I've come to the conclusion I suck at headlines, but PICTURES. . .

First of all, I've come to the conclusion that I suck at writing headlines. I remember in college, we had to learn to do it the old school way, and I sucked at it then. It's a lot easier to write a headline at a certain font size to fit in a certain amount of space in this day and age, but I still suck at it. If there's a course on headline writing, I'll surely take it.

On to other things. . . we had a publisher from a sister newspaper give us some photography tips recently and I want to show how I applied what he was telling us.

He was telling us about aperture, shutter speed and how to use aperture priority on cameras. I'm just beginning to understand this concept. Incidentally, when messing around with Mary Lou (my camera), I discovered when using the aperture priority setting, it basically tells you what aperture is appropriate for daylight, nighttime, etc., etc., and the same goes with the ISO setting (shutter speed). These are the results.

My yard is covered in leaves right now, and I'm pretty proud of this pic. No photoshop necessary.

I liked focusing on one thing while blurring out the stuff in the distance. You can adjust aperture and shutter speed accordingly to get more of the background in focus, but I'm working on focusing on one object at a time.

I think if I would have gotten the swing in the background just a little more in focus, this pic would have been awesome. Especially if someone was on the swing.

Holy crap. A sun star. I got one. YAY!

Since I don't work for a newspaper that employs photographers, reporters have to write and take their own photos. This means a lot of elements are at play, and you have to think about a bazillion things at once. I incorporated that element, a little, into the next set of pics. I thought, what better way to do that than to try to take photos of my strong-willed, cantankerous, almost 4-year-old son.

This pic would have been AWESOME had he been facing toward the sun, getting the best natural light.

This would have been superawesome had he actually LOOKED at the camera. . . stinker.

Almost, but this looks slightly out of focus and there's too much shadow on the one side of his face.

MUD PIE, MOMMY! He was referring to the mulch against the house, but this was as good as I was going to get. He wouldn't be still for, like, five seconds. He also kept saying, "You can't catch me, Mommy! You can't take my picture!"

I also read an article recently talking about how moms should be in more photos with their children, so I took that lesson to heart and took this one myself. Yeah, for those who spend hours taking photos specifically to upload onto their Facebook profiles, don't use a DSLR camera. It's, like, harder and stuff. Also, this pic would have been better, had we both been facing the sun, but he didn't want to go that way.