Tag: photos

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Kids/Parenting

Can you say “Precocious”?

I had someone say that to me about one of my kids this last week, but I think it might apply to all of them. Yes, even the one with a twenty-word vocabulary.

This week, Hayden told Ryan (AKA Daddy) that he wanted to work on his birdhouse this weekend. Ryan agreed, but that wasn’t good enough for Hayden.

“Put it in your phone, Daddy.”

Ryan said, “Why do I need to put it on my phone?”

“Because,” Hayden replied, “your phone is smarter than you.”

Ouch.

Last night while we were finishing dinner, Rebecca picked up a picture of Jesus and pretended to read the information on the back, as if she were delivering a talk in Primary (which she hasn’t done yet—she keeps volunteering for prayers). About twenty minutes before, she discovered Rachel had absconded with her milk cup and finished it off. I finally appeased her tears—or so I thought.

After introducing her subject, Deezus, she continued on about Him for a while before I realized what she was saying:

“An’ he wants us to be nice . . . and kind . . . an’ not d’ink ouw big sistay’s d’inks. . . .”

Not on the subject of talking, but last week, Rachel was playing with her baby doll when she suddenly ran into the kitchen, opened the silverware drawer, and ran back:

(She actually got the baby’s mouth most of the time. She also shared some cereal later.)

Rachel is still working on words in general, so we applaud any of her efforts, even “yah” and “suh.” Unfortunately, her latest phrases have taken a sharp turn toward the negative:

When she gets upset, she flaps her hands like a floundering flightless fowl and wails, “No waaaaaay.”

And last week on a road trip, she realized we all found it hilarious when she answered any question with “Ummmmm no.” It’s a lot less cute the 45th time.

What’s your favorite precocious moment?

Categories
MetaBlogging

Making a photo post GREAT

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Three weeks ago, I gave a couple tips on making photo posts—and then I turned the mic over to you for your input on making photo posts GREAT. Here’s some of the collective wisdom of MamaBlogga readers!:

from the original post, seconded by readers in the comments:

Resize your pictures before uploading them
Figure out how wide your post column is and in a photo editor, resize the image to fit. It looks a lot better than making your browser resize them. And if you make your pictures too wide (post them exactly as they come off your camera, for example), they can break your blog or your readers’ feed readers. We’re probably not going to scroll side-to-side to see pictures of your kids. Sorry.

(Exceptions: if you upload photos to Flickr or Photobucket and they make some good looking, smaller versions, or if you use Blogger. They resize them to look good pretty consistently.)

Reader MamaBugs concurred:

Resizing is vastly important! So is arranging the photos neatly so they don’t seem like they just thrown in the post.

Use pictures in “regular” posts
This is a principle I know (but usually don’t apply) from my professional blogging (i.e. not MamaBlogga), and yet I hadn’t really thought about applying it in the “momblogosphere.” Several readers pointed out the advantages to this method:
Christy:

My favorite posts are those with photos. I have over 150 blogs in my reader and if there are no photos, I often will just skim the text to see if it catches my eye.

Deb, Mom of 3 girls:

I like seeing posts with pictures – I definitely prefer those to ones with just one long paragraph of text. For my own posts, I usually try to either add in funny captions or stick to one topic or event in each post to help with the onslaught of photos…

And warillever gives some great examples:

. . . I can recommend one mommy blog that uses pictures extremely well — Notes from the Trenches. Chris makes liberal use of pictures both as an accent to her textual posts and as the meat of other posts. Even her photo posts, however, include humorous captions that capture the essence of the action.

Look at her Easter (I Hope You Dance) or American Idol (Geeks Gone Wild) for evidence.

Incorporate pictures into your posts
This dovetails with both of the above points and comments. Don’t just throw some pictures into your posts and hope they’ll fit; resize them so that they’ll fit where you want them and arrange them nicely.

Typical conventions for using images in posts are “smaller” pictures (ones that don’t take up most of your horizontal post space) aligned to the right or left with relevant text wrapping around them and larger images breaking up the text, usually centered, and sometimes with captions underneath them.

And, of course, key in incorporating your images with your posts is making them relevant to one another. Some topics (like our kids 😉 ) would seem incomplete without some sort of photo reference. This doesn’t mean you have to write a post describing exactly what’s going on in the photo; you can use your imagination (and humorous captions) to make even a tenuous connection.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been making an effort to do better with this; see my post from last week Crazy talk for an example of all these conventions.

If I may say so, I’m particularly proud of that post because it gave me an opportunity to incorporate cute pictures and talk about some of the cute things Hayden’s been doing lately. I’m reluctant to post about both of these topics sometimes because I don’t know if most of my readers are really interested in Hayden’s little (mis)adventures. However, I thought (and I hope you agreed!) that the format of the post, and the pictures, helped to make the post more enjoyable all ’round.

Any more photo post advice?

Note that I still have two coupons for free professional photo montages—see the giveaway post for details, and leave a comment there to enter.

More tips from Works-for-me Wednesday

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Categories
MetaBlogging

Making a photo post

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Sigh. Every so often, I gather up a bunch of pictures of Hayden and post them. Let’s face it: this can be like being caught in an elevator with an overeager parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or other relative, armed with the seven hundred most recent pictures of their beloved child. Mom bloggers do this probably more than most other bloggers.

Maybe the best photo posts are “real” posts with photos that go with them. I always feel like no one will be that interested in my pictures, unless they’re really funny.

So today I’m going to your collaboration in creating a “blogging tutorial.” As a reader, what do you think makes a photo post good? What makes it less like the caught-in-the-elevator scenario I imagined above? As a blogger, what makes them easier for you to do?

Here are some of my thoughts, please add yours!

Put it in context
We’ve all heard it: a picture is worth a thousand words. In high school, I was reading a book about the Vietnam War and was struck by the commentary on a very famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. The text read something to the effect that photographs can’t stand alone. You need words to tell you what happened before and after, to put the photo into context. Because out of context, pictures (like words) don’t mean anything.

Your context doesn’t have to detail how everything happened to get to that point—though if the picture isn’t fairly obvious, some explanation of what’s going on (and what we’re supposed to see) could help. Otherwise, your context can be as short as a silly comment about the photo (but try to let us see why you’ve chosen that photo in particular).

Make it funny, cute, or both
We’re moms. We can appreciate cute pictures of cute kids. We can appreciate funny pictures of funny kids. Funny comments can help, too.

Make it unexpected
The pictures I can’t wait to post are the ones of Hayden doing surprising things: wearing his shirt around his waist, wearing Mr. Potato Head’s glasses, etc.

Make it not too long
I’m very guilty of this one: I wait so long to post pictures (because I figure no one’s interested) that I stuff 8 or 10 or more pictures into a photo post. As if forcing more pictures on you would make you happier to look at them all. I still envision most of my readers as the victims in my elevator, backed into a corner, nodding politely and mentally vowing to take the stairs for the rest of forever.

Resize your pictures before uploading them
Figure out how wide your post column is and in a photo editor, resize the image to fit. It looks a lot better than making your browser resize them. And if you make your pictures too wide (post them exactly as they come off your camera, for example), they can break your blog or your readers’ feed readers. We’re probably not going to scroll side-to-side to see pictures of your kids. Sorry.

(Exceptions: if you upload photos to Flickr or Photobucket and they make some good looking, smaller versions, or if you use Blogger. They resize them to look good pretty consistently.)

Maybe the best photo posts are still “real” posts with photos that go with them. What do you think? What makes you enjoy photo posts more? What tips do you have for making them easier to do?

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