A Dose of Fairly Fabulous-ness

I’m thrilled to be hanging out in Alissa’s little piece of the world today. Mostly because tomorrow I’ll be hanging out in her REAL piece of the world. Yep, today I’m crashing her blog, tomorrow I’m crashing her house for a full on Blog Sugar slumber party! Alissa and I are long lost soul sisters, total BFFs. It’s OK to be jealous. #justkidding #oramI

When I’m not spending my time calling, texting, tweeting, and blogging with Alissa (total bffs) I’m a wife to a pretty cool Breadwinner, and a mom to two sassy little girls- Big Sister (5 yrs old) and Little Sister (3 yrs old). I keep busy refinishing every piece of furniture in my house and anything else I can get my hands on, in addition to helping with marketing at the girls’ preschool, blogging our lives, and running a cute little shop full of hoots and tweets. Know what else?…

My name is Meagan and I’m a lazy photographer.

It’s true.

Back in 2005, my husband noticed I stopped using my film Canon SLR because of the instant satisfaction factor of his little digital point and shoot. My laziness made him sad, so he did a little research then bought me the digital base for my Canon Rebel and off I went- shooting on auto…beinglazy.

I knew I was capable of taking decent (and sometimes awesome) photos. I’d been shooting small weddings, children’s portraits, and high school senior portraits with film for years, but with digital? Well, it was easier to let the camera do the work for me!

After 5 years, 2 kids, and tens of thousands of photos shot usingthe all too familiar green square setting and every once in a while adventuresome ‘P’, I sat in my living room one night complaining about how my photos are just not what they used to be and listing off all the reasons why I needed a new, bigger, better camera to make my photos better. My kind, sweet, loving husband looked me square in the eye and said, ‘Have you tried reading the manual?’

Ugh- Gut check. I was so used to letting the camera do the work for me, then getting frustrated with it when things weren’t just right-maybe I needed to stopbeing lazy and do some of the work myself.

So there I sat, that very night, digging through drawers to find the manual- something I should have done 5 years ago. I read it cover to cover that night- camera in hand, pressing buttons, turning dials, and changing settings as I went. I revisit aperture settings mean and how they (along with shutter speed) effect an exposure. But the most important discoveryI made- ISO settings.

When I used film, I knew which film speed to use for which lighting conditions- day, night, low light, bright light, fastmoving subjects, etc. Guess what-that’s the big key I was missing! The ISO setting corresponds with the film speed. Low light, fast moving subjects- kick up the ISO setting. Bright, sunny day-lower it. This tiny bit of info…and a new 50mm fixed f/1.4 lens have changed my photos.