5 Tips For Taking Great Holiday Photos!

Editing and Creating Great Photos does not have to take a lot of money, nor a lot of time. There are so many online sites where you can store your photos, print your photos, edit photos and create photo albums that can be shared online with your loved ones. What a wonderful way to stay connected while far apart, or what a great way to just simply share your photos! Creating a great album is fun but you do need to start with some fun photos!

Try an unexpected angle

You don't always need to see the entire face....just imagine her expression inside the water!

The holidays are here, you have great intentions to take photos that will keep the memories alive forever, don't set yourself up for disappointment, be prepared and you will be able to create memories that will last a life-time!

Here are some tips that I have for you!
1. Make sure your batteries are charged or bring extras, there is nothing worse than trying to capture that perfect moment and finding your battery dead. I'll never forget, when our daughter was born, my in-laws came to take photos, and guess what: NO FILM! We don't use much film these days, but batteries come in close!
Photo Editing tip: If you do forget that extra battery (it happens to the best of us!), make best of what you do have!  If you only were about to take 3 quick pictures before it died, edit them to make them look stunning!  You can save a bad picture in a few different ways, if the color is way of try black and white.  Black and white will always look better if the color image is good, but it does help if you do it right!  If the picture is a bit blurry, try adding different textures, or even making it look like you intended it to be blurry by keeping some points blurry and sharpening, say faces (boca anyone?)!

2. Don't bring a new camera, when taking pictures you're going to do your best when you know your equipment, save the new for at home, and practice before using a new camera somewhere special. New cameras take time to learn and patience as well, you don't have time to read your instruction manual while family is creating the perfect photographic moments right before your eyes! You can always edit photos, take out the red-eye, change the coloring a bit to make it look better, but it's still best to leave the new toys for a not so special time until you get the hang of it!
Photo editing tip:  Same thing goes for Photoshop!  Yay!  You got Photoshop Elements for Christmas, however, it's important to remember that it will take a while and a lot of hard work (and frustration!) to figure out.  Rent books from the library, read tutorials online, and practice as much as you can!

3. Take a lot of photos, and I mean a lot. The more you take, the better chance you have of capturing perfection! Many times I feel like I have taken too many photos only to be disappointed when I begin to download. You can always delete, but once you're home you'll never have the chance to catch that moment again. I have not played around with Photo Shop a lot, my daughter does though and she has created some amazing photos by editing instead of deleting many photos.
Photo Editing Tip: You might be disappointed by a picture if the color is a bit dark.  As long as it isn't overly dark, that is easy to fix in Photoshop!  While you won't get the stunning natural light that you might have if you had the correct exposure taking the picture, you can definitely play with the light control to turn a terrible picture into a well exposed one!

4. Get down on the floor when taking pictures of children, that way your photos will be in the perspective of the child and will truly capture the moment. The look on a child's face is so much cuter at their level than from way up above, you'll catch the glimmer in their eyes, the wrinkle in their little hands.
Photo editing tip:  A lot of times you can't quite get the angle that you were hoping for in real life (this happens to me all the time!).  In Photoshop Elements, it's easy to crop your image to give it a completely different look, and get the angle that you wanted!

5. Family photos are nice but sometimes it's much more fun to take candid photos where everyone is natural instead of trying to get many people smiling and in position at the same time, we all have horror stories of frozen smiles while the grandpa's get their adjustments just right!
Photo editing tip:  If you take your family photos yourself with a tripod, often times when you download them you'll find out you completely missed something while you were taking them!  Blue garbage can five feet away from Dad anyone?  It's easy to fix this in Photoshop with the burning, copy, and layer tools!  There are great tutorials on this if you Google it!

I am in no way a great photographer, my daughter is much better! But I still love to take photos, some turn out, others hit the trash button. There is always photo shop, you can turn some pretty awful pictures into something gorgeous with a little bit of tweaking here and there! Most of all, don't get stressed out trying to take the perfect picture, let things happen naturally and you won't be disappointed.


“I wrote this blog post while participating in the TwitterMoms and Adobe blogging program, making me eligible to receive a $50 gift card. For more information on how you can participate, click here.” (make sure you link to http://photoshopelements.twittermoms.com/about )