Take Better Photos With the Camera You Already Have- Tip #7: No Cheese!

Several months ago I gave a workshop on how to take better pictures with the camera you have. (You don't necessarily need to go out & buy a better camera to improve your photos!) I thought it would be something worth sharing here, so I'm going to share it in parts. Each Friday I'll share another part. If you have any photography-related questions that you'd like to see me answer, feel free to leave them in the comments
(or e-mail me). Perhaps I could do a post on a subject you're curious about.

Tip #7: No Cheese!
1. Take more candid photos! Don’t always stop your kids and have them smile at you for photos. That’s great sometimes, but be a fly on the wall other times, and catch them busy at something.

2. Wait for it… If your kids are prone to stopping what they’re doing & either smiling for the camera or avoiding the camera (out of habit/expectation), try waiting with your camera ready, until they get sick of paying attention to you. When they get back to what they’re doing, you can anticipate what they’re likely to do next and stay ready with your camera, so that when that cute moment comes, you’re ready to click!

During this Easter Egg Hunt, I crouched down by this egg, ready for someone to come and get it!
The kids were moving so quickly that this proved to be the best way to catch that moment!
3. When you want a smiling photo: Instead of asking them to smile and say cheese, try getting them laughing instead! You’re much more likely to get a genuine smile or facial expression! (How you get them laughing is up to you- tell a silly joke, make a funny noise, tickle… do whatever works for your kids! Some kids respond well to being told, “Don’t you smile! Don’t you DARE smile!”… after saying that a few times with a mischievous grin on your face, they just might crack into the biggest, most genuine smile you’ve ever caught on camera! (But don’t forget to have your camera READY for it when the genuine facial expression comes- sometimes they’re short lived & you don’t want to miss it!)

Candid photos are some of my favourites. They're great for taking you right back to that moment in time!
I hope this gets you thinking this week as you pull your camera out. See if you can go a week without asking anyone to SAY CHEESE!
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Share the photos you're taking with the tips in this series on Instagram, using the hashtag #RaisingMemories

You can find me on Instagram @RaisingMemories
Other Posts in the Series:

Tip #1: Using Your Flash
Tip #2: Natural Light
Tip #3: Be Aware of your Background
Tip #4: Perspective
Tip #5: Focus & Zoom
Tip #6: Rule of Thirds
Tip #7: No Cheese!

Each Friday I'll share another photography tip. If you have any photography-related questions that you'd like to see me answer, feel free to leave them in the comments- perhaps I could do a future post on a subject you're curious about.

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Tutorial: DIY 2x4 Chalkboard Christmas Countdown

I was asked to teach a craft for our "Country Christmas" activity for the ladies at church. We got together in November to make things for Christmas and here's what I came up with:

Materials you'll need to make one:

- a 2x4 cut to be 14" long
- sand paper or a sander
- vinyl
- chalkboard vinyl
- a Cricut (or something like it that will cut shapes & letters for you)
- Red or green paint for the background
- Cream paint for the edges (or you can just sand the edges)
- Foam brushes (they work best if you're going to dry brush the edges)
- Plastic plate for your paint
- Newspaper to protect your work surface


How to Make One:
1. My husband cut a whole bunch of 14" pieces of wood for me. You can have it done where you buy your wood, or do it yourself if you're savvy with power tools. He also sanded them for me (if you're just making one, it won't seem so overwhelming to sand it with sand paper instead of a sander ;)

2. Then I painted the wood red (or green). Leave one side unpainted, or it'll be sticking to your newspaper or whatever you've got your wood sitting on, to dry! The paint will be brighter when it's wet.

3. After it dries you can dry brush the edges with the cream paint (or use sand paper to rough it up). (Click her to see how to dry brush your edges).

4. Your last step is to cut out the vinyl & stick it on!

I used Silhouette's chalkboard vinyl and the Sophisticated Cricut cartridge to make the chalkboard shape. I used Cricut's vinyl in "Latte" and the Cricut American Alphabet cartridge for the letters.

I'm really happy with the way they turned out! All you need is a piece of chalk and you can update your countdown each day! :)

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Finding the "Story Within the Story" with Nokia #Lumia 1020 Phone Camera from Telus

I've been test driving the new Nokia Lumia 1020 phone for the past couple of months and today I want to share some photos with you that I've been taking with its amazing camera!

I was challenged to find the "story within the story" in my photos, so let's see how that went...
I started by taking a few close ups, just to see what kind of detail I could get:

I walked out into my backyard & looked at my exciting (kidding) lawn and then I noticed this little guy!

