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Dadand meets Photoshop Elements

We’ve been Photoshopped. Errr… Photoshop Elemented.

You’ve heard the infamous software noun used as a verb lately—mostly when they refer to fashion mag covers and making some super skinny model even skinnier.

Well Pete and I will be putting some nouns and verbs together, along with other parts of the English language, over the next few months to capture our work with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Now if it would only make me look skinnier.

Well, I think it can, and we’ll show you how—along with a bunch of other stuff about photography, some tips and tricks and maybe even a surprise or two.

You see…taking photos is pretty important to us, mostly for our blog and our families. Not necessarily in that order. But our snapshots are more practical in nature, and less artsy-fartsy hobbyist.

We take pictures to record the memories we try to make for our kids everyday. And to show you how we do stuff. We do it to remember the day the training wheels came off, or when we jammed our finger changing the #@%&X wheel bearings on the camper.

And we take a lot of them.

So we need to organize. And tag. And sort, stack, retouch, scale, crop and print.

And take the rabbit ears out of every. Damn. Family. Photo.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Our Gear

Ahhh. The gear. Photography can be one of those expensive hobbies. And you can get all geared up, spend thousands and still take crappy photos. Just ask the mom in our homeschool group who has a “professional photography” business and mumbles crap about f-stops all the time. Ha.

I can use my iPhone and take better shots. Add in something like Photoshop Elements and you’ll never know the photo came from my phone.

So, yeah, I use my iPhone a lot for the blog posts. Sometimes it’s easier since we’re holding stuff with our other hand or I don’t want to get the Canon greasy.

Photography for blog with Photoshop Elements

Here’s my Canon EOS 3xti and some lenses. The short one is a 50mm and reminds me of my high school and college photo classes—where you actually had to walk to compose your shot, rather than turn a zoom lens. It’s a lot more fun. Oh and there’s my Sony Bloggie, which I use for video and still sometimes, and of course the shot is taken with my trusty iPhone.

Pete throws on a snazzy olloclip lens for his iPhone and instantly gets macro and fisheye abilities. And I’m sure every once in a while he sneaks out Merrypad’s Canon too.

I’ve got a few budget-friendly Smith-Victor photo floods that I used for some product shots, but for the most part we shoot as is, where is.

Aside from that, we both snarl at anything but our MacBook Pros when we need to organize and edit our work—primarily using Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks.

But that’s changed after we saw the power and time savings in using Photoshop Elements.

My trusty MacBook Pro.

My trusty MacBook Pro.

What’s next?

Look for some DIY-how-to-tutorial-walk-though-type-posts on taking photos, organizing them and editing them.

I’ll be using about 900 of last year’s summer vacation photos as a case study.

Nah.

But I’ll try and take regular photos—the stuff that pisses you off but can be fixed easily with a little know-how. You know, like when the kids consistently blink when you shoot. Or they do rabbit-ears. Or you want to fake a panorama but you only got a iphone 4. Or that old guy mistakenly photobombs your kid’s only shot with Mickey after you’ve waited for 40 minutes in 90-degree heat and the family behind you is already bumrushing the photo op.

Yeah, like those things.

Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see.

We’ve apparently got a batphone hotline straight to Adobe if you stump us and we need to ask.

And I WANT to call.

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