As usual, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing all of your different interpretations of the Nurture Photography themes each week. I’m blown away by the creativity and talent that you all have and display each week. Those of you who have been taking part in the challenges for a while now, it has been amazing to watch you grow and to see how much much more confident you’ve become in your abilities over the seasons.

I’d like to thank Kristi of Live and Love Out Loud and Alicia of Project Alicia for their tireless work over the past couple of months to help make the challenge the success that it is. I couldn’t ask for better co-hosts.

I’ve had a great time photographing the prompts along with you all, it’s been a lot of fun and a little of an extra challenge using my Lensbaby to shoot the photos for this season’s challenge.

We have been posting tips, tutorials and freebies for the duration of the Nurture Photography Spring 2013 Photo Challenge, If you missed any or would like to go back and take a look on our blogs the tutorials can be found here:

• Free Spring and Easter themed Templates from Project Alicia
• An Introduction to Aperture from Live and Love Out Loud
• The Importance of a Clean Edit from Bumbles & Light
• Flower Macro Photography Tips from Live and Love Out Loud
• Storytelling with Photography from Bumbles & Light
• Ten Tips for Better Family Selfies from Project Alicia

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

The tips and tutorials we have shared each week, and freebies, can also be found in our free Nurture Photography Spring 2013 eBook package, download to your computer or mobile device so that you can read anytime!

Click to Download

The Nurture Photography Spring 2013 Tips and Tutorials eBook is available in PDF format, simply click on the image above and download to your computer or handheld device via iBooks, Kindle and more.

We’re always looking for ways to reward you all for your participation and we hope that you’ll enjoy the e-book. Feel free to pin it, tweet about it, share it with a friend!

I’m teaming up with Kristi of Live and Love Out Loud and Alicia of Project Alicia for another inspiring adventure as we photograph our way through spring with the Nurture Photography Challenge – a seasonal photo challenge series chock full of tips and tutorials, inspiring weekly prompts, personal feedback and encouragement.

Just a few details:

All are welcome regardless of skill level, camera equipment or geographic location.

Share your favorite images inspired by our weekly prompts each Friday and grab our lovely button while you’re at it!

The linky will remain open from 9am Friday – 9am Thursday CST. Don’t forget to visit and comment on the previous entry in the linky list.

We’re sharing the photography love and showcasing our talented photographers by pinning some of your lovely photos to our Nurture Photography Inspiration Board.

The Nurture Photography Challenge has taken to Facebook! Stop by, “like” our new Facebook fan page, ask questions and share your work on our wall as well.

I wandered around with the little toy camera loaded with out of date film every now and then, trying to shoot something interesting, not really sure how the photos would turn out. Although the results are obviously low-tech I’m really happy with them and their weirdness. The camera is a point and shoot camera at its most basic: A plastic body to be loaded with film, a dial to wind the film and a shutter release button. But it does have four plastic lenses which expose each corner of the film consecutively after you hit the shutter button.

One of the lenses appears to have scuff marks on it or something, judging by the blurriness in the top left of each image.

After getting these back from the shop, I immediately loaded more film into the camera. They’re not perfect at all, by any stretch of the imagination, but this is kind of fun! Even if I did manage to photograph my own finger several times. You would think that I didn’t know what I was doing, apparently I don’t.

The bookshelves in my home are full. The shelves bend slightly in the middle, there are books lined up neatly in rows with their spines all pointing out towards the rest of the room. When I ran out of shelves, I began to haphazardly push yet more books into available spaces. They are haphazardly stacked up on top of one another, in front of one another. There are a few that sit in a pile on the floor in front of the shelves, there is no more space.

These past few weeks have brought a few minor setbacks and a little disappointment, but also the resolve to work harder and better. I pull out old books from the shelves, some I have barely looked at since college, and revisit my notes. I’ve been reading new books too and I’m hard on them, treating every one like a school textbook. Take any book from the shelf and open it, you’ll find scribbled notes in the margins, folded page corners, and bookmarks made from crumpled receipts or scrap paper. It’s time to regroup and read more books. Sometimes I’m unsure of whether I even know how to deal with things in any other way.

I find inspiration and practical information in more than just photography manuals. Although I am not anywhere near close to being a painter, I have always enjoyed Art History. Similarly I have learned to pull inspiration from the other things that I enjoy doing, reading both fiction and non-fiction… allowing the words to create ideas and visuals in my mind that I can later use for something photographic.

