To view the entire, growing collection, please click here: Baby Animals

I have begun a new collection for those adorable images in my portfiolo.

Even those who are not big animal loves can find inspiration and and warm fuzzy feelings from those precious animal babies.

Is just one of the phrase that sticks out in this image.

Follow the leader.

Following in the shoes of a parent.

Guidance.

Love.

Raising children.

Hey Mom! Wait for me!

I unknowingly captured this motivational moment in time, and am greatly surprised. I wanted to share it with everyone. I hope you all get the same good, warm feelings from it that I get.

I'm sure all of us have seen this rejection reason many, many times. There have been many threads about this topic, figuring out exactly what this broad statement means.

To me, it means Unappealing to the Eye.

Ok, you say, but what does that mean? How can I make my images more 'appealing'?" you might say. "They look great to me!" And they probably are great images, or move us in some way, otherwise we wouldn't have taken them. But one thing we often forget to do is look at the image from another perspective. The best way I have found to do that is to play with the RAW file.

Pick an image that you feel is top-notch. Open the RAW file. Now you may think I'm crazy, but trust me. This has worked wonders for me. Time to play with all of the settings without ...

It's been a crazy April here in Virginia, USA. The month started out bright and sunny, but about halfway through we finally got the rain we'd been praying for! ... and then some! .. and then some more! Some areas have even been hit by tornados. Suffolk and that area got the worst of it. Luckily I'm north of that area and missed the monster tornado.

So far where I live, it has either rained all day long, all night long, or both. Days when it has been bright and sunny, I've had to work at my office job, only to find it raining when it is time to get off. If it is not raining by the time I'm scheduled to get off, I'm working over-time! And if it hasn't been raining during my time off, it's been overcast and windy 90% of the time.

I ...

A couple weekends ago when I went to shoot a kite flying event, I became greatly intrigued with the youth soccer photo opportunities that were waiting for me when I arrived there.

I played soccer for 13 years myself, so the opportunity to capture the essence of something I'm very passionate about overwhelmed me. ... And I nearly cried when I ran out of memory. =( I had gone out that weekend expecting only a kiting event, so took only a 4 GB memory card. I was only able to fill about half of that with soccer pictures. =(

I found the area's soccer schedule online and planned for another outing. This time I was going with an 8GB, and a couple of 4 GB memory cards (plus 2 extra batteries). Four hours and 800 plus JPEGS and RAW files later, I headed home.

Reviewing ...

My first editorial image made it online! This was taken at the 7th Annual Kite Flying Frenzy in Frederick County, VA, USA. They had music, games, and LOTS of people enjoying the beautiful April weather with wondefully colored kites!

My husband and I just bought our first home! The stress from trying to get everything done in 30 days was HUGE! The person we were buying from kept trying to get money before closing, trying to get out of fixing things that were in the contract, etc etc. The bank also neglected to inform us of things they needed until days or even HOURS before they had to have it or we lost the loan!

But, we finally closed and the stress started to decline a little, except for having to deal with breaking our current apartment lease. We were originally planning on moving in about mid-April, but do to complications with the landlords at our current place and just wanting to get out of here already, we're moving in three weeks!! Yikes!! On top of that, we have to pay some penalty fee ...

Comes Spring!

I appreciate each season for the unique characteristics each brings, but I am really looking forward to spring right now!

Here in Virginia (US) it's been a little chilly lately, and many of the more northern states have been getting dumped with snow and ice. I'm ready for warmth!And from the merchandise starting to line store shelves, other people are beginning to think the same things: bunnies and eggs.

I loved watching the Easter cartoons when I was a kid! I loved (and still do) dying and painting eggs, hiding them, finding them, eating lots of candy, and getting stuffed bunnies, ducks, and chicks as gifts.

But, one of the things that always stumped me as a child was how the Easter Bunny came by all those eggs? Did the bunny ...

... check your monitor settings.

In a carry-over from yesterday's events (Stock Image -vs- Snapshot), I learned another valuable lesson as well.

I am used to working on my desktop computer, where I have already spent painstaking time matching my monitor settings to my camera display. The brightness, contrast, and color settings are very accurate to what the image will look like printed out, so I do not have to lean on the histograms too much.

However, I failed to calibrate my new laptop monitor to match what I am used to seeing on my desktop monitor. Hard lesson learned, right?

Looks like I'll be doing some major cleaning to see if I can get some of these images ready for resubmittal!...

For the past couple of weeks, I have been slowly editing and keywording several images before uploading them here. These were images from two different caverns, one in Virginia and one in West Virginia.

I probably have about 100 photos between the two locations. Going through them, I found about 28 of which I deemed great! They were, to me, unique shots of interesting formations within the caverns. I thought to myself that these will definately be accepted! After uploading these images, I endured an 80+ hour wait period to see how they would fair.

This morning was the unveiling! There were 30 emails in my inbox, all from Dreamstime! The images had been reviewed! I hastily clicked into my inbox. To my dismay, I saw "Image Not Selected" over and over again. Twenty-seven out of 28 of the images ...