A Big Reason to be Festive!

In case you can’t tell by my photos, I had some fun with this week’s Christmas Light Bokeh Prompt for this week’s Good to Wow: Shoot and Edit. Christmas lights are so pretty! And happy! And Fun! But that in itself is not the big reason I have to be festive.

I’m assuming that you want to know because you’re still reading. Here it is:

I’m no longer unemployed Bean; instead I’m going to be E.I.T. Bean! (That stands for engineer in training.) That’s right! I have a job!

It’s awesome because a) it was totally a God thing as I didn’t actually apply for the job, they just wanted to interview me and b) it’s a job I actually want! I’ve talked about my previous potential job angst before and about how I was hesitant to really go out and get myself an engineering job. This opportunity literally fell into my lap (praise the Lord!) and who am I to say no when that’s where God wants me to be?

How has God shown you his providence lately?

All these shots are Straight Out of the Camera (SOOC).

Holiday Edits & A New Blog Header!

Now I feel like a bit of hypocrite, as I was feeling inspired yesterday and thus have designed a new Christmas themed header for my blog. Oops. I always find it interesting that after you’ve got something off your chest you can let it go and move on from it and I guess that’s the case with my new header! I’m still not listening to Christmas music, though. 😉

For this week’s Good to Wow: Shoot and Edit, I wanted to use gradual filters like what Cedar talks about in her tutorial. Fortunately, I did take a landscape photo, which works really well for that kind of filter. I also fiddled with the white balance and saturation to make it look better.

Original Shot

Looking at photos like that makes me so happy that I live in Alberta and have the Rocky Mountains on my doorstep.

What’s on your “doorstep” that makes you happy?

Bah Humbug?

To be honest, I really haven’t been feeling terribly Christmas-y yet despite the snow on the ground and it being Advent and all. Mr. Bean can attest to how annoyed I was that my favourite radio station started playing Christmas music on American Thanksgiving. (It’s not even advent yet! Why are they playing Christmas music already!??! Why can’t they wait until Advent starts or until it’s December?!!?)

When I was growing up, we didn’t really start celebrating Christmas itself until basically Christmas Eve. I especially loved that some of the first Christmas Carols we’d sing were at the Lessons and Carols service at Church as well as on Christmas Eve instead of at the end of November. It made it seem so much more special! My family celebrated Advent and would do the Advent wreath/calendar things in December but we wouldn’t really put up any decorations, including our Christmas tree, until the 20th – 23rd (depending on how organized we were! haha. For what it’s worth, my family is usually one of the families whose Christmas cards arrive after Christmas.) Some of you probably think we’re crazy, which is fine, but we’ve always believed that the 12 days of Christmas start at Christmas and so that’s when we’d really celebrate Christmas and enjoy the Christmas atmosphere. So, I guess one of the reasons why I’m not terribly enthused for Christmas at the moment is that I’m afraid that I’ll be tired of it by the time it actually comes around – do you ever feel this way? Plus, from being in university, I learned quickly that as much as I might have wanted to get into the Christmas Spirit, I couldn’t if I wanted to do well on my finals! Old habits die-hard I guess!

View of the Rocky Mountains on Saturday Morning

That being said, given that it’s now actually December and we’re now in the second week of Advent, Mr. Bean and I have put up our mini Christmas tree, our Christmas lights and our door wreath and that helps make me feel a bit more in the Christmas spirit. I have been listening to the Christmas songs on the radio occasionally while I drive to tutoring because I like the DJ in the afternoon, they give good traffic updates and sometimes secular music annoys me more that 24/7 Christmas music. (I’m really picky, aren’t I? I guess that’s what happens when you enjoy listening to Christian music and then it’s taken away from you – that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it! haha.) Despite that, I’m still trying the “dip your toe in first” method instead of the “just jump right in!” method when it comes to enjoying Christmas in hopes that when Christmas finally gets here, I still want to celebrate it! Maybe like Scrooge I’m not so Bah Humbug-y after all; I just take a bit of time to get into the Christmas spirit! 🙂

When do you start celebrating Christmas? Are you sick of the Christmas atmosphere by the time it actually comes around?

These photos are Straight Out Of the Camera (SOOC) and are my submission for this week’s Christmas/Holiday themed Good to Wow: Shoot and Edit over on Jill’s Blog.

 

Black and White Beauties and Workflow Considerations

I was feeling in a black and white mood tonight as I edited some of the photos from my photography course. (You can see the originals here.)

In her post, Ashley asked us about our post-processing workflow. I know mine probably isn’t the most efficient, but this is what I do:

• Import photos (raw files) into Lightroom. Before I import them, I add as many tags as possible.
• After they are imported, I sort them into appropriate collections and add any tags that I forgot to add or didn’t apply to the whole bunch.
• Then, I go through and rate the photos – 4 or 5 stars if they are fabulous, 3 if I really like it, 2 if I like it, 1 if it’s okay and reject it if it’s terrible.
• I then set the filter to “rated” and go to the develop mode to make adjustments or apply presets. If a photo really needs to be looked at in photoshop, I will do it, but I prefer to do as much as possible in Lightroom. Unless, of course, it’s a panorama, then I’ll quickly export it from Lightroom and use the photomerge function in Photoshop to put them together.
• I usually just leave my files in Lightroom as it remembers any adjustments I have made to the original raw files and only export them if I am using them.

What do you do in your post-processing workflow?

These are my edited photos for this week’s Thanksgiving themed Good to Wow: Shoot and Edit. You can see everyone else’s edits on Ashley’s blog!

Gratefulness Edit

I hope all of you had a fabulous Thanksgiving!

I didn’t feel like doing too much for my edits, so I only did one photo. I first opened it in photoshop, cropped it, removed the post coming out from our heads, added the “Creamy Galaxy” texture on soft light blending mode, then added text and a border. You can see my original shots here and everyone else’s edits over on Ashley’s blog for this week’s Gratefulness themed Good to Wow: Shoot and Edit.