This one is actually cropped- the original wasn't taken this close up- so that just goes to show you how great this camera is! That's a pretty clear little caterpillar moseying along in my backyard! He was fast, too! Just look at the "fuzzy" edges to some of those leaves- you can see the fuzz!

This next photo makes me a little sad- I sure miss those blue skies! ;)
(Now all we've got is white skies... and a lot of snow ;)

There was no editing done to any of the photos I'm showing you today- I wanted you to be able to see the colour quality you can get straight out of camera.

By the way, this phone's camera has a 41-megapixel sensor... you guys... my DSLR doesn't even have that!

Katrina was with me when I walked around looking for things to take test photos of, so I took a picture of her. Then I looked for the "story within a story" and cropped the photo just to her eye.
Check out the detail here!

I also wanted to test out the video, so I took this adorable little video of my sister-in-law making my baby nephew laugh. It's adorable! And the quality is great too :)



This next shot was really an outtake (it was an attempt at a shot of the kids' table at a family thanksgiving dinner). I almost deleted it but then I noticed my nephew's face! He kept pulling this face at me every time I tried to take an "un-posed" shot of the kids eating at the table ;) So, a little story within the story, thanks to the ability to crop & still end up with a usable photo!

Check out this post I did in October, about my first try at making my own pie crust! All of the photos in that post were taken with this camera! I would never use my point-and-shoot camera for a post like this, but I wanted to play with this phone's camera some more, and I thought these photos were just fine for that post! (My point & shoot would've been so frustrating to try & get shots like this with!)


This is a sneak peak at the post linked to above- head over to the post to see all of the shots!

Here's a shot I took of the last bite of my piece of pie. I didn't want all of that background mess in the photo, so I just cropped it & the quality after cropping was great!

Something really fun to play with is the Nokia Smart Cam App. It takes a bunch of photos in a row and then it can merge them in different ways. It will choose the best face out of a sequence of shots, or it will show a person several times in a frame if they were moving, or it can blur everything that wasn't moving, like this shot of Talia on a swing:

This camera has been so much fun! I took it with me to Mexico and almost all of the photos I shared with you yesterday from our trip to Mexico were taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020!

These are just a few shots from our trip to Mexico. Yesterday's post shows a lot more photos from Mexico with the Nokia Lumia 1020.

Just a few more shots before I leave you (some photos of the girls on the way to school on a rainy day, a "selfie" of Katrina & I on a hayride on a class trip, and of Talia when I took her out to Red Lobster for her first time).

I wouldn't have had photos from any of these events before this phone unless I brought my ipod along, and I can assure you the photos would not have looked so nice! :)

The only thing that I didn't like about the Nokia Lumia 1020 phone (when comparing with my DSLR for goodness sake!) was indoor photos without natural light. Please note that I am used to using my DSLR with an extra bounced flash when needed, so it's been a while since I've seen the dreaded red eye! Here are a few examples of the less-than-stellar indoor shots I got (but you've seen several great indoor shots earlier in this post that I was able to get with natural light coming in through windows).

The photo on the left required flash which created red eye. The photo on the right was taken in a very dimly lit restaurant.

Regardless of your camera skills, TELUS won't leave you alone to figure this awesome device out- they offer Learning Centre Sessions which give you one-on-one access to device experts who'll teach you all you need to know about your new device, whether that's the Lumia 1020's advanced camera, or one of the phone's many features. This is good news for someone like me because this is the first time I've ever had a cell phone! (I know, welcome to the future Heather!) Luckily for me I have a husband who could help me out ;) It has been a lot of fun!

Disclosure: This phone & a couple of months of service were provided to me for review purposes from Telus. All opinions shared in this post are 100% mine!

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10th Anniversary Trip to Mexico

Ken & I have been married for 10 years!
I keep putting this post off because of other posts, but today I'm finally getting it up so that I can share photos!

To celebrate this year we wanted to do something big. We decided to go on a week-long trip to Mexico! We were super excited about this because neither of us had ever been on a vacation like this before. Ken served a 2 year mission for our church in Mexico when he was 19, so it was especially cool to be returning there after a decade.

