkey. Without any prior knowledge on how to use this application, I got this result with a few simple clicks. I didn’t even bother editing my photos and my collage turned out awesome!

2010 Soccer World Cup, South Africa

Here are the steps I took: I clicked on Collage, three empty frames appeared, which I rotated with one click below the frames. I then clicked on the blue box with Upload Photos to the left, and chose my three pictures from my documents. I then dragged them over to the empty frames by clicking on the mouse and holding it down. I placed them where I wanted them to be. I clicked on the paint palette, wondering what it was for, and saw that it changes the background color. I chose the dropper and picked a color from my photos to replicate. I liked the green in Jessica’s T-shirt and went with that. My final step was to save it in good quality, not best quality as I hadn’t resized my photos earlier and didn’t want a large file size. That’s because I don’t want to upload large file size images on my blogs or else my blogs will load slower.

Climbing Rocks – 3

I tried to capture an action shot of Jeremiah jumping off the rocks, but it wasn’t easy to get. My camera has a slow reaction time from when you press the button to when it actually takes the picture. I think Jeremiah had to jump four times before I got the photo below and even then he’s almost hit the ground. For this reason, I’m posting two photos today. The photo directly opposite helps to tell the story of the one below.

On my About page you can read more about me and my digital camera.

Isn’t She Lovely – 9

Little Amanda looking lovely in a summer dress

This photo was taken just before Amanda’s 2nd birthday. She loves getting dressed up and so she asked to wear this pretty dress just for fun. She was looking so lovely that I asked her to pose for me. It was my idea to have her stand with her back to me and to turn a bit to face the camera. I wanted to capture the bow at the back of the dress and her curly hair. Thankfully, she was willing to humor me and this was the result… a moment captured on film (or whatever they call it these days in our digital world). I liked this dress so much on her that I decided it would be the dress she wore for her 2nd birthday a few weeks later.

I recommend you read My First Cameras and how I began as an amateur photographer of which I am still today.

Isn’t She Lovely – 6

Here are two more photos of Amanda at the Cape Town Scratch Patch. I loved the painted mineshaft background and miner’s car full of gemstones, so I took the opportunity and placed Amanda in it. She had a lot of fun with the multi-colored stones and I’m glad that I captured her enjoyment with my digital camera.

Amanda Sleeping – 4

This is a very recent photo of Amanda and my last one in this series. I used PicMonkey to edit this picture. They keep adding new features. One of them is Photo Corners and I used that application here. It gives my photo that scrapbooking look. In a sense, my photography blog is my digital scrapbook. All of PicMonkey’s features are free at the moment, so now is a great time to give PicMonkey a try. I’m very happy with my font in Picasa 3 for this blog and so I used theirs, although PicMonkey has really cool font applications to choose from.

Here is the image cropped with no photo editing. She looks like a sleeping angel. Which of these two images is your favorite? The question: to edit or not to edit. I’d love to hear from you. Also, make sure you check out my parenting blog at Amanda’s Books and More where you’ll find lots of fun things to read and be inspired.

Amanda Sleeping – 2

I used to get upset when my roll of film was developed and the colors came out wrong. Some shops developed your film using the right “mix” for the type of film it was. For example, Kodak film got a different treatment to Fuji film. I was otherwise at the mercy of whoever developed my film. All of that has changed now with the digital world we live in. I don’t have to get upset, because I can use either Picasa or PicMonkey for free and change my colors all I want. Today I’m posting an unedited image and an edited image and you can see for yourself the difference between the two.

This picture of Amanda sleeping was taken in 2011. She arranged her dolls like that with her favorite broken Baby Born swaddled up and Piglet. To me it looks as if she was one of the dolls, she’s so cute.

Related stories:

• My First Cameras
• Broken but Precious