Family photos are one of those things that everyone should always put more effort in on trying to make as many as possible, as often as possible. My family wasn’t the best at doing that, and sometimes they were last minute, but the ones that we do have, I just absolutely love.
What you see in the pictures below, is a canvas print of the last family photo I took before Mom passed away, courtesy of Easy Canvas Prints. It was taken on a Dad’s 60th birthday, on a complete whim.
This beauty is now hanging in a prominent place so that anyone that is over can see it. Everyone that’s seen it so far is amazed at the quality, and at how much nicer and unique it looks versus just framing a picture. The quality is unreal—the pictures don’t even do it justice. I had never seen a canvas print up close and in person, but this definitely won’t be my last one. And for someone that has a hard time with gifts, this is the perfect answer!
Help Portrait is a movement of photographers who are using their time, equipment and expertise to give back to those who are less fortunate this holiday season.
I first learned about Help Portrait by one of the guys (Ty Miller) setting up the one here in Dalton through Twitter. While watching the video, which was very touching, and showing it to my brothers and Alicia, I wanted to be a part of it, as did they. The turnout for volunteers was great, and they already had pretty much every aspect of it covered. So we just tried to help out wherever we could be of any assistance. We also brought some snacks for the volunteers and the people that showed up to enjoy while they were there. It was really nice to see everyone work together and work hard to pull the event off. I think there ended up being close to 32 sessions of people show up for portraits. It was awesome and felt really good to see their smiles and see the happiness in their faces as their photos were handed to them. It was definitely a great experience and something that I am very proud to have been a part of. I hope for us to be able to be a part of it next year as well and help bring hope to many more people through this awesome movement.
Even with already having a DSLR camera, I’ve been wanting a high megapixel compact camera that would easily fit in my pocket that I could take on bike rides. My D200 would be awesome to have with me all the time, but there are times when I’d rather be a bit more discrete and others when I don’t exactly have the room for it. So I picked up a factory refurbished Nikon Coolpix S550 off of eBay last week. I went with another Nikon because I’ve very much enjoyed the one that I have now so far and really like the quality of their products. It’s about the same size as my enV2 phone and is going to be great for snapping some shots while out on some bike rides this summer. I’m not by any means going to make it my priority camera, as that would be kind of silly, but it’ll be nice to be able to capture some of the things that I would like to shoot when I don’t have the D200 with me.
We’ve had a digital camera around our house for probably the last 10 years. The way I used to copy our photos off of the camera was to simply make a folder called ‘Family Photos’ and copy the photos into it. As time passed, the folder would simply act as a timeline of oldest to newest, which turns out not to work well at all.
Previously if you wanted to find a picture of a certain holiday, you would just scroll down using the thumbnails view in Windows until you found the pictures that were taken around that time. I know for certain that my dad has spent long periods of time before looking for certain pictures. It’s just a messy way of storing them in hindsight; especially when the numbers get into the thousands.
I’ve had reorganization on my mind for quite some time and happened to stumble across a site a few days ago, OrganizingYourPhotos.com, that lays out an example of a tree structure using levels and other tips for organization. This gave me the motivation to work on it today. The idea is to start out broad and narrow down the event or place until you get down as specific as you want.
I mentioned a little while back that I wanted to step up my digital camera, so I just recently did so. I now have a Nikon D200, 10.2MP. At first I was a little overwhelmed with all of the settings, I mean after all I am used to a point and shoot, but after playing around with it a little bit and going through the guide written by Ken Rockwell I am becoming more and more familiar with it.
I bought it slightly used to save a little cash; only 365 shutter actuations. It came with alot of accessories, including Nikkor 28-80mm, 70-300mm lenses and a Nikon storage bag.
The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.
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© Copyright 2007-2012 Shane Holden
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