The Night Sky, Nature by Design
We all need something that inspires us, the universe inspires me! Its hard to believe that there is so much beauty around us and we often don’t take the time to stop and see it!
Late in the evening on March 1st I got a call from my husband, he was excitedly telling me to check the sky watch maps at Space Weather to see the Aurora intensity. When I pulled up the web site I mirrored his excitement and said “Heck yeah, we are so going sky watching tonight!” Since we live in Northern Minnesota we have the opportunity to see Aurora’s when they dip low enough, its not often though.
What does this mean? Well, first of all the sun has to be active and when it is it sends out solar flares that can interfere with our atmosphere and cause geomagnetic storms. OK, this is the really simplified explanation, there are a lot of factors and more scientific stuff but I’m sure you don’t really want to hear all that. If you are interested check out SpaceWeather.com for more info. Our atmosphere is always slightly active but when its more active we get a nice light show of green and sometimes purple ribbons to the north. Because of the light pollution from cities most people that live in the northern areas still don’t see them. In order to catch them in Northern Minnesota we still have to go out to remote areas and use long exposure photography. On the night of March 1st we were hitting K5 to K6 for intensity, which means it was dipping low into the upper United States and perfect for sky viewing.
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Winter Fun!
You can’t be serious and work every day! I recently took the kids out to enjoy the sun, although it was extremely cold! Living in Northern Minnesota you do learn to acclimate a bit and even at -10 we were out playing. I should also add that hand warmers are your friend. Normally I shy away from taking photo graphs outdoors in the winter because all the white scares me. It can be tricky to get your camera settings right so that the pictures aren’t all over exposed, or blue. We took a chance and had a blast in the snow.
So I’ll leave you with a few pictures and the reminder that you shouldn’t work too hard, you have to take time to go out and play as well! Want to see more Northern Minnesota Photography? Check out Nate Paul Images for more photos taken by myself and my husband.
Spyder3 Monitor Calibration Tool
So I’ve waited far too long to get around to playing with a calibration tool for my monitor. I finally bit the bullet and decided it was time. While at a local camera and photography store I noticed they carried display calibrators so I decided the Sypder3 Pro was destined for use in my home office.
A display color calibrator reads your monitor and sets up a profile to adjust your settings so that you see the truest colors possible. This is important if you do a lot of photography or graphic design, you want to make sure the colors you see and design for are what the final printed product will look like. Of course, there are always fine differences in printers as well, but at least this helps get is closer. If two people look at the same image on different uncalibrated computers, they may see very different colors! Your purple-ish may be my blue-ish. Contrast plays a part here too. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration when a designer and client are having trouble agreeing on a color pallet because they are seeing 2 completely different colors! The problem only compounds further for photographers, for whom color editing can make or break a shot. Spending a good amount of time on a photograph only to find out after its received back from the printer that your colors are off can drive even the most patient artist to madness. Calibrators are supposed to help alleviate some of that stress.
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Basic Photo Editing with Aperture 3
Here is a quick video tutorial on how to use Aperture 3 to do some photo editing. Aperture 3 is software designed for Mac computers and does a beautiful job editing photos. In this tutorial I go through some of the basic steps to edit a photograph to make it look more clean and professional. Don’t have Aperture or would like me to do your photo editing? Use my contact page to request a quote for my services.
Want to see this video in High Definition? Go to YouTube directly for more Web Savvy Mama tutorial videos featured in HD.
See the finished photo and others at Nate Paul Images, my husband’s online photo gallery where he and I display some of our favorites!
New Photography Site
My husband has been doing photography for a bit now and finally asked me to create a website for his photos. I spent the weekend finishing the setup and loading a sample of his photos.
What does this mean for my web design clients? Custom stock photography! We will be slowly building a large collection of images that can be used for stock photography for everything from web sites to advertising. Our goal will be to offer stock photos that will be of use to WAHMs and other small businesses for a reason price, with out needing to buy large amounts of credits to do so!
Eventually we may decide to expand this to product photography to go along with my graphic editing services. You’ll be able to have Web Savvy Mama not only design your website but supply the images to go along with your products! Of course, this is still a bit in the future, but the white box I made my husband build is just itching for use!
In the meanwhile, what would you like to see pictures of?
Photo Manipulation Examples
As I’ve been doing all evening, updating the website and moving the portfolio pages to the blog area. Here are a few photo manipulation examples. Photo Manipulations are photos that have had editing done to either touch up or exaggerate the image. This can also include editing product photos, removing backgrounds or combining images.
