the big picture

I love playing around with my camera and can't wait to finally take a photography class at a local studio next week. The lighting in my family room is much more natural than my dining room, where everything looks yellow due to the overhead light. Is there a certain light bulb I should be using in my dining room fixture to give off more white light versus yellow?

I haven't spent enough time with my camera (Nikon D7000) yet to take it out of auto mode, but I have managed to at least turn off the auto flash, ha! Baby steps...

It helps me to load my photos in blogger and blow them up to see what part of the subject ended up 'in focus' versus not. I thought I had managed to get the flowers in focus here, but was aiming too low and got the leaves and vase.

The cupcake made it into focus here. I've eaten about 3 of these in the past 2 days by the way, thank you very much, ugh! Who buys 6 cupcakes for one 7 year old child? My husband. And who ends up eating them all because she can't stand to see them go to waste? ME!! Crave cupcakes are like crack I tell you. Linsey tipped me off to the gluten free variety and they are absolutely irresistible. We've compared them to the other big cupcake places around town and Crave continues to win, hands down. OK, back to my struggling photography skills. ☺

The red tulips for our little Valentine and Shakespeare's Love Sonnets for daddy. The big red box of chocolates were for me (along with the fabulous pink hydrangea) and yes, I've managed to down quite a few of those this week as well. Major chocolate hangover!

See how much more yellow the photos are in this room? Same time of day but the sun has shifted enough that I need the overhead light, which casts the yellow light.
Jenny recently asked me how I get my photos so large on blogger. I do it the manual way by deleting the following section in the 'edit html' version of the post,

WIDTH: 265px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px;

and changing the photo size from s400 to s800
She was able to adjust by right clicking on her photos and selecting extra large, but I believe she has the newest version of blogger. I don't seem to have that option but please let me know if I'm missing something.
This is the size of a photo loaded as 'large' in blogger without alteration:
Much better to adjust into the larger format.

Improving my photography skills is one of my goals this year and I'm excited to finally get into a studio with a professional photographer and get to work. I'll be sure to share what I learn after class next week.

I hope you've had a ♥ filled week!

xo~
Tricia