Exciting News!!

I have lots to share with you guys but, I'm not going to write a novel so I'll spread it over a few posts.  I've been horrible about getting here and keeping things updates but promise things will turn around.

So what's the great exciting news?  One of our photos was chosen to be used as the cover art for Friends of the Topeka Zoo's summer issue of Zooreka.  Zooreka is the magazine that goes out to all the FOTZ members.  They say it's close to 5,000 households.  That's a lot of people seeing one of our photos.

Very exciting for us, but super exciting for my husband, it's his photo.  It's the first time one of his photos have been published.  I've been published a couple of times.  I'm happy that he got this little boost of confidence.

Well do you want to see the photo? Good, because I'm going to post it anyway. :-)  If you love it you can click on it and buy it in our Artfire shop.

Just Popping In

I'm just popping in to let everyone know I haven't forgotten about you.  I've been re-working the artfire store.  We will be offering free shipping on all of our items shortly.  There are 15 more to go and then we will be adding a lot of new photographs.  I also promise to get back to blog more often.  I don't want anyone thinking we've forgotten about them.

I Heart Faces Friday Fix-It

I'm doing another Friday Fix-It.  The rules have changed though, someone was using a submitted photo as their own.  Totally not cool!  Any way on to the submission.

Original:

My version of it:

So no how I did it.  Lightroom again this week, it's just quicker for these basic edits that I'm not making selections and layers on.  Of course the first thing I did was rotate the image. Now I'm just going to go down the sliders

Exposure: +2

Recovery: +24

Fill Light: +20

Blacks: +20

Brightness: +10

Contrast: +35

Clarity: - 48

Vibrance: +80

Saturation: -45

Lumiance: 36

Color: 36

Lens Correction: +86

Mid-point: 60

This can easily be achieved with the preset Abby Angelic that can be downloaded from Adobe.  Which is what I did. :-) 

Things Are Getting Exciting

This last week has been filled with exciting prospects for our little business.  When you take something for a hobby to a part-time business it can be a little scary.  We went to taking photos for fun to donating photos to the school to doing photos for friend and then biting the bullet, after much begging, to a part-time business.  But this week has proved to be worth it all.

We have two prospective clients that aren't related to us or friends.  :-)

We finally heard back from the friends of the zoo!  They are accepting our donation of photos for use in fundraising and advertisement! This is a non-paying thing but it gets our photos out there and it helps a group that has become very near and dear to our heart.

We finally got to chat for a little bit with my step-son last night.  He's on leave now for a few days before he ships out to the horn of Africa.  We won't get to see him but it was nice to hear from him.  He had told us before he left he would be talking up our photography to his buddies.  He had been showing them the photos we took of him and his fiancé before he left and he has 164 people interested in it.  Even if a tenth of them call us when they are back on leave that's sixteen new clients!!  Which is uber exciting!

I got a new photo up on Artfire this week too!