The perfect snow

Sunday was one of those perfect days where the snow fell straight down all day long, light and fluffy without a breath of wind.

Fortunately for me, Sunday was also the day I'd scheduled to take some more photos of Edith and her two Bassets - Royal and Court. We met at 2 p.m. at a place just outside town, and spent an hour wrangling dogs for what we hoped would end up to be some great portrait shots.

I don't have final edits of any of the outdoor photos ready yet, but I was working on some of these from the barn loft earlier this morning. Because there was no wind we were able to open the south door of the loft to let in a flood of natural light, and it was perfect.

Whenever I get back from a shoot and review my photos, I'm very hard on them, and there are always things I would do better or differently, and I always learn something new to try next time. In this case, I was fortunate to have a second chance at the same location with almost the same subjects - the old dog Hank stayed home this time. I put my previous experience to work, and as a result I do love this second round much more than the first.

If I had a third chance, I would do more shots like the ones above, with Edith interacting with her dogs, rather than everybody smiling for the camera. The whole point of these photos is that these are dogs she's had for years, and she has a special relationship with them, so I like the more casual shots.

I've used my new actions a little bit on these photos, but I'm still becoming familiar with them, and most of them are a little much for the style I'm going for with this setting.

I also used my new 50 mm lens a little bit with this shoot, and I really liked how it did. The one thing I learned, though, was that I needed to set my aperture a little higher, because the area of focus was a little narrow for three subjects - it would focus perfectly on Edith's face, but the dogs would be blurry, for example.

Just when I start to figure out how to make aperture work for me, I got on a rabbit trail of photo blogs this morning, with very technical tutorials, and realized how much more I have to learn....

In addition to learning the new lens and actions, I will also add packaging to my photography in the near future. I'd like to have an extra touch when I deliver prints or CDs of my photos, and simple but classy packaging is just what I need. I am also going to look into designing logo stickers and either printing them myself, if I can find the labels I want, or having a printing website do them for me.

A brown paper package tied up with rustic ribbon and sealed with a C} Images label would be just the ticket, don't you think?