www.jlevphoto.blogspot.com
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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Copyright
Anyone know of a good way to copyright photos? I'm a little worried about my pictures being stolen. I know I can always put a watermark on the picture but that can easily be taken off by anyone. I'm not really sure why anyone would go through the trouble of stealing someone elses pictures, it's not THAT hard to produce good photos so why not learn instead of steal? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Not a lot to blog about these days. We spent all day yesterday worrying about the crawl space under the house flooding because the sump pump wasnt plugged in. We basically flooded the street when we turned it on. Oops! Then we spent a few hours at Lowes looking through carpet because our upstairs needs to be done ASAP.
I'm a still a little undecided about the name we have picked for our little guy. I think we might end up changing it and maybe not telling anyone until after hes born. Is that mean? lol. I like the name Emmett but it just doesn't click with me. Not to mention everyone thinks we are naming our kids after twilight characters which makes me want to puke. Seriously.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Adbrite
I signed up for Adbrite and I'm not sure it's going to last long. I visited my page and within about a minute I had a full page ad pop up. Annoying! We'll see how it goes I guess.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Photoshop
I've been working in Photoshop for years. I started when I was about 11 with photoshop 7. I was home schooled after the 6th grade and my favorite thing to do was design layouts for web pages (I also ran my own website for awhile but that's another story). I stopped when I went back to school for the 11th grade and have since picked it up again. I don't remember a lot so I'm like a newbie to it again. I want to start posting tutorials and stuff on here of things I learn and maybe help someone else out. I'm gonna start today! I'm not very good with explaining things so in order to understand what I'm talking about you'll probably have to have a little photoshop knowledge already.
Here is a picture of B that I took today while playing outside (taking advantage of the 45 degree weather here in Missouri!). Anyways, the top picture is SOOC (straight out of camera) and the bottom is after processing. I love the way it looks and it is really really easy. I rarely shoot in RAW, I did this using a high resolution JPG.
1. Open a picture in photoshop
2. Run an action.... for this one I used the free Coffeeshop Butterscotch Vintage action. There are a LOT of free actions out there and they make editing pictures so much easier.
3. When I first ran the action it made the right side of her face really dark so I selected the Dodge tool and went over the dark part a few times to lighten it up a bit.
4. To make her eyes pop a little I used the selection tool and went around both eyes then went to Images < Adjustments < Brightness/Contrast, I upped the brightness about 10-15 and the contrast 20-25.
And that's it! I'm sure this is totally confusing haha. I will do another tutorial soon with more detail and pictures. This is just a basic understanding of what I do.
Oh, and don't mind the deflated pool in the background of the picture. I actually forgot it was in the yard since it snowed like CRAZY and covered it completely. Oops!
Here is a picture of B that I took today while playing outside (taking advantage of the 45 degree weather here in Missouri!). Anyways, the top picture is SOOC (straight out of camera) and the bottom is after processing. I love the way it looks and it is really really easy. I rarely shoot in RAW, I did this using a high resolution JPG.
1. Open a picture in photoshop
2. Run an action.... for this one I used the free Coffeeshop Butterscotch Vintage action. There are a LOT of free actions out there and they make editing pictures so much easier.
3. When I first ran the action it made the right side of her face really dark so I selected the Dodge tool and went over the dark part a few times to lighten it up a bit.
4. To make her eyes pop a little I used the selection tool and went around both eyes then went to Images < Adjustments < Brightness/Contrast, I upped the brightness about 10-15 and the contrast 20-25.
And that's it! I'm sure this is totally confusing haha. I will do another tutorial soon with more detail and pictures. This is just a basic understanding of what I do.
Oh, and don't mind the deflated pool in the background of the picture. I actually forgot it was in the yard since it snowed like CRAZY and covered it completely. Oops!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Sorry the pictures are a bit crappy, the first one was taken at night and I couldn't get B to sit for very long in the second one. The first is a bow holder that I made the other night. It turned out so cute and it was super easy! Its made out of an 8x10 picture frame that I sanded down a little and painted then hot glued the fabric and ribbon on. I also made the little bow, I'm proud of it since I've tried and tried to make cute boutique looking bows but always fail! I think this one actually came out pretty cute. I can't wait to make a trip to Joanns soon so I can buy some more small ribbon, I'm feeling creative.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Parenting
When I had B I was very strict with how I wanted to do things. I didn't want to co-sleep because I figured it would be a terrible habit to break, I didn't want to rock her to sleep because then she wouldn't know how to self-soothe and yadda yadda blah blah blah!
