MostlyLisa, one of the blogs I read on a semi-regular basis, posed the following question: “How did you get into photography? What or who was your muse?”

Well clearly this was a no-brainer for me. My kids! Well, my kids and my dog. We bought our first digital camera about a year before Simon was born, and used it like anybody uses a point-and-shoot. When Ellen accidentally dropped that camera (which I consider a huge blessing in disguise) it set off a chain-reaction of upgrades (okay, two) that culminated this June with the purchase of my first DSLR. By the way, Ellen, anytime you want to come over and “accidentally” drop my television, computer, and iPod, feel free.

The vast majority of my photography is my family and my dog. Part of this is because it is all I have time for. Between work, other commitments, and other interests/hobbies I find it difficult to find time to take and process pictures of them, much less anything else. But the pictures I do take, I want to share. I want to become more involved in the large and active online photographic community.

But then I think about all the weirdos on the Internet. They’re out there and they’ve already impacted how I write on this blog. I decided to stop talking about politics after a conveniently anonymous stranger commented that I was “brainwashing children”. Was it a totally ignorant and ridiculously outrageous comment? Absolutely. Was it also enough to make me not want to deal with it? Definitely. But it begs the question: what other kind of undesirables are out there, reading my content?

The amount of information we publish in this medium can impact our lives in a number of ways. How much we provide is a decision we all have to make for ourselves. Unless you’re a 3 year old who relies on his parents to make that decision for you. Oops. The rule we established with Simon is that we’d post pictures on Flickr that were “public” up until the time he turned one, at which time they all became available only to those we’d marked as “friends” or “family.”

I relaxed that rule a bit when I got the new camera, because one of my main subjects is Simon, and I want to share my. . .um. . . art. As of today, my paranoia has gotten the better of me (again), and I’ve changed most of the Simon pictures back to their restricted status.

I’m clearly somewhat conflicted on the issue, so I throw it out to my readers: What lines do you draw with regards to pictures of you, your family, and your kids on the web?

A beautiful photoblog from the Boston Globe.

Mary has been getting a lot of attention recently, but we’re trying to give Simon his due, too. Having Kate’s parents in town helps tremendously. The kid gets tons of Grandma and Grandpa love. I had a chance to take Simon, his soccer ball, and of course my camera to a nearby field earlier this week.

Look at that form. At 2 years old! That’s sick.

The more time I spent on flickr this past year, the more I started craving a DSLR. I was further inspired by pictures taken by friends like Lou Ann (check out this hummingbird) and Shannon (take a gander at these statues). Finally, Lou Ann provided the straw that broke the camel’s back by lending me her Canon Digital Rebel, and possibly more importantly, a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens.

So last Tuesday I went out and spent the money from the government that we didn’t yet have, picking up a Canon Rebel 450D from Penn Camera in Fair Lakes. It is a beautiful camera, and I’m super excited. Hopefully it will allow me to capture some small portion of the cute-overload that is the TID (Toddler+Infant+Dog) our household is about to become.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but took some shots this weekend. And then I discovered that my existing software won’t read the RAW files from the 450D. So I have a bit of work to do to get the correct software installed and refine my work flow for processing photos (I had a good system with the Rebel). Once I do you bet I’ll be posting pictures here (and on flickr).

On Monday we went to a rockin’ Memorial Day party hosted by one of our friends. There was lots of food, music, and entertainment. A good time was had by all. I spent the first hour or so of the party wandering around with my borrowed Digital Rebel (again, courtesy of Lou Ann) and 50mm prime lense snapping shots of kids playing, adults chatting, hosts hosting, waterfights, food, toys, etc. I was having a great time snapping away and had probably taken over 100 photos (in my exaggerated version of this story that number skyrockets to 200-300).

I took a shot of the folks at the Rock Band station, and, for the first time that day, looked down to check the preview of the picture to check the exposure, which I wasn’t sure was quite right. I saw the following message:

“^@$*!*@#$&*!!! I had left the @&*%&@!#$* memory card sitting in my computer from the last time I had pulled pictures off of it. I can’t even begin to express my disappointment. I was excited about the pictures I had taken. My level of disappointment was such that I couldn’t bring myself to take up the generous offers of “please, use MY camera” from the host and a close friend.

All you amateur photographers out there, please tell me you’ve done this at least once. Please tell me this is a right of passage that you all go through at some point. Please tell me that you look back on it now and laugh. It made me grumpy for a full hour or two after I made the discovery (my apologies to Kate and Ellen, who caught the brunt of the grumpiness).

I came home last week to find my basement looking like this. Simon loves it. The kid won’t stand still for more than 1 second, so my attempt to get him in the photo with a slow shutter speed didn’t work at all (see the blur in the lower right hand corner).

Casey’s mug shot. She’s in big trouble. Okay, not really. But this is what she would look like if she WERE in big trouble.

Our friend Lou Ann purchased a brand new spiffy Canon 40D and was kind enough to lend me her old Canon EOS Digital Rebel. It’s clear that I have a lot to learn about how to use a DSLR, and how to do post processing. So this is the first of what may be come many “lessons learned” posts.

I took Simon out last night to play baseball with his Spiderman bat and ball. I took the camera along to snap some photos. This was at about 5:30PM, so the sun was low and the light was nice and soft. I learned two things last night.

1. Pay attention to shadows! Of about 70 pictures that I took, maybe 15 were keepers (in my book - others may beg to differ). Of those 15, I only thought 3 or 4 were worth posting for the world to see on Flickr (again, others may disagree!). Many of the pictures were discarded because of shadows. Either he was facing the wrong way and his face was in shadow, or more egregiously, my shadow was in the frame distracting from the picture. It’s something I didn’t think of at all and didn’t really notice looking at the camera’s LCD when reviewing pictures.
2. Despite the good light, I didn’t set the camera correctly to get the vibrant colors that I really want when taking photos. I didn’t do any post-processing initially, and everything looked a little washed out. Kelly responded to my twitter complaint this AM and suggested that I fiddle with the saturation.

I followed Kelly’s advice (thanks, btw!) and increased the saturation in photoshop to create more vibrant colors. Mouse over the image below to see the difference a little saturation enhancement can make (IE6 users won’t see an image - look at this one on Flickr. Oh and download a better browser).

So my question is this. While I prefer more vibrant colors in my photos, how much saturation is TOO much saturation? If I move that slider to the end of the spectrum, I can get an image that is clearly too saturated. My problem is that my eyes have a hard time distinguishing when that threshold has been crossed. Any suggestions?