The Sleeping Curse

I woke up this morning in a good mood. I love when I wake up and feel completely rested. I have this curse where I absolutely LOVE to get my sleep and then some. I could (I DONT though :) sleep for 10 hours a day and take a nap after lunch. I have always been this way... my parents thanked Jesus for me after they were used to my brother Jason; he would scream and fight sleep off like it was punishment. Tooth and nail every night with him :) Not me, though; I would bring my parents my pajamas when I was tired and ASK them to put me to bed :D Don't you wish I was YOUR kid? :D Well this love affair with sleep has followed me into my adulthood and my parent's blessing has become my curse :) Can anybody relate? This thing of oversleeping is one of the hardest habits to break! It is so easy to hit the snooze button and just role over for another 5 minutes, which usually turns into an hour! I needed to change this so I have now been waking up at 6am or 6:30am because I want the day to be productive (this is still a work in progress :). On top of that, I noticed that when I sleep longer than 8 hours, I feel MORE sleepy throughout the day, not more rested which is an oxymoron I think! The satisfaction I feel when I get up early is worth the sacrifice of an extra hour of sleep. Ever feel that way?

Since I am still working on editing I thought I would give some image editing tips for the other photographers that follow our blog (probably not a very large group yet, but I think there are a few here :). And even if you aren't a photographer, you can still see what goes on behind the scenes.

Here is a picture of Temple on the day she was hanging out with Isabel. How rad is her face in this one? :) here is the picture straight from the camera with NO editing.

I pull the image into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom first, this is where I do most of the normal corrections. The image needs to be sharpened a bit... This shot is a little blurry which is common but doesn't mean it cannot be salvaged. Also, it is a bit over exposed so it is a bit blown out along the sunny side of her face. It's a bit too blue for my taste so I am correcting the white balance a bit here... This is personal preference, some photographers prefer a more blue, cool look. Here is the image with minor corrections.

Afterwards, I upload the image to Adobe Photoshop to do more creative and artistic editing to give it an appealing look... This is where personal creativity comes in to play because there are so many ways to edit the same image. If you are a professional event photographer and you do not use Totally Rad Actions, you are seriously missing out! In this image, I use the Actions 'Select-O-Pop' 100% and then 'Lux(soft)' at 57%. Then I add our logo and there you have it... a cute and artistically edited picture of Temple Jade. :)

If you want to see more photo processing in future blogs write a comment and tell us. Or if you would like to know something about Emily or Temple or myself and you think you have a good idea for a blog post, let us know! We have another couple photo shoots this weekend; One up north and one at the Phoenician with Angie and Alex. Make sure to come back next week and see what we have been working on. Have a great weekend and thanks again for stopping by. :)

Oh, and leave some comment love if you want to, we won't bite... :P