Secret Admirer Friday, Sep 28 2007

I’ve been watching my blog stats on a couple different sites for a while now – not that my stats are anything that impressive, but it’s kinda fun. Anyway, I’ve noticed a trend that has me puzzled. I don’t know of any regular readers in Ohio, but apparently I have a secret admirer located there. I have more hits — up to 10 a day–originate from one particular town in Ohio than any other place and they’re all from the same person. Adding to the mystery, the visits only average 11 seconds. So I’m curious. Who is my secret admirer? If you’re out there, please drop me a line.

Tiffany, I know you’ve had a similar experience. Anyone else have any thoughts on mystery returning visitors?

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My dirty little secret Friday, Sep 28 2007

I bet you’re wondering why I posted a plain black rectangle on my blog. Well, that’s not just any ole’ black rectangle. I’m kinda embarrassed to admit this, but it’s actually the SOOC version of the second of yesterday’s Dreamland shots. Melody asked for “processing secrets,” and I love you all so much that I’m revealing my dirty little secret and admitting just how awful some of my photos are straight off the camera.

Yes, I am a heavy Photoshop (Elements 2.0) user. And while I really, really want to learn to properly expose pictures right off the bat (wow, just think of the time that would save in editting!!), it’s also kinda cool that it’s possible to save “bad” pictures through the miracle of editing software. Pictures like the one above aren’t destined for your computer’s recycle bin! Part of me feels like it’s “cheating” to rely on the software so much, but hey, it’s the final image that matters, not how it got there.

So I opened this dark image in Photoshop and let the program work it’s “auto correct” magic (which isn’t always so magical and can sometimes make your pictures look even worse, but since I’m lazy and it’s easier to do that than correct everything manually, I usually give that a try first…sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t). Anyway, this is what “auto correct” gave me.

And then I used a bunch of crazy filters and processing to get the final result. Don’t ask me what exactly I did, because I don’t know. I know it involved a gaussian blur overlay, a couple of different OptikVerve filters, some burning/dodging and noise reduction. I had a rough idea of the effect I was after, so I just played around with it until the image on the screen sort-kinda matched the one in my head. I tried to recreate it today and take note of the steps, but I couldn’t get the same results. So folks, this image is unique…the one and only…impossible to duplicate.

As long as I’m showing sleeping baby pictures, here are a couple more. In case you couldn’t tell, I totally LOVE sleeping baby pictures. I’ve recently developed and new ritual. Almost every night when the house is still and everyone but me sleeps, I creep into Nadia’s room to gaze at my sleeping beauty and snap of few pictures. Every night she’s sleeping in a different position, and sometimes it’s downright comical to see how she’s contorted her little body! Other times, she looks so peaceful and angelic that it takes my breath away. Sleeping pictures are probably my favorite kind of picture to take, because she actually holds still for the camera! I realized today that if I keep this up, this kid is going to have a HUGE collection of sleeping pictures by the time she starts kindergarten. LOL! But they make me happy so I’m going to keep doing it. I even created a “Sleep, my child” set on Flickr, and looking at all those images of my sleeping child makes me feel peaceful.

Anyway, (you can tell I’m tired with the way I’m rambling) I’ll leave you with a couple images from last night, and now I’m off to capture yet more pictures of the sleeping beauty. I wonder what position she’s in this time…

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