9/365 - Photography Progress?

I'm getting this post out of the way fairly early today. We have had a busy day so far and a busy night to come. We went to a birthday party this morning at Chuck E Cheese. Sydney is my cousin's daughter and she just turned 2. The kids had a great time and Sydney's Hello Kitty cake was SO cute! Ana Kate had never been to Chuck E Cheese before and was on stimulation overload....she didn't want to leave when it was time, but she was a good girl. From there we went out to lunch and then shopping.

We have church later tonight so I decided to post early. Our church has two services and every other week we teach the toddler class, so we serve one service, then attend the other service. We love it and our church is amazing! So, with this being our week to teach we will have a long night tonight.

Ok...so on to the main subject of this post. I have been getting a lot of comments from my friends lately about how they love my recent pictures and it makes me feel SO good to hear some positive feedback. I really do love photography and like to be able to see the improvements. But I have to say that I really second guess myself a lot and feel like because I'm self taught, that I don't know what I'm doing. I think the most positive thing I've done lately is to start taking and editing my photos the way I like them. I think in the past I was too worried about what everyone else 'might' like or editing the 'right' way. When I started focusing on what I like to see in pictures and stopped worrying about everyone else, I began to see better results. Another thing is that a vast majority of the pictures I post are SOOC. I prefer to do my editing in the camera...or mostly. When I do edit I rarely do much...usually just a couple of small tweaks. I'm still learning a lot in photoshop, but mostly what I'm learning lately is that it is easy to 'overdo'. That being said...the photos today aren't that great. They were taken at the party and I didn't have many to choose from. Hoping to get some better pics tomorrow.

The birthday girl...Sydney.


Ana Kate loved all the games.