I am pleased to introduce you to the very beautiful and talented Ally Young.  I was able to capture this picture of Ally at Natalie & Joey's Wedding.  Ally is a musician and did a wonderful job singing at the wedding.  You can find Ally on Myspace Music by clicking here.

a little before and after actions and finally some a more artistic textured effect.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Selah.  I love this picture, but I realize that the color of her skin was a litte to orange.  So I decided to play with it and work a little with the image.

Here is my first edit where I worked on Selah's skin.

And for the final image I tried a vintage effect.  I think it is a little overexposed (as in too bright), but I like the way it makes her eyes stand out.

I've been doing a little playing with a new photo effect I got from coffeshop actions.  I love taking a favorite picture and just adding a little something to make it a little more unique and artistic.  The action does a little lens flare as if bright sun is shining into the lens.

A little before and after pixie dust action

Sweet Em pretending to water the flowers

Now here is a little pixie dust.  My first time to try to do this kind of effect.  I think I need a little more practice, but for now I call it pixie dust showers.

We are working on a little gallery project for Hidden Acres.  This is one of the pictures that will be included in our gallery featuring "Faces" of kids that were at camp.  She is just beautiful.

I love the brightness in Selah's little eyes.  I also like to be in the middle of the twinkle in her eyes. :)  She's a cutie!

Here is a picture that reminds me of why photography speaks to us.  Now you may not know this couple here but if you did this picture would make you smile and want to live out your faith more fiercely.  I am blessed to say that this couple is a part of my family.  They were before I even knew it (spiritually speaking ) but now more so because they are my husband's Aunt and Uncle.  I love them and their picture.

Days from today I will be able to show this picture to my children and say "So this is love.  To love God.  To love people.  To love your spouse.  To love your family.  To love the Church.  Let me tell you about this here couple."

Picture of Uncle Charles and Aunt Lavina at Hidden Acres.

Picture with a little color editing

Picture with a little vintage and texture stuff going on.

Here is another fun little thing you can do with pictures.  I am pretty pumped about this photo edit.  You see I learned about textures at JessicaSprague.com and she guided me to flickr where people will post some textures you can download for free.  Later while sitting in Sunday School going through a new Bible Study series with really cool and updated design to it, I came across this cool photo texturing thing they were doing to make their pictures look that they came out of one of those sticky albums.  So I thought surely I can find a texture to help me do that to my pictures.  But after waisting my life away in front of the computer surfing flickr I decided that I could probably just do it myself.  So that night in bed I came up with the idea of how to get it accomplished.  The next day I created my first texture and tried it on this here little bear.  My new image is called "Old Bear"  Now that I look at the images side by side they don't look to much different, but maybe you can tell the effect on your screen :)

Picture of bear Ruth and Jody bought on their honeymoon

"Old Bear"

So I began getting serious into trying to improve my photography when we bought our first digital SLR, a Canon Rebel and I began taking pictures of our little Seth & Selah.  I was happy with the pictures we were getting.  Then I wanted to try my hand at digital scrapbooking.  So I bought Photoshop Elements (The full Photoshop version is expensive and not in our budget) which was all I really needed.  Of course I needed some classes to know how to use the program.  Now to share with you some of the people who taught me much of what I know.  I want to thank Jessica Sprague and Rita from CoffeeShop.  Through Jessica I became familiar with Photoshop Elements.  I also began learning that a trick that a lot of photographers used was something called "actions" for Photoshop.  I was feeling left out because it seemed not very people made "actions" for Photoshop Elements and those few that did of course charged.  Then I came across a link to CoffeeShop which offers FREE action for Photoshop Elements.  I love playing with these things. 

So then my pictures I feel went to the next step.  Let me show you a little that I can now do with Photoshop Elements.  Here is a little editing action.

Here is my little Selah.  A great picture straight out of camera (or SOOC photographer lingo)

Now here is Selah brightened up with a little color correction

And because I couldn't stop playing with this great picture I went on to try a little vintage look on her.  Now I can't decide which edit I like better.  What do you think?