Loving My New Nikon D5000 and Photoshop Elements

Mr. Incredible decided to get me a digital SLR camera for our 10th anniversary.  Even though our anniversary isn't until August, he had me research what was available (we prefer Nikon since we already have a traditional SLR from them and the lenses are interchangeable), and we made our selection, the new Nikon D5000.

Boy, am I enjoying this!  Actually, we are both enjoying the new camera.  We're getting in plenty of practice in hopes that we will have a pretty good grasp of using the camera by the time our anniversary rolls around and before we go to the NASCAR race in October (my gift to Mr. Incredible.)

I love the depth of field and have been having fun experimenting with it.  Here are a couple of my favorite experiments.  The clock has the foreground blurred, and the picture of the girls has the background blurred.  I can think of so many uses for this technique!

 

I've also been playing around with my photos in Photoshop Elements.  This is a really bad photo that I played with.

Here is the same photo after I cropped it and made some other changes in PSE.

I love this photo now!  And then I went a little crazy and decided to try my hand at creating a square containing four of these photos, each one being a different color.  (Miss Muffet didn't like the final image at all - strongly objected to being unnaturally colored.  Well, she did kinda like the orange one.  That's her favorite color. LOL!)

I have many, many more photos to post.  Buddy Bear just had his first birthday, Miss Muffet had her fifth birthday last month, and Baby Bear will have her 4th birthday in about 3 weeks.  It's crazy around our house during these summer months!

Care to share some of your favorite pics?