Natural Light, etc.

I'm not talking beer here people. 

The title has to do with lighting my cards in photographs.  It's a struggle because our house does not seem to have any natural light coming in anywhere. Never mind the fact that I do most of my card making in the evening.  I even went out and bought a "sunlight" lamp that gives off white light instead of yellow.  It's nice because colors are not distorted but it didn't help the photographing issue.  Anyway, it's a pain since I usually don't make duplicates of the cards that I give away and I like to snap a photo so that I have a record of past designs.

So, let me further the boring nature of this topic by showing you a few attempts at this whole "photograph cards" issue.  By the way, I realize that Photoshop can fix almost anything but that's not the point!

Ok, the first card with the balloon was made for a friend's birthday.  The layout was borrowed from a blog I read regularly (can't remember which one at the moment---I read a lot of blogs!) but the design is my own.

As you can see, I laid the card flat which makes it look funny.  I usually stand them up but wanted to try something different.  Regardless, the lighting is yuck.

Here's the card standing up.  Equally horrid!

This last one I took this morning.  When I was letting the dogs back in I noticed some sunlight coming in through the back porch.  So, I took the opportunity to try and photograph this silly card one more time before I HAD to put it in the mail.  It's not too bad.  I think it shows the colors best out of all the failed attempts.  Well, at least I have a visual reminder of it.

Since I really liked the way the card turned out, I decided to make the same one for a child's birthday.  J's little friend Amelia is turning two this weekend and I needed a card.

I'm pretty  happy with the way it turned out.  Of course, I only wished the photo was better. But enough about stinkin' photography!

It's pretty late and I need to say buenas noches.  But before I do, I wanted to leave you with this cute picture of J.  I took this Monday at his friend Kylie's house.  Her Mom was hosting our group's Kids Craft and had set up a water table with toys on the porch.  There were other fun crafts to try such as pudding finger painting and painting with sponges but Jackson gravitated to the water table without even stopping anywhere else.  I'm glad I stripped him down to his diaper since he ended up soaking himself with all the splashing! He had fun.  The boy loves water. :-)