It’s always work, though. Too many ideas can sometimes be as bad as none at all, even worse are the things I’d like to work on right away but instead have to store in the back of my mind for a later date.

I’ll keep on reading, continue growing. I’ve already grown so much, but there’s still more of the same path ahead of me.

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

But we’ve come to learn that home isn’t necessarily the walls that you live between, it’s the people who are there with you. Home is the weekends we can spend together as a family, a Friday evening spent with my husband watching TED Talks over a shared bottle of red wine and those long conversations that are usually difficult to make time for these days. Home is giggles with a certain little boy, hide and seek and snuggling under blankets.

Home is always changing, but for me, their two faces are constant. Even if we don’t get to see my husband as often as we’d like due our different schedules. We know that although the schedules are temporary, we are constant. I wanted to be able to take a few photos of all of us, or at least one of my husband to include here, but getting everyone together during daylight hours is near impossible for the moment.

Home is warm, comforting things. Home is also difficult. It’s being there for one another when you can’t be physically present. It’s making phone calls to the triage nurse because your child is hurt. It’s staying calm on the outside when you’re panicking inside. It is walking, carrying a crying five year old boy to the pharmacy in the rain at 8pm on a Thursday night to get medicine. It is returning to our apartment and cuddling until the medicine takes effect and he falls asleep.

Home is so much more than the four walls we live between.

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

Head on over to Project Alicia today where Alicia is sharing some tips on taking family self portraits.

I’m teaming up with Kristi of Live and Love Out Loud and Alicia of Project Alicia for another inspiring adventure as we photograph our way through spring with the Nurture Photography Challenge – a seasonal photo challenge series chock full of tips and tutorials, inspiring weekly prompts, personal feedback and encouragement.

Just a few details:

All are welcome regardless of skill level, camera equipment or geographic location.

Share your favorite images inspired by our weekly prompts each Friday and grab our lovely button while you’re at it!

The linky will remain open from 9am Friday – 9am Thursday CST. Don’t forget to visit and comment on the previous entry in the linky list.

We’re sharing the photography love and showcasing our talented photographers by pinning some of your lovely photos to our Nurture Photography Inspiration Board.

The Nurture Photography Challenge has taken to Facebook! Stop by, “like” our new Facebook fan page, ask questions and share your work on our wall as well.

We love Instagram just as much as you do! We’ll be on the lookout for your beautiful winter photos, so be sure to use the #nurturephoto hashtag. We’ll share a few favorites on Instagram each week, sending a little bit of love your way.

An image can convey emotion or mood. It can have a narrative, or represent ideas. These are the same elements that we would expect of a written novel and are important aspects of storytelling. With photography we have the ability to tell stories, be they our own personal stories or something more broad about the world we live in.

Storytelling with Photography

The story that you tell with your images can be documentary style, photos of your every day life or the life of someone else. With documentary photographs your aim is to capture a real life story as it unfolds, to share it with others. It can also be a concept, made up by the photographer, but still tells a story of real issues and ideas.

The story you tell can also be entirely fiction, a fairytale. It could be a mixture of all of these, a fairytale that has elements of reality. As with the written word, the possibilities for storytelling through photography are almost endless. Next time you take a photograph, try asking yourself: “What story am I telling?”

Storytelling with a Series of Images

When telling a story through images, try not to include too many elements in one photograph. If you need to include multiple storytelling elements to be able to convey your meaning, try using a series of photos. The series can contain two photos, or it can be made up of hundreds. The images can be directly related and a part of the same shoot, or they can be separate images taken over time that build a broader story.

We do this more often than we think, we take multiple photos on vacation for example. Those vacation photos will tell the story of that little part of our life, documenting the places we visited, the food that we ate and the things that we did.

Before you begin shooting, you might want to consider the kind of shots that you would need to tell the story effectively. Wedding photographers often have a list of shots that they need to get during the day, these will include shots that the family have requested but will also include elements that bring together the story of the wedding day.

Think about the visual themes that you need to include in your images to tell the story. These can be things such as props, locations, style. When taking a series of photos to tell a story, often there will be one or two things that are consistent throughout. This can be a prop, or it can be a location or a concept… something that ties each image together.

Storytelling with a Single Image

Stories exist in different sizes, there are long novels and short ones. These short stories can be told with a single image, one that conveys the intended meaning in a smaller area. This doesn’t mean that a single image is any less powerful than a series, the story told may be a shorter one but that doesn’t make it any less important than a longer story.

