Blogging Tips 6: Photography

What blogging tips do you have for taking photos?  Camera and lens recommendations?  Do you use any products to edit photos or create product collages?  Any sites you could recommend for photography or Photoshop help?

I love photography, always have.  But the problem is, is that I also love videography, painting, blogging, drinking wine, reading books and playing cards, sometimes.  So when it comes to photography as a hobby, I struggle to find time to do everything, because I always want to do everything.

Currently, I have the Canon EOS 70D which serves my photography and videography needs.  The only complaint I would have about it is that I find my videos to be shaky.  Really, I should just bring the tripod out more but that requires work.  Apart from that, I am extremely happy with this camera, especially with the size of the display screen and the wifi connection (I can set it up and then take pictures from my iPhone).   Photography is one thing that I love learning and have taken classes through the university for both photography and editing with Photoshop.  My summer goal is to learn Lightroom as I have recently subscribed to the Creative Cloud and now have access to all of Adobe's tools. And yay for teacher discounts.

My favourite ressource, by far for price point, and the huge amount of potential for learning is by far, SkillShare.  3 lucky people today can get Premium access for .99$ using this code.  And really for 96$ a year, I can learn so many different things in such a variety of topics that it would never make sense to sign up for a blogger's course, which usually run around 300$...why, when I can learn all the things for way cheaper on SkillShare.  Look at all the courses they offer just on posting on Instagram.  I also love that I can set a goal of 5 minutes of learning a day and they push me an email so I can check it out during my day.  I get super excited just looking at the classes that I am lining up to follow this summer!

On the daily I use a variety of tools for my photos.  Sometimes it is Photoshop (when I have the time or am designing something from scratch) but the majority of my time is spent on either PicMonkey (for making collages or doing a quick graphic) or Canva (pinterestable images, blog headers)

Here are a few examples of ways I've used each platform on my blog:

PHOTOSHOP :  3 years ago my sister and I orchestrated a series called 30 somethings.  We wanted to show the beauty that each of these women possessed by taking a portrait of them and then they wrote about what the 30 somethings meant to them.  One of my favourites is Jordan's post or Sara's- mostly because of the message, but because I'm talking photoshop right now- I love how different the photos are and I had fun playing with the blending and the lighting in both.

PICMONKEY: All the graphics I make for our series or style challenges are with PicMonkey.  So why not a little throwback to our very first style challenge, when there was only a few of us.  Graphic at the bottom was made with PicMonkey.

CANVA: What I love about Canva is the variety of sizes of prints you can make but mostly all the templates that are free and very reasonably priced if I wanted to buy.  Lucia's upcoming birthday party invitation was made with Canva and one of my favourite blog posts on defining your personal style was made with Canva.

Well that's it for this awesome series, thanks to Lisa for putting it together.  Hop on over to Jill's blog to see what she has to say on all things photography!