Just a Swingin’ – The Edit

So last week, I posted some photos of my daughter, Kelsey, that I took at my photography class. I encouraged my readers to look through the unedited version of the photos and pick their favorite. And the winner was, this one:

Here are the settings from the original photo: ISO 400, 200mm, f/5.6, 1/160 sec

Then I pulled the photo into Lightroom 4 (which I am loving by the way!) and did a little bit of editing:

In addition to these settings, I also did a skin softening on her face and a post-crop vignetting in the amount of –24. Now I am still learning the edit part of photos, because I really never thought it was necessary. Since taking these couple of classes, I am now able to see that even just a little bit of editing can make a big difference in my photos.

So again, here is the before:

And here is the after:

Now if someone had moved her hair away from across her eyes, that would have been helpful! But I am not by any means at expert at Photoshop Elements yet, so I am not even going to attempt to edit those away!

So what do you think? Does it help to see the screenshot of what I did in Lightroom?

Just A Swingin’

It is much too beautiful of a pre-spring day here in California to stay cooped up in the house writing a blog post today. So today, I am going to share with you some pictures I took yesterday at my photography class. Kelsey came along with me since we were meeting the guys later, so she ended up becoming one of the subjects. Our project was to try to photograph her in our instructor’s backyard in the late afternoon while she was swinging on the swing. The pictures I am going to post today are straight out of the camera, no editing! I have to warn you, this is going to be a photo heavy post! But be sure to pay attention, because this is going to be a reader participation post! Be on the look out for your favorite…

Here are the photos I took yesterday:

Did you find a favorite?

Great! Tell me which picture is your favorite (just count down from the top picture and give me which number it is in the comments) and next week, what ever picture gets the most votes, I will post the before and after photo and tell you what I end up doing in Lightroom to get the after picture (which I will edit before next week!) Sound like a deal?

What will you be photographing this weekend?