This weekend, I said goodbye to a dear friend, Emma, as she left from a lovely visit to meet Mr. Jameson for the first time. I also said goodbye to my first DSLR camera, the Nikon D40, which I purchased in 2007. I sold it to her, plus the extra battery, and I am currently camera-less.

Of course, we’re not literally camera-less; I am not sure that’s possible anymore, because we still have Brian’s sophisticated point and shoot, plus our camera phones, and our camcorder which can take stills too. So by no means am I really camera-less, but I still feel the loss of the ability to shoot in RAW format. Like forgetting to put on my wedding rings: even though I have my lovely rose ring which goes on my index finger, my ring finger still feels naked and awkward.

Friends tell me I take great photos. I myself think I have a long way to go to be professional, but I can see the growth in my skills since Jameson was born. Like I told Emma, I think that you lose some things (like freedom haha) when you have kids, but you gain in others. Particularly, my Lightroom skills.

I never read the manual, so here I am learning on the fly. I started with the Library screen, the basic adjustments to my photos (Auto-whitebalancing, sorting and rating) and moved to where I am now primarily working in Design mode, I am syncing adjustments across all similar photos to save time (though Brian would say I still spend obscene amounts of time editing photos), and even starting to play around with free presets which can tweak photos in fun ways I may not have thought of.

So last week, I re-processed some of my favorite photos and posted to Flickr last night. Here are a few:

Remember when I talked about how much better the color looked in my recent monthly photos?

Here’s an example of a preset I used which made the photo look aged. I tweaked it to bring out the blues again because the hat is such an important part of the photo.

And there are examples of my improvement with eyes and softening skin to remove Jameson’s dry baby skin. Because baby skin is not always silky soft.

I’m excited continue to enhance my skills with a next level camera. My new friend will arrive on Tuesday from Amazon (of course). It will come with 16 megapixels versus the D40’s 6 for more cropping and blow up fun. It has 11 focus points and faster continuous shooting plus a vibration reduction kit lens for quicker more accurate focusing (especially for the sneaky fast baby Jameson is becoming). It comes with a view screen that flips and rotates for great positional shots in awkward places and self portraits! We’re going to have fun, my new friend the D5100 and I.

Are you curious as to how I chose this particularly camera? Then read on.

I’m creating a digital scrapbook for Jameson for his first year which I don’t plan on publishing until after his birthday in December. So I’m a little ahead of the game when I started researching where I would publish his photobook. But because I had some specific requirements (square format, lay-flat binding), I wanted to make sure ahead of time that I could create exactly what I wanted.

I have ended up selecting a site called My Photo Creations, in connection with Digilabs who print for real photographers (So I have to think their quality is good). I had to limit my size though to 10×10 instead of 12×12 like I originally planned.

Anyway, this hunt started me on the search for photobook deals. I spent some time on the (confusing) site of Photobookgirl to help me determine where to begin my search for a square, lay-flat binding book and read some of her reviews. My top picks were:

• Adorama – Best quality! But expensive. Has real photo books.
• My Photo Creations – which again, seems to be the best compromise for what I want to do, but max size is 10×10
• Picaboo – Best pricing with groupon that runs pretty regularly, but cheap quality according to reviews.

Anyway, during this hunt I also uncovered a $20 free gift card promotion with My Publisher (Note: you cannot combine special offers). They have these new mini books that they were also running free shipping on — so I received 8 mini books for the cost of tax (no guarantees for how long this promotion will be running). However, I wasn’t impressed with their photo book software which I had some difficulties with before successfully placing my order (pages being duplicated, unclear direction, etc.)

A couple days ago, Brian uncovered another photo creation site from slickdeals.net which I hadn’t heard of called Paper Coterie who are relatively new to the scene. They are running a $40 free promotion until May 8th (just extended). I purchased two spiral bound photo books for the price of shipping and a little extra, since my books were $22 each.

I like this new site because it doesn’t require you to download any software, and they layouts seem pretty flexible. And it was really easy to do a two page spread. I am excited to receive my order, since their facebook page has all kinds of customers raving about their customer service and the quality of the products.

In addition to photo books, they have some really nice looking unique calendars and other products. I’ll post a picture of my book when it arrives!