It’s time for the Love Your Shot! | Link-Up over at Love that Shot! Come on over and share your favorite photo you took this week and tell us a little about how you took it or how you processed it.

Monday night, our little family went over to the park to play a fun game of Plants vs. Zombies! It’s quite a fun little game, especially for the little girls. It’s based off of a computer game that Aaron likes to play, and now Autumn likes to play it too. She came up with the idea of playing it out in real life over at the park! The object of the game is kill the zombies before they get you and eat your brains. Your weapons are vegetables and plants. My favorite is the pea shooters! We used balls and threw them at the “zombies.”

So on our way home, we spot this pretty little tree with these cute little seeds hanging from them. Autumn and Summer say they are their peas for their pea shooters! I had to take some pictures of them and was snapping away until Aaron told me to come over to where he was and look straight up. So I did and this is what I saw. Beautiful bokeh sparkles smiling at me! My tip is to look up. You might be surprised at what you find!

And here is a photo of the game in action! The girls LOVED it!

Who’s in the mood for a giveaway?  My awesomely talented brother is giving away a beautiful handmade leather cuff bracelet over on Love that Shot this week! Head on over and enter to win. Right now… Come on, you know you want to.

Oh boy, today is sure a tough day for this mommy! This morning I sent my first-born to her first day of first grade. I’m not really sure how I ended up at this day so quick. Aren’t your babies supposed to stay your babies forever? I keep telling Autumn to stop growing, but she won’t listen to me. It’s not fair!

Well, since I had to face this day no matter what, I made Autumn let me take pictures of her. She was not too happy about the whole “early morning” thing, but she humored me and gave me some poses. This first one she was kind of giving me the “fake princess model” pose. She doesn’t really ever do this unless I’m taking pictures of her. Crazy kid!

Then she decided to take off and run around the yard a few times. I’m thinking the sugar from the fruit smoothie she had for breakfast just started to kick in.

Then, of course, comes the “seriously mom, aren’t you done yet” look. I get this a lot. It’s also the “mom, you don’t know anything” look. I get that a lot too. Shouldn’t I have a few more years before the teenager attitude starts? Honestly, I think Autumn was born a teenager. She’s had the attitude since day one!

This week at I Heart Faces the theme is “Beach Fun!” We don’t live near the ocean, so we have to make do with our “desert” beaches at the local reservoirs. I love this picture of Summer. She’s having such a blast splashing in the water! I had just gotten my Lensbaby lens and I thought this would be a fun place to try it out. I love the effect it gives the water.

Head on over to I Heart Faces for more fun beach photos!

**Also, we’re having a fabulous giveaway over at Love that Shot! Be sure to stop by and enter to win a beautiful hand-stamped steriling silver necklace from 3 Little Birds Boutique!

Love Your Shot! | Link-Up is our new weekly feature on Thursdays over at my website, Love that Shot! We’ve got a fun blog link-up party going on! All you have to do is choose your favorite photo you’ve taken in the past week, blog about it with a tip on how you took the photo or how you edited it and come link up. Click on over for some fun today!

This past weekend, my parents and my sister and her husband took a little drive up north to see a Vintage Boat Show. I’m much more of a nature photographer so photographing boats was a bit of a challenge for me! I decided to wander around and capture some nature around the hotel. Then we went inside the hotel and they had these handmade sailboats made out of sticks. They were the neatest things! I totally want one for my house now!

Anyways, I was looking at them and then looked past them and saw the lights in the background and I knew I had to get a picture! Now, I said before, I am a nature photographer and taking pictures of “stuff” is kind of hard! But I think I managed to pull it off. I love the bokeh lights in the background behind the rustic sailboat. I used my 50mm lens for this shot and used the wide aperture of f/1.4 to create those yummy bokeh sparkles in the background.

What a cutie this week! Wow, those eyes are just stunning! I absolutely loved the vibrant colors in this photo so I decided to do a clean edit this time. It was super easy and took me less than 3 minutes to do!

1. First I cropped to a portrait orientation. Hey, look! I’m getting better at cropping, lol!  Normally I would have probably left the crop alone, but I wanted all the focus to go straight to that handsome little boy.

2. I added a Levels Adjustment Layer and brought the outside sliders in towards the middle, just until they reached the beginning of the upward slopes. Then I grabbed the middle slider and moved it to the left just a little. What this levels adjustment did was brighten the exposure and give the colors a little bit of a boost.

