We had yummy Chinese from Chan’s last night and I got the most appropriate fortune:
I’ve really enjoyed my first full month of retirement from photography, but it’s quite obvious I need a new hobby. ha!
Right now, my hobby appears to be that of a “couch potato” – I’ve/we’ve managed to watch Dexter Seasons 1 through 4 (um, AWESOME!), every Dance Mom, Scouted, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI (Las Vegas) and of course our regular family shows – Modern Family, Desperate Housewives, etc. While it’s been nice to just sit around and relax on these chilly winter nights, I really need to be on the look out for the next thing! Quilting? Cooking? Zumba/fitness?
We’ll see what happens!
Speaking of fortunes, this was Scott’s:
Appropriate too? We’ll see!
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Well, I spent pretty much the last 3 days trying to put together a video/photo slideshow for Jacob’s graduation. WHEW! This is a ton of work! Especially the video portion! I’ll admit I’m thoroughly disgusted and frustrated with myself that I can’t just figure it out immediately! I thought it would be fun and easy, but it is NOT. Plus our computer is super S-L-O-W and keeps locking up!
All my problems aside, it was fun to see these videos from almost 18 years ago! Wow, time flies! Gotta say too when I showed the initial “rough draft” to Scott and Claire last night, we were all a total MESS – pretty much bawling our eyes out – haha! Very bittersweet.
Anyway, I plan to do at least 2 more songs, so this is just the first portion. Song credit goes to the band Lonestar – “Let Them Be Little”.
If anyone is interested in the process…I first had to buy a VHS to DVD converter – I bought THIS ONE. Works pretty well, but what they don’t tell you is you need a VCR to use it – all you get are cables, a little converter box and software. So I dug out an old VCR and luckily it still worked!
Then I thought I needed some video editing software, so I bought the top-rated consumer-recommended one – ugh – it SUCKS!!! I probably can’t say the name here, but I’m trying to get my $$ back! ugh! It kept locking up my computer and it was NOT very user-friendly. So I tried making my slideshow on my old fav ProShow Gold, well, that kept locking up too and I couldn’t easily clip the video segments. I tried Roxio Easy Media Creator – which I use all the time to burn CDs/DVDs and that kept locking up too – and it took like 10 minutes to even open the video program. I think our computer’s processor needs to be upgraded or something. So I ended up just doing it all on Windows Movie Maker. Good enough. I seriously wasted so much time trying to do this! But hopefully it will be worth it in the end!
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Check them out – gotta admit, those “boy band” songs are so dang catchy! :-)
Oh, and if Claire gets her way, I guess Harry (the one with the brown bushy hair) will be my future son-in-law.
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Merry Christmas & Happy New Year! I found a new trick that I’m a little in love with right now – taking photos with my ipod touch and bringing them into the Instagram app to “edit” them. For these, I actually took most of them with my regular camera (Nikon D700), then when I had them up on my computer monitor, I took photos of them with my ipod touch and brought them into the Instagram app – I used “Early Bird” on all of these, then e-mailed them to myself. Slapped into a collage and done. :-) Problem is, they are very VERY low-res, so they only look good pretty small and in a collage. I wish I knew a way to make them better resolution! Anyway….
The middle photo though was a pic of our Christmas tree – taken with my current very favorite lens – the 35mm f/1.4G – on manual mode to make the lights blurry like that. :-)
Next we have our New Year’s Eve photos! We were getting ready to go across the street to our friend/neighbor’s house for a party, so I barely had any time to take these. uggh! (Scott rushed me out the door…) But I got what I could. Nikon D300, Tamron 17-55mm f/2.8 lens (at like ap of 16, iso 160, shutter 1/160), Alien Bee ring flash. I brought all these photos into Toy Camera Analog Color with the polaroid border and Process type 5.
So yay! I got the first two pages of our 2012 Memory book done! :-)
While I was at it, I took some ipod touch photos of some of my fav images I took in 2011 of Jacob & Elle. Used “Nashville” and “Early Bird” filters from Instagram here.
And tried something completely new on this image – hmm…not sure what I think, but I know Elle is beautiful no matter how I edit the photo! :-)
Have a great week! I start my 10 days in a row again at work tomorrow…boo hoo! Feel sorry for me?
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