Hello My Quilting Friends! Today I'm talking with Brenda LaFleur about photography. Whether you're wanting to shoot pictures of your quilts, your grandkids, or a pretty landscape, this podcast episode has tips on all three! Watch the episode here:
Brenda is an extremely talented photographer and her landscape and city-scape pictures are just beautiful. Click Here to check out her website.
Brenda is also a quilter so she has a unique perspective about shooting pictures of quilts. I was working through this last summer and fall as I shot the pictures for the book Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day. The key we both agree is to just shoot pictures! The more you shoot, the better you get.
Here's some good photograph advice from Brenda:
- Get the best lens you can afford. Your lens may very well cost more than your camera and that's okay. A great lens will last longer than your camera and if you stick with one brand they will be compatible (all Nikon lenses are compatible with my new camera body, no matter when they were made)
- Set up on a tripod. While it's annoying, using a tripod will allow you to shoot pictures you can't shoot by holding the camera.
- Don't blow out your highlights. Adjust the camera to be slightly underexposed so it captures all the data (light and dark) in the image. If you shoot with the lights blown out (overexposed) you will not have the data to restore in editing.
Yep, you will need to edit your photos. Brenda prefers Adobe Photoshop because that's what she started with when she began taking photos. I prefer Adobe Lightroom because it seemed simpler to learn when I got started last summer. Either program works great!
Be sure to check out Brenda's website and beautiful photos right here.
News from around the house...
This week I was digging in my garden with a pickax while I recorded the introduction to the podcast because I couldn't find a trowel in the red barn to save my life (and I wasn't interested in cleaning the place up to find it). Gardening isn't my favorite, but I do like fresh herbs and tomatoes so I had to push myself into getting it all into the ground.
So while digging in the dirt, I shared the latest Prism Path Baby Quilt Along post, which will get your baby quilt together in one piece. Just three more weeks and this quilt will be done!
We also learned how to quilt Pinstripe Gridlines this past week with walking foot quilting. Click Here to find that tutorial.
I've also shared a post on traveling to Hart Square, a historic log cabin village that was just incredible. It really was like walking back in time and makes me feel so thankful for running water and electricity! Click Here to find that post.
I've been furiously editing Mally the Maker, my fiction novel and it's HARD. I love it, but it occupies a big giant chunk of my brain and it literally feels like I'm being sucked into the world every time I sit down to work on it. I wish I could work on this all day for many hours of the day, but that's just not realistic.
So this week I'm trying to find more balance and work slower. We got back to Star Trek last night and I made some progress on hand stitching that I've missed for more than three weeks. There's a piece of me that wants to race through this process, but there's another piece that knows this will be so much better if I just slow down, take a step back, and make sure my life doesn't fall apart while I finish this novel!
Let's go quilt,
Leah Day