3. Next I ran my Eye Sparkle Action from Love that Shot and very lightly sharpened his eyes and brightened the catchlights. I really go for the natural look with eyes, so I lowered the opacity of the layers way down to around 5-10%.

You’ll notice that I didn’t do anything to the darkness under his eyes. I always leave these sorts of things because I really feel they are part of them. Funny story, when I had my Senior pictures done the photographer took out the darkness and circles below my eyes. We got the finished photos back and something just didn’t look right about me! It seemed like part of me was missing, and we were right- my eyes weren’t “me” anymore! My daughters have inherited the shadows under their eyes and I always leave them in because it makes them unique. So long story short, that’s why I never touch those kinds of things!

4. Next I added a teeny tiny bit of warmth with my Warming Action.

5. Finally I darkened the edges a little bit to bring the focus straight to the little boy.

And that’s it! So easy and quick to do and it gives beautiful results!

Michelle Johnson is a fine art photographer and the co-founder of Love That Shot, a website for photographers with tutorials, workshops and fun products! Find her at her blog, My Two Seasons, and her website, Love That Shot.

Wow, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a photo for I Heart Faces! I got to thinking and I remembered this photo from when Autumn was about 2 years old. I had pulled her hair up after I shampoo’d it and she saw herself in the mirror. She was surprised and not in a good way! She couldn’t talk yet, but I could see what she was thinking in her eyes… “Mom, what in the heck did you do to me???” I thought it would be perfect for this week’s theme!

Head on over to I Heart Faces for some more fun “Surprise” photos!

I edited this with the “Monteverde” texture from the Old World Collection at Love That Shot. I’ll be posting a tutorial on how I did this black and white conversion in the next couple of weeks. It was super easy to do!

I have this lovely bloggy friend. Her name is Puna and we “met” each other a little over a year ago. She has such a lovely family and I’ve gotten to know them a bit over the last year through Puna’s fun blog posts. She takes gorgeous photos and I’m so glad we found each other!

Puna has a fun contest going on over at her blog this weekend, Hello Love – Family and she’s giving away a 16×20 canvas from Hello Canvas! All you need to do is enter a photo that best  best illustrates “Hello Love – Family” to you.

So here is my entry. These are my two sweet girls. They can get on each other’s nerves like crazy. They can fight like little wild animals. They can get each other in trouble and take immense pleasure in doing so. But, they love each other so much. They love to rough-house with each other and wrestle. They love to make each other pictures with love written all over them. They are best friends. They are sisters. This is an ultimate love that, if you care for it, will last forever.

This is me and my sister, Misti. We are best friends and I’m so lucky to have her. I want my girls to have this kind of relationship with each other when they grow up. (This photo isn’t for the contest…I just wanted to share. )

It’s time for Fix-It Friday again at I Heart Faces! What a fun theme this week! I love these color themes and I was going through the kindergarten school photos I took of Autumn in June (I know, I was so late!) and thought this one might be fun for Fix-It Friday this week.

I went pretty simple on my edit for this photo. I wanted to keep the beautiful colors, but give a bit more warmth and extra pizazz.

The first thing I did was add a Levels Adjustment Layer and grab the two outside sliders and drag them in towards the middle just a bit. This gives the colors a bit of a boost and clears up any digital haze.

Next I created a Curves Adjustment Layer and selected the Red Channel. I pulled down on the red a bit to reduce some of the red in her skin. She is naturally very pink and translucent and I normally keep that in, but it was a little hot that day and she was flushed. She also has darkness around her eyes that is a family trait, so I kept that in too!

I then went back to the RGB Channel and slightly lightened the entire image.

I added a texture from Florabella, Frou Frou. I set the blending mode to Soft Light and left the opacity at 100%. I added a layer mask and lightly removed some of the texture off of her face and skin.

Finally I sharpened the image. And that’s it! Pretty simple steps, but I love the results!

The final image:

Michelle Johnson is a fine art photographer and the co-founder of Love That Shot, a website for photographers with tutorials, workshops and fun products! Find her at her blog, My Two Seasons, and her website, Love That Shot.

It looks like there is a wildfire burning out of town this afternoon. I looked out my backyard window and saw what I thought were storm clouds, as we had had some storms this morning. Then I look closer and they don’t look like clouds, more like smoke clouds. I checked the news and sure enough, there is a fire out there. It’s burned about 400 acres so far. I hope they are able get it out soon.