If you follow me on Instagram ( @raisingmemories ), you've been able to get a glimpse at our vacation already. Today I'll share some more :)

I was a little nervous going into this vacation because the weather did NOT look good for while we would be in Cancun. To make things worse, I caught a cold a couple of days before we left (which, by the way, I STILL have!) There was nothing I could do about either of those things except pack an umbrella and a bunch of Dayquil, so off we went! :)

Here "we" are at the airport, waiting for our flight. After 4 hours looking at the back of an airplane seat, we arrived in warm & muggy Cancun! Ken's Spanish skills immediately came in handy for finding the right van to take us to our resort. Ken sat up front with the driver and had a nice Spanish chat while I watched out my window, at my first view of a country other than Canada or the USA! We were greeted at the resort with cold, wet towels and I was given these flowers- how nice! :)

When we checked in, we were told that we were being upgraded to an ocean-view room because we were celebrating our anniversary. (The guy at check-in asked us if it was our honeymoon) The next few people that we talked to also asked us if we were on our honeymoon and eventually, after explaining that it was our anniversary several times, we gave in & just smiled & nodded when they asked about our honeymoon! We decided it could be a late honeymoon since the one we had 10 years ago wasn't too fancy ;)

Below is the view we had from our room, and the lovely Jacuzzi we had in our room, as well as the cake we were greeted with just after checking into our room! haha Happy Honeymoon to us! We were also given a bottle of wine upon check in & another special bottle of wine with our cake (we don't drink ;)

We had just enough time to explore our room & choose which of the many restaurants on our resort to go to for dinner. Ken had been looking forward to tasting real Mexican food again (he has been thinking and talking about this for many years), so we got dressed up and headed for the fancy Mexican restaurant! We were excited to have someone come to our table and make fresh guacamole for us right there, with whatever ingredients we wanted added- it was so good! I was in love with the pico de gallo at this resort (at this restaurant & most of the buffets). There were 3 Mexican guys there singing and playing music- it was so cool! We went to this restaurant again later in our week and our waiter arranged for them to sing to us at our table for our anniversary!

When we got back to our room, our bed was turned down with chocolate mints and a rose on our bed- I loved that!

The next day (Thursday) we woke up to rain. I didn't mind too much because I had scheduled 2 hours at the salon to have my first real mani/pedi! These were deluxe mani/pedis and they were AMAZING! I loved it so much!

We had a break from the rain in the afternoon- long enough to walk around outside, by the beach, and eat at a little place outside under a thatched roof- so neat! Then the rain started again & we headed out in the rain for a special Italian dinner reservation on the other side of the resort. This is the only photo I have from that night, of me, ready to go (I'm wearing beach sandals with my nicer shoes in my bag because there was no way I was walking outside in all that rain in heels! ;)

That restaurant was not quite what we expected. The dishes were beautiful, but I didn't enjoy eating them! There was unexpected raw fish involved ;) We're glad we tried this place but wouldn't return!

The rain would not let up, so we spent the evening in our room- we ordered room service (we weren't too full after that restaurant ;), tried out our Jacuzzi and just relaxed! It was so fun to be at an all-inclusive resort! Normally we wouldn't do things like order room service or go to a fancy restaurant every night! (and there's no way I would spend money at the spa, but our resort had this awesome resort credit included with our booking that could be put toward excursions and spa use!)

Below is a photo of our reflection at breakfast on that rainy day. The buffet was at an Italian restaurant (not the same one we went to the night before) and it was BEAUTIFUL! There was gorgeous stained glass on the ceiling and walls and beautiful furniture- such luxury! ;) On the right is a shot of us at the beach with our resort bracelets (we think the fact that they were pink must have meant we were on our honeymoon), and the cute towel art that we found waiting for us when we got home one night.

Our resort was known as not having a very swimmable beach (It had a lot of seaweed), so on Friday we took a free shuttle to another hotel that was included in our "all-inclusive" that was located in the hotel zone. Its beach was GORGEOUS! I have never seen a beach like that in real life- true, turquoise water and beautiful, light sand! (Sand at beaches around home is brown... kind of almost like dirt. haha :) This was sooo nice!

These photos were taken with my DSLR

That afternoon we took a city bus into Cancun city to go to a Mexican market. As soon as we got on that city bus, it was like we were taking a journey into a whole other world! I loved it! It was really special to be with Ken and for him to be able to share with me some of the experiences he had while on his mission. It was also really nice that he could speak the language and knew what was going on ;) We had a fun time walking through the market area and picking up a few little gifts to take home. It rained only a little bit that day while we were at the market, so we were very relieved that the weather was looking better!

