What better way to come off maternity leave than with the I Heart Faces Bisbee Photo Walk?! 27 Arizonans gathered this morning for a 92 degree, 2 hour stroll through the charming streets of Bisbee, AZ. Strolling with us were a handful of extremely patient models who did everything we suggested, and then some! One of our models came in a stunning 1800's period dress; ever worn a corset in the desert?! And another model graciously slide atop an old Chevy that was so hot you probably could have fried an egg on the hood! Her mother is going to kill me! (But her father stood right next to me snapping away with his DSLR...)
I'd like to send out a huge THANK YOU to my co-leader Pauline Fredericks. Pauline came to my rescue when the walk became larger than I had anticipated, and with her knowledge and years of experience we all learned a great deal this morning about diffusing and bouncing light. Thank you so much for all of your encouragement! Thank you also to our models and extra hands; the morning was a huge success and more fun than I imagined possible because of your willingness to play along!
The next photo walk, I think we all agreed over lunch, should take place in the fall or winter, when the temps are more user friendly. And, the walk needs to last twice as long, there just wasn't enough time to do everything we were dreaming up! Here are my favorites from the morning, a mere fraction of all the great work that exploded from all the energy surrounding me:

I Heart Faces is doing something hilarious this week; a "Me Then, Me Now" theme. The idea is that you take a photograph of yourself as a kid and recreate it with as many details as you can manage. Since I have my parents visiting right now we decided to recreate an image of my father and I. The original picture was taken in upstate New York, when I was just one year old. The "Now" picture was taken in Arizona, 29 years later. I have a handful of other snapshots I want to recreate before Mom and Dad head home on Thursday, but for now we have this one, and we find it pretty funny:





Seriously, you deserve a belly laugh! Go check out the entries in this week's contest by clicking on the button below!

I AM HONORED, ELATED, no, CRAZY EXCITED!! to announce that the city of Bisbee, Arizona, has been selected as one of the 20 US cities featured in the I Heart Faces Walk Across America Photo Walk! And yours truly is going to be leading this very fun morning! I've got some really cool ideas that will ONLY be seen on our walk, trust me, we live in the Wild West afterall... You don't need to be a pro to join the fun, you just need a camera and some enthusiasm and leave the rest to me! Read on!

CLICK HERE to register for the Bisbee, AZ, I Heart Faces Photo Walk Across America!





To see the other 19 locations where you can participate in this event, CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW:

It's another Fix-It-Friday over at I ♥ Faces! I have to admit that I was up with The Baby before 6am and after getting him back to sleep I sprinted for the computer hoping to have an uninterupted morning with the new "Fix-It" photo. The Boy started yacking lastnight at 8:30pm and I knew that today would be a "Mommy" day and not a blogging day... So here is my fix; I got a whole twenty minutes in before the pitter patter of little needy feet! Yehaw! I played this morning with "free transform", did a bunch of patch work because though the tear was beautiful, and I appreciate pouting, it looked more like a blemish with my "Troy" Action I wanted to use. I saturated some colors and sharpened around the eyes. Lastly I cropped to a square and because of my transform I was left with a black bottom right corner and a black top left corner, so I had to clone and stamp a little to cover those areas. Not too shabby!
LIGHTER EDIT:

DARKER EDIT


Head on over and have your chance! This Fix-It is open to all! As for me? My morning is going to continue with vomit covered laundry, and lots of it, and a good strong cup of coffee! How funny is it that the coffee didn't happen at 6am?! I didn't want to lose five minutes to making coffee, or creating kitchen noise that would wake The Boy. (Did you know that if you put Vanilla Dream Soy Milk in your plain black coffee, you needn't add sugar?! Delish!)

I'm in LOVE with I ♥ Faces. And every week I log on to participate in their photo contest and admire the entries from around the world. And some weeks I stumble onto amazing pictures that are so cute and fun, and yet, they are posted so tiny you can hardly appreciate the love that went into capturing the moment. So when Angie, co founder of I ♥ Faces, asked me if I had a tutorial to write for them, I immediately thought "YES!"

When I started blogging I was a simple cut and paste kind of girl who had NO idea what cyber text was or how to manipulate it. I thought that when I uploaded my photos to Blogger, the "large" size choice for my images was the largest possible display. WRONG! Fortunately, my talented BFF, Julie Rivera, takes pity on me and shares her many secrets. She taught me about rewriting my "Html" information, and life has never been larger or clearer for my blog since! There are two simple things anyone can do to their blog Html to make their photos appear larger than normal. There are so many wonderful Blogger posts out there, everyone should be showcasing their work large enough for us all to appreciate it!

To start, I size all of my Blogger images to 300 DPI and usually 5" x 7" or "5 x 5" for my square crop. This typically gives me a file size between 6MB and 8MB.



I add my photo to Blogger by the standard upload method:


Select "large" as the image size. Click to upload:


After the image has uploaded you get a paragraph of what I call "cyber text" in your Blogger entry.


And the original image will appear in your blog as this size:


Now for changing the Html or "cyber text" to make your image larger. Locate the area in your Html that I have highlighted and delete only that section: width: 400px; height: 294px; It is very important that you do not delete too much or too little, every punctuation matters!


Next you will locate this other little tid-bit I have highlighted and you will change this number from 400 to 640. This is a number you can experiment with but I always use 640.


Your NEW Html or "cyber text" should look like this, with the exception of your file name instead of mine:


And your newly enlarged image should look like this:


Keep in mind:
- Every cursor and punctuation will effect the display of the image so if your image does not display properly, upload it again and only delete the text specified.
- This process will NOT work properly if you have an image that is sized to 72DPI or other web sized files. Please size your file to 300DPI before uploading.
- These directions may only work in Blogger.

It seems lately I am suffering from addiction... It used to be the weekly photo contest over at I ♥ Faces. Now these clever girls are having a "Fix It Friday" blog where each week you can download an image of their choosing and try to edit the image to make it better. This week's image comes from Jen, My Mindless Musings. To me, the exposure was looking really good to begin with, and thus the challenge, how do you take a really nice photo and have it be a standout, especially when there are oodles of talented photographers participating and posting their edits each week. Interested in photography? You cannot possible visit this site and NOT learn something nifty and useful in just minutes! Watch out, it might just be YOUR next addiction.

Here is my take on the image:



I have to give credit to Pea Head Prints who was the first that I noticed to flip flop the image horizontally. I borrowed that idea as well. In my head I knew right away that I wanted to crop to a square, and well, given that the photo was a close-up, it wasn't possible with the original image to achieve the composition that I wanted. In the end I decided to "draw" more head, so part of the head in my image is make believe. I showed it to my husband and his crtical eye couldn't locate what I had done, and at the end of the day his pat on my back is enough of an ego boost for me.

Here is the original photo, not mine, from a contributor to the www.I ♥ Faces.com website.



And this is my take on fixing it up and cropping it for a more interesting composition. I only spent about five minutes on this, with The Boy on one arm and The Baby on my leg, and the husband behind me saying "what are we gonna do today?" Be sure to go check out other entries, people who spent a lot more time and talent than I to doctor this image!