You can include props to tell your story, often portrait painters would ask their subject to hold a personal item and include it in the painting so as to tell the viewer a little more about the subject. Think about context, what is happening around your subject that could further the story you are trying to tell?

You can convey meaning with a closer shot, a facial expression in a close up portrait for example. You might also need to take a wider shot to tell the story effectively, perhaps the surroundings play an important role. Remember, sometimes the story can be told just as effectively by what you have chosen to leave out of the frame. Unseen elements, or elements merely hinted at can add a lot to your story.

Next time you are out shooting, or planning a shoot, think about what story you would like to tell with your images and how you can best convey that story to the viewer.

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

I’m teaming up with Kristi of Live and Love Out Loud and Alicia of Project Alicia for another inspiring adventure as we photograph our way through spring with the Nurture Photography Challenge – a seasonal photo challenge series chock full of tips and tutorials, inspiring weekly prompts, personal feedback and encouragement.

Just a few details:

All are welcome regardless of skill level, camera equipment or geographic location.

Share your favorite images inspired by our weekly prompts each Friday and grab our lovely button while you’re at it!

The linky will remain open from 9am Friday – 9am Thursday CST. Don’t forget to visit and comment on the previous entry in the linky list.

We’re sharing the photography love and showcasing our talented photographers by pinning some of your lovely photos to our Nurture Photography Inspiration Board.

The Nurture Photography Challenge has taken to Facebook! Stop by, “like” our new Facebook fan page, ask questions and share your work on our wall as well.

We love Instagram just as much as you do! We’ll be on the lookout for your beautiful winter photos, so be sure to use the #nurturephoto hashtag. We’ll share a few favorites on Instagram each week, sending a little bit of love your way.

I have a giveaway for a 8×8- 26 page AdoramaPix Photo book going on at the moment. Click over, check out my review and enter to win! There’s also a discount code for 50% off any 8×8 photo book!

A Wordful Wednesday post linked with:

I’m usually pretty bad about getting my photos printed. I do make sure to print some of my favourites at AdoramaPix to frame and hang on the walls of our home, but the rest often end up just sitting on my external hard drive with the promise that I’ll get around to printing them eventually. It can be difficult to know what to do with them, do I print a bunch of 4×6′s and keep them in a shoebox? Do I use them to make a photo album?

AdoramaPix Photo Books are the perfect solution. I just uploaded my photos to the AdoramaPix website and used the book creator to put together my 8×8 photo book.

The Photo Book creator on the AdoramaPix website is easy to use. You have the choice of using one of their pre-made templates or to make your own, then just drag and drop your uploaded photos into the template. You can upload your photos from your hard drive, or you can import photos directly from photo hosting services such as Flickr, Instagram or Facebook. There is a save button in the photo book creator that allows you to save your progress if you would like to leave and come back to your photo book later. It’s always good practice to save periodically, even if you are still working on your photo book.

I decided to not use one of the templates, but to instead use the page layouts and spreads provided to help me build my own entirely customized photo book. Then all I had to do was drag and drop my photos into the layout. I decided that I would make a photo book for my parents, so I uploaded some photos I had taken last summer while Mikey and I were staying with my parents in England, and also imported some photos taken during the same time period from Instagram.

When the photo book arrived in the mail, I was blown away by the gorgeous quality. The cover is solid and durable, I had chosen to print one of my photos onto the cover, the image looked fantastic and the quality of the binding for the book is wonderful.

AdoramaPix use real archival quality photo paper for their photo books which means that your images look beautiful (even my instagram photos look great!). The printed photos are fade resistant, and the pages themselves are sturdy and thick. The pages of the book lay flat, there is no gutter, and the book is an absolute pleasure to look at. I chose the fingerprint resistant HD Glossy paper for my book, AdoramaPix also have a Professional Lustre finish available for their photo books.

After seeing the exceptional quality of the AdoramaPix Photo Books, my husband and I made a resolution that we would print one every year with our family photos from the previous year. I know that my mum is just going to love it too, the AdoramaPix Photo Books make a great mother’s day gift! Speaking of which:

I’m happy to be able to offer my readers 50% off 8×8 photo books (any page count) at AdoramaPix with the code: PxMomBL50

Discount code is good for 50% off 8×8 photo books at AdoramaPix. Any Page Count. Code expires May 12th.