I used to lay her down in her crib and pat her to sleep but she started to hate it so I rocked her. I have been rocking her little chunky butt every night since she was about 9 months old, I tried not to worry about it being a hard habit to break and instead focus on spending that time with her. About 2 weeks ago I tried to rock her to sleep, around 8pm which is her normal bedtime. She refused to sit still she wanted to run around so I let her. I figured maybe she just wasn't quite ready for bed yet. About 30 minutes later I tried again and the same thing, she threw a fit. At this point I knew she was getting tired she was showing all of the signs and I really didn't have a clue what to do so on a whim I took her upstairs and put her in bed and walked away. We listened for a bit expecting her to scream but instead, silence. After about 10 minutes I decided to go check on her and sure enough she was sleeping. I figured for sure that was a fluke. So the next day at nap time I tried to rock her and it didn't work so instead of fighting her I took her straight upstairs and laid her down in her crib, gave her kisses then went back downstairs. She put herself to sleep. This has been consistently happening for the past 2 weeks. And now she lets me know she's ready for bed by pointing to the stairs. She did this all by herself and I am so proud! I hate that, at one point, I actually listened to other peoples opinions on how I was raising B. We even tried letting her cry-it-out because I thought for sure that she would be rocked until the age of 28. I was so wrong.
Just recently I stopped listening to what everyone else thought of my parenting and started to trust myself a little more. We are going to potty train when SHE is ready, we are going to toss the binky out completely when SHE is ready and if she ever wants to sleep in bed with mommy and daddy then I'm going to let her.
I used to lay her down in her crib and pat her to sleep but she started to hate it so I rocked her. I have been rocking her little chunky butt every night since she was about 9 months old, I tried not to worry about it being a hard habit to break and instead focus on spending that time with her. About 2 weeks ago I tried to rock her to sleep, around 8pm which is her normal bedtime. She refused to sit still she wanted to run around so I let her. I figured maybe she just wasn't quite ready for bed yet. About 30 minutes later I tried again and the same thing, she threw a fit. At this point I knew she was getting tired she was showing all of the signs and I really didn't have a clue what to do so on a whim I took her upstairs and put her in bed and walked away. We listened for a bit expecting her to scream but instead, silence. After about 10 minutes I decided to go check on her and sure enough she was sleeping. I figured for sure that was a fluke. So the next day at nap time I tried to rock her and it didn't work so instead of fighting her I took her straight upstairs and laid her down in her crib, gave her kisses then went back downstairs. She put herself to sleep. This has been consistently happening for the past 2 weeks. And now she lets me know she's ready for bed by pointing to the stairs. She did this all by herself and I am so proud! I hate that, at one point, I actually listened to other peoples opinions on how I was raising B. We even tried letting her cry-it-out because I thought for sure that she would be rocked until the age of 28. I was so wrong.
Just recently I stopped listening to what everyone else thought of my parenting and started to trust myself a little more. We are going to potty train when SHE is ready, we are going to toss the binky out completely when SHE is ready and if she ever wants to sleep in bed with mommy and daddy then I'm going to let her.
Monday, January 11, 2010
How do busy moms blog so often? I only have 1 and it's really difficult for me to get on the computer. For some reason I've been getting up early just to make breakfast, strange? I have been craving eggs, pancakes and french toast. So what have we had the past week? You guessed it; eggs, pancakes and french toast. This is probably horrible to admit but when I have a nice big, fulfilling breakfast I stay full for the majority of the day. Normally I'm not hungry again until around 5 which for us is dinner time. It doesn't help that I already feel like Emmett no longer has any space in my stomach. Is that normal for only 24 weeks? I'm assuming not. I definitley think he'll be bigger then B but I also predicted her to be big and she came out a whopping 7lb 7oz. So I guess we'll see!
We have officially started our journey with NO CABLE. The cable company decided they wanted to charge me 500 dollar fees to have everything switched over to the new address so I said UH NO THANKS. The crappy tv isn't even worth half of that. We still get basic channels but those are free. It was funny because Patrick was like 'YAY NOW WE DONT HAVE TO WATCH AMERICAN IDOL!' so I turn on fox 4 and I'm just waiting for him to notice that we, indeed, DO have the channel and we WILL be watching tomorrow night. He got pretty upset, he cant stand the show but I went through a whole season of Ice Road Truckers without complaining so he can SHOVE IT. In the nicest way possible, of course ;). So dinner is just about done and it smells pretty amazing (tacos!!!), I wanted to blog a little about the documentary "The Business of Being Born" but I guess I'll save that for another day. Stay tuned haha.
We have officially started our journey with NO CABLE. The cable company decided they wanted to charge me 500 dollar fees to have everything switched over to the new address so I said UH NO THANKS. The crappy tv isn't even worth half of that. We still get basic channels but those are free. It was funny because Patrick was like 'YAY NOW WE DONT HAVE TO WATCH AMERICAN IDOL!' so I turn on fox 4 and I'm just waiting for him to notice that we, indeed, DO have the channel and we WILL be watching tomorrow night. He got pretty upset, he cant stand the show but I went through a whole season of Ice Road Truckers without complaining so he can SHOVE IT. In the nicest way possible, of course ;). So dinner is just about done and it smells pretty amazing (tacos!!!), I wanted to blog a little about the documentary "The Business of Being Born" but I guess I'll save that for another day. Stay tuned haha.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
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