One of my favorite parenting blogs is The Goody Blog, which is written by the wonderful editors at Parents magazine. This blog is a great resource for new products and tips; and it is a great way to get your daily Parents magazine fix between issues.

Check out some of my favorite posts from the month of May:

-The ManBabies highlighted in the post Who’s Your Daddy are both disturbing and funny -I love to play with my food (yes, still), which is why I loved this post
-First 90210, then New Kids on the Block, and now Fraggle Rock is making a comeback! All I can say is goody!
-These boxes from Pottery Barn are a perfect match to our Chrysanthemum baby shower invitations and thank you cards
-Silhouette prints are classic and traditional. Check out the beautiful necklaces in this post.
-Do your kids hate bath time? If so, then read about the Lil Rinser. This product is genