Friday 18 April 2014

Graduation Weekend Photo Post! {Photography/Picasa Tips}





As you may have noticed my blog went quiet for a week & that's because we were away on a road-trip which was necessary in order to spend the weekend with 2 sets of grandparents 
{of the kids of course!} & all of our children, to celebrate our eldest daughter graduating from university.  She is still actually AT university as she is now studying for her Honours degree.


Here is the glamazon above!  She decided that black shoes would be far too boring so she chose burgundy ones instead - then of course needed an accessory to tie in with the shoes which meant hunting one down by visiting every costume jewellery store in our neighbourhood!!


She gave us a tour of her Chemistry lab so I took an "in situ" photo
 of her in front of one of the cabinets full of vintage apothecary bottles.


We ate out each night so I took the photo above & gave it a polaroid frame 
{seeing as the quality wasn't great, based on it being a night time shot} 
for a more casual look.  The advantage of this is that it gives you the space to
 add some text.  I like to add some text at times to help me remember dates & places!


I changed some of the photos to black & white as I had a LOT of photos!  
The kids kept grabbing my camera too so by the end of the weekend I had 
275 photos, which I cut down to the best 75.  The kids have no idea how to 
focus so a lot of the shots were spoiled with in focus trees & out of focus faces!!


I got rid of all my wrinkles using the retouch tool!  Cheaper than botox!!
There were a lot of people in the background of most of the photos as it
was a busy occasion, so I changed some of the photos to circle shapes
to eradicate the busy backgrounds.  Circles are nice to scrap occasionally to!


Sometimes it's nice to use the text option
 rather than adding a bulky title to a layout.


As the focus should be on my daughter here I used a soft focus around
 her as the focal point.  {Her Dad & I look a lot better that way hahaha!!}


Someone else took this photo & it was BAD so I did my best to rescue it 
by changing it to black & white.  That generally helps to hide a multitude
 of sins.   At least we have a photo of the whole family together!


This is my hubby's mother - who is 75!  She is a university professor & still
 working fulltime!!  {Not at the same university}.  To dramatise this portrait,
 taken at night, I increased the highlights & the shadows. Blowing out the light 
helps to decrease wrinkles too & saves time spent using the retouch tool.


I thought the photo above was quite an interesting 
capture.  Always fun to have something different...


Whenever family are together it's always good to get a good mix of photos
 of different relatives together.  Here we have father, son & grand father.


I created a couple of collages in Picasa, with photos 
relevant to each set of grandparents, as a gift for them.


I use Picasa for all my photo editing.  It's a free software product from Google. 
 I own Photoshop Elements but never have the time to spend teaching myself
 how to use it.  From my experience with it it's not intuitive & everything seems
 to take a LOT longer!  Of course it is still on my bucket list though!!




14 comments:

Lizzy Hill said...

Lovely memories here, Helen....looks like a fabulous time - special time with all the family in one place, too....& I'm with you on Photoshop...I'm learning, but oh, sooo slowly. Picassa ROCKS!!!! Your GLAM DD looks fabulous, too:)

Julie Tucker-Wolek said...

Loving all the photos!! I use Picasa too!!!!

Beatrice Lawson said...

Congrats Helen! What a gorgeous girl you have! (good looking family too!) Smart and beautiful and I love her style. Her burgundy shoes were great.

I am a Picasa user too, PS seems so complicated and there is no way I am spending crafty time learning more computer stuff. I am sure my pics would be better with PS but.... Picasa does the job too.

Margaret Mifsud said...

What wonderful memories you have preserved here Helen and, I must say, you have a very good looking family too!! You did a fabulous job of editing. I don't really like Picasa it seems to take over every picture on the computer and that irritates me no end, but then, apart from cropping my photos, I don't do a lot of editing either. Huge congratulations to your DD for graduating, you must be a very proud Mum!!! ox

Helen Wallace said...

A beautiful set of photos Helen. LOVE the purple hair! And big congrats to your beautiful daughter. Like Margaret, I can't cope with Picassa either, it seems to poke my photos all over the place in random order which makes no sense to me. I use photoshop which I love.

scrapbookertink said...

Hi Helen, just popped in to say hello, not a lot of time recently for scrapping or blogging, trying to get back into it! Wow I remember reading when your DD had just started Uni, I have one in her 1st year and DS starts this September, take care xxx

dstandard said...

Fabulous photos and congrats to your daughter! When my daughter and I get together for a photo shoot with the kids ( she scraps as well) we often taken several hundred shots hoping to get several fabulous ones!

Sandi Clarkson said...

Such great photos! And your MIL is so darn inspiring!

Svjetlana said...

Lovely selection of photos. Congratulations to your daughter!
I tried Photoshop Creative Studio once and loved it ( you can have it for free for a month), unfortunately can't afford the licence right now, have Photoshop Elements instead which is good for cropping and adjusting light/contrast and so on, but not for some more creative editing, or maybe I don't know how to do it. Never tried Picassa thought.

yyam said...

Glad you got a variety of shots! Nice to see the extended family. Prof grandma looks cool!

Lynette Jacobs said...

Congratulations on your daughter's graduation. Lovely photos of your family. I love you mother-in-law's style...funky.

Keren Tamir said...

Congrats to Chelsea!! wow that's amazing!!
beautiful photos of all of you!! nice to see you not behind the camera!

Di Garling said...

Lovely post Helen and thanks so much for sharing this wonderful occasion with us all. So many great pics for you to look back on in the coming years. You have presented it all beautifully too. Sending big congrats to your daughter on a great achievement. Cheers Di
PS. The new blog looks great too.

Linda Eggleton said...

So many fabulous shots of a very special day...huge congrats to your DD :)