Behind the scenes -photography on a shoes string.

I love simple photos with a plain background but in a house with 3 young children it can be so difficult to find the time, space or finance to do it!

But what has God gifted mother's with most? Creativity so why not play to those strengths? To get a plain background for a simple play doh tubs family shot I used what I had on hand, something that's in endless supply with a refluxy baby in the house, yes laundry!

I used Bethany's pooh bear blanket to create a neutral background and propped it up on a box which contains my 21st birthday champagne glass and laid a coat hanger over the top to make my 'backdrop' wider.

Not perfect but I was pleased with the results considering my little man even managed to continue playing beside my tabletop studio!

The results are here.

Enjoying lightroom 2, and the kids toys...

I was recently persuaded by a review in a photography magazine to download a trial of lightroom 2. Already being an enthusiastic user of lightroom I could not see what additional benefits it would offer over my combination of lightroom and photoshop as my routine for processing is to fix any exposure/white balance problems in lightroom and run and b&w conversions then export to PS for watermarking and any other kind of editing needed. Although this can be a frustrating process when LR's develop module hung and continually exported the wrong image I was happy with that and wondered what improvements could be made for another version.

Well, the main advantage for me in my 5 days of trial use has been ability to apply a vignette to a cropped image and the changes to the crop overlay it's self allow for easier size ration selection etc.

The first image below was edited in lightroom version 1:



The next image was edited with lightroom version 2 using the same action:

Although it used the same preset the results are quite different because of the ability to apply vignette post-crop.

Not certain yet whether I will spring for the full version once my trial has ended, it depends on whether it become indispensable between now + then. The only teething difficultly is that as I do not have the option financially to also spring for PS CS4 lightroom 2 will not open and export images to CS3 for editing. However, version 1 so frequently exported the wrong image and hung that it may be quicker to export a file and open it myself anyway.

And go on admit it any mother of pre-school children, you have been desperate to take revenge on the characters of 'In the night garden' for years and are very jealous that I have had a therapeutic morning of character squishing in the name of testing a new version of lightroom out!