I’m also absolutely thrilled to be able to give away one 26 page 8×8 AdoramaPix Photo Book to a lucky reader!

Simply enter to win on the RaffleCopter Widget below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclaimer: I was provided with an 8×8, 26 page photo book for the purposes of this review. All opinions expressed are entirely my own. Prize courtesy of AdoramaPix.

In Chicago, we are just beginning to see signs of sunshine. There are buds on the trees and late daffodils blooming in front yards, but not very much blossom to speak of yet. My wanderings around the neighbourhood revealed no lilac flowers, or much of anything lilac at all!

But of the flowers that are currently blooming we have a lovely mixture of purples, blues and whites so you’ll just have to bear with me and imagine the colours mixed together to create a pretty lilac.

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

Don’t forget to head over to Live and Love Out Loud today, where Kristi has a tutorial for you on taking macro photos of flowers!

I’m teaming up with Kristi of Live and Love Out Loud and Alicia of Project Alicia for another inspiring adventure as we photograph our way through spring with the Nurture Photography Challenge – a seasonal photo challenge series chock full of tips and tutorials, inspiring weekly prompts, personal feedback and encouragement.

Just a few details:

All are welcome regardless of skill level, camera equipment or geographic location.

Share your favorite images inspired by our weekly prompts each Friday and grab our lovely button while you’re at it!

The linky will remain open from 9am Friday – 9am Thursday CST. Don’t forget to visit and comment on the previous entry in the linky list.

We’re sharing the photography love and showcasing our talented photographers by pinning some of your lovely photos to our Nurture Photography Inspiration Board.

The Nurture Photography Challenge has taken to Facebook! Stop by, “like” our new Facebook fan page, ask questions and share your work on our wall as well.

We love Instagram just as much as you do! We’ll be on the lookout for your beautiful winter photos, so be sure to use the #nurturephoto hashtag. We’ll share a few favorites on Instagram each week, sending a little bit of love your way.

We can make a pinhole camera out of our digital cameras too, the concept is the same and there’s no fussing around with film and developing.

DIY Digital Pinhole Camera

To create your digital Pinhole Camera you will need:

A camera that will allow you to take photos without a lens attached. Some models of DSLR may not do this, so check your camera before you begin.

A Drill
Spare Camera Body Cap
Thick Foil (such as a foil pie tin)
Scissors
Fine needle or pin
Tape

First you will want to take your body cap and drill a hole in the center. It doesn’t matter so much what size the hole is for this part so long as it’s not enormous, you’ll end up putting foil over it. After drilling the hole make sure to thoroughly wash the body cap to remove any left over plastic dust.

Cut a small circle of foil, place on a hard surface such as a cutting board. Using the pin, poke the tiniest hole into the center of the foil that you can manage. You may have to experiment a few times to get the size correct. If the hole is too big or uneven then your images will be more out of focus. It took me about three tries to get it how I wanted.

Now, carefully tape the foil to the inside of your body cap, making sure to align the hole in the foil with the center of the hole drilled into the cap. Black electrical tape is probably best for this but regular tape will work in a pinch, just watch out for light leaks.

Now you are ready to screw the body cap onto your camera body and start shooting.

To shoot with your Digital Pinhole Camera you will need:

Tripod
(Optional: DSLR capable of high ISO)

Because the very tiny hole needed for the pinhole camera does not let in very much light and you will therefore need to use longer exposures, a tripod is recommended. If your camera is capable of very high ISO then you may be able to handhold but I got better results using a lower ISO, a Tripod and long exposure.

Experiment with your shutter speed for the best results, and have fun!

The images I created with my digital pinhole camera are a little fuzzy. Because of the small size of the digital camera sensor (you have less leeway than with film) to get sharper images with a pinhole the hole itself needs to be as exactly round as possible and the size of the pinhole should be more precise. These things are almost impossible to do with the tools you may have on hand, but if you are looking for more accurate pinhole photographs with your digital camera you can actually purchase specially laser cut body caps to use.

The point here though wasn’t to create perfectly sharp photos, but to have fun and experiment with new things. I enjoyed trying out my pinhole camera, working out the exposure and seeing what I could create without a lens attached to my camera.

There are other fun ways in which you can manipulate the light coming into your camera, head over to Live and Love Out Loud today where Kristi has an awesome tutorial on creating shaped bokeh.

Have you ever made a pinhole camera before?

*Photos taken with the Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic

A Wordful Wednesday post linked with: