Snow face

My middle child

I like taking pictures of my kids when they are crying. Somehow, it represents our day to day life a little more accurately than all those happy, smiling pictures.

This is my middle child. This year he has discovered that snow is tasty. At the beginning of the winter I did not mind letting him eat the snow in our backyard. It was fresh and fluffy. I foolishly let him feast to his heart's content. Now, when we are out and about, he does not listen to my pleas to stop eating the dirty, salty mounds at the edges of parking lots. Hindsight is 20/20.

On my last post womannorth asked about the difference between jpeg versus raw images. I have been shooting using a digital SLR, which gives me the option of saving my images in the camera as jpeg files or raw files. The only reason I have been shooting in raw recently is that I can easily adjust the exposure of my image on the computer using photoshop. I talked about how pictures of snow can be underexposed here.

I also have a very good digital point and shoot. I looked through my manual and it does not shoot raw files, only jpeg. Look in your manual under 'image quality' or 'compression' to see what options are available on your camera.

When I shoot jpeg files, I almost always select the setting for the highest image quality (which is also the largest image size). It will say 'fine' or 'superfine' or 'large' or something along those lines. You never know when you will get a great shot that you might want to print and enlarge. The drawback is that the larger files take up more room, and fewer images will fit on your card. The only time I would reduce the image quality would be in a situation where I was running out of room on my card and I was nowhere near a computer to download them. Even so, I would probably go through my full card and delete some images that I knew weren't good before I would switch to smaller files. If I was running into this problem often, I would seriously think about purchasing a card with more memory.

This picture was taken on February 13th, 2008. I didn't have a chance to get out with my camera today.