Saturday we spent some time laying out by a pool in the morning. It was so nice because we had this beautiful pool with palm trees all around us and then just beyond the pool you could see and hear the ocean!

(The photos above are 2 different pools- Ken swam laps in the bottom one and the top one had a level with chairs in it, so you could be "in the pool", on your lounge chair, ready to take a dip as needed ;)
We also spent some time walking along the beach that day and went out for dinner at this beautiful place (shown below). For some reason there was hardly anyone at this place that night, so it was like a private dinner and we had an awesome waiter. He even showed us a baby crocodile that lived in the water behind the pool (!!!!). Crazy!!

We wanted to try to get to an LDS church on Sunday and after much research, several phone calls and a lot of help from a lady at the resort, we felt confident embarking on an adventure to get to one! It involved taking a 30min shuttle to that resort I mentioned earlier (where we went to the beautiful beach & took a city bus to the market), then a long city bus ride further into town, and a short walk to a lovely stake centre located in the middle of this city. We were excited to make it there! It turned out that they were having their primary presentation (all of the children speak and sing songs for the main meeting) which was awesome for me since I couldn't understand the words, but I knew the tunes of the songs (the same ones we sing at church in English) and Ken could whisper translations to me of the short comments that the children gave when they took turns speaking.

After the meeting we met a few American couples who were also on vacation and offered to drive us back to our hotel! (They had a taxi that they were paying to drive them around that day). So that was really convenient! It was fun to meet them (they took the picture below for us- it was super sunny. I couldn't keep my eyes open ;) and we made it back to that resort just in time to catch the 30 minute shuttle back to our home resort.

Monday we had signed up for an excursion to go to a waterpark. We were excited that we would be taking a boat to get there! Below are a couple of shots of us on the boat and the view of some of our resort from the boat. The waterpark was so cool because it was right off of the ocean- we got off of our boat onto a beach and walked into the park from there. We were amazed by the view that greeted us when we got to the top of the first waterslide! Ahead of us we could just see ocean and all around us it was like jungle- tons of palm trees in the park, and we were just surrounded by forest of trees- it was gorgeous! The park wasn't very busy, so if you had to wait your turn at all, you waited for maybe 3 people to go down a slide ahead of you- it was fabulous :)

(Don't mind my crazy hair- it was really windy! ;)
Tuesday morning we got up early and went to the beach to watch the sun rise.

This photo taken with my DSLR

Then we got breakfast and headed off for our last excursion- a trip to see the ruins of Coba. After a long ride in a van, we arrived and started a fairly long trek through a forest. We spotted some huge butterflies! When we started seeing ruins, I spotted a crazy bright lime green caterpillar that blended right in with the moss- I thought it was so cool!

But the main attraction was when we arrived at this HUGE pyramid which we climbed. (And I have never been so sweaty in my life- it was so hot out and that was quite the climb!) Pretty amazing to reach the top and see the view and a little intimidating to start the descent!

These photos taken with my DSLR

On our way out of the forest, there was this little area with shops that had been flooded because of all of the rain they had had recently. It was quite a sight!

I couldn't stop looking out my window on the way home from that excursion, at the homes and shops of the Mexicans who lived in that area. I was in awe. If I ever return, I would love to spend more time in areas like that, seeing the people and how they live. I would have loved to have photographed more of it!

That evening, back at the resort, we had such a neat experience- to be involved in a turtle release!

That night we were treated to a special anniversary/honeymoon(?) dinner at a Japanese restaurant. We were given a special menu with options not on their regular menu (we had Duck and Filet Mignon!) It was an awesome dinner. We loved our waiters and they treated us really well (as did most of the waiters throughout our whole stay!)

Wednesday morning I got to enjoy the spa one last time with a massage and then we checked out- left a tip in our most recent towel creation, said goodbye to the iguana (just kidding- but seriously- it was so weird to see these guys waltzing around like squirrels!), and hopped on a plane, saying farewell to Cancun!

Other than the fact that I was sick the whole time, this trip was everything I hoped it would be! I'm so happy we went for it and did something big for our 10th anniversary. It was so much fun! As I type this I look out my window and feel like I'm in a snow globe ;) but it's not so bad, knowing I just came from such an amazing place. And it sure helps that I'm coming home to birthday party planning for Katrina and Christmas plans, too! :)

Disclosure: All photos in this post were taken with the Nokia Lumia 1020 phone, unless otherwise noted.  This phone was provided to me free of charge for review purposes.  Tomorrow's post will tell you all about it!

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