More Challenges

Like I said last post, I haven't taken too many photos in the past few days and the ones I have taken are still on my camera which my mom has with her today.

Instead I've found several more photo challenges to join!
The first one is over at A Ray of Sunshine. Her theme is Winter and so I'm entering this picture from last week:

The next one is over at Cookie Cutter and the theme is "color"

The last one for today is hosted by Lucia at her blog - Lucia, etc. - and the theme is "the little things". This is my entry because it's the little things like striped pants and red sneakers and golden hour bokeh that make this picture perfect.

This is my youngest brother who is 23 months.

Thanks for stopping by!
~Mary Kate

Entering...

I haven't entered a photography challenge in a while so I thought I would enter Mary Ann's (Shutter Happy) photo challenge.

The theme is anything which is good because I  haven't taken many photos in the past few days (I've been very busy with school starting back up again) so I'm sharing one that I took right before Christmas and never shared with all of you.

I took this out our car window. The city you can faintly see is Harrisburg (PA's capitol).

And I'm also entering a photo challenge by two girls, Gloria and Mary Catherine. Their theme is "bokeh" which makes me very happy as I have tons and tons of bokeh from Christmas.It is not easy to pick my favorite bokeh shot. But I believe this is my favorite:

It doesn't even have that much bokeh in it, but I love it so much! It's from our Christmas breakfast and I just held my plate up in front of our Christmas tree. (And just look at my last post to see a TON more bokeh filled photos)

~Mary Kate

The End is Just the Beginning

In other words, fall is almost over and winter is just starting :)
The other day I happened to look out the window and notice that the light was at the perfect golden hour light. Most of our leaves are gone, so I wanted to capture some pictures with the gorgeous light and some to-die-for bokeh. AND as it just so happens, MaryAnn at Shutter Happy is having a photo challenge with the theme being "Color". So my color is a mixture of golden yellows, orangey reds and dusky browns.

The colors started off as a light undertone of the beautiful golden light to come:

I'm entering this photo in Mary Ann's photo challenge {Shutter Happy} :

By the time I found a tree in our back yard to photograph, the sun and sunk a little lower in the sky...

I'm not exactly sure what I love about this shot - I almost deleted it right after I took it because my camera was being stubborn and not focusing on the whole leaf, but I'm so glad I decided to keep it.

The golden light became more intense...

And the following photo I'm entering in golden hour photo challenge @ The Three Photographers Adventure:

Until it forced me to stop because all I ended up with were jack-o-lantern-looking leaves...

{Our five kittens have just started to open their eyes, here are two of them.}

~Mary Kate

Autumn Colors

Around here the leaves are starting to turn into gorgous shades of yellow, orange and red. I've had a lot of fun out in our yard taking pictures.

I'm entering the next photo into the Live Every Moment photo challenge:

The theme is Autumn and this is by far my favorite picture that captures "Autumn".

This next photo I'm entering in the Shades of Autumn Challenge:

This week's color is "green". I love the fact that it's mostly green, but you can see the beginning of gorgeous colors peaking through.

Fall also means school which means waking up early enough to see the sunrise. Most mornings I don't even notice the sunrise in my rush to get ready for school, however yesterday morning I happened to glance outside and see a spectacular sunrise. Of course I had to run and get my camera and run outside and find someway to make it interesting.

Those were the true colors, I promise, the only editing I did was add my watermark and sharpen the leaves. That's it.God is the true artist of this beauty, I just captured his amazing work.

This next photo makes me so happy. I've wanted to capture a scene like this for a while and I finally did!
And since it makes me so happy I found a photo challenge for it!

On our 45 min. drive to school Monday morning, my mom rolled down the window and came to an almost complete stop so I could get this picture. :)

I love fall colors!

I still have a bunch of photos waiting for me to edit them or post them. In fact I still have never gotten around to posting the photos (or even finish editing the photos) from my little impromptu photoshoot with my younger siblings last week.

But I figured that if I try to wait until all my photos were edited and ready to share, then I would not be posting for a very long time. Because the problem is, I keep taking new photos each day and then every few days I sit down and edit a couple here and there. So I'm always behind.

Ah well, at least I have these. I'll leave you with a bunch from the last two weeks:

Trying to be creative by sticking my camera in the cabinet to get this shot.

How my bedroom looks most of the time. And how I want it to look the rest of the time.

Very random picture taken while listening to my Spanish CD for homework.

Rose is a goofball. 'Nuf said.

The starfish in our bathroom.

One of the pictures during our "impromptu" photo shoot last week. See how messy his shirt is? yeah I didn't bother to change his clothes, that's how spontaneous it was. :)

Our globe.

During our photo shoot I pretty much just followed Joey around and snapped pictures of him playing.

I more formally "posed" the older kids. John Paul, as stated by one of my friends "has beautiful eyes". I agree!

Our family "bus" aka 12 passenger van.

I hope you are all having a great Autumn!

~Mary Kate

More editing!

I just found this other photo challenge, well actually it's an edit challenge. Sort of like i heart faces fix-it-Fridays. Anyway, you download the photo and edit it and then enter it. I would have done it tomorrow, but the I have an hour left to link up so I'm doing it now.








This is the original picture we had to edit:

Personally I think this is already an amazing photo and that it hardly had to be edited. I've never been one for crazy editing, so I stayed on the more simple side and this is what I came up with:

I don't have photoshop (or any editing software) so I use picnik.com. So I'll try to explain best I can how I edited this.
1.) I played with the levels darkening the dark clouds, water and boat and lightening the sky.
2.) I used played with colors until the water and dark clouds were the right shade and the light sky stayed the same beautiful shade of orange that it was in the original, except I brought out the color more.
3.) And lastly I used the sharpening tool (which on picnik is called "mascara") to sharpen the whole image, especially the boat, water and light clouds.
See, I told you this barely needed any editing at all!
Love,
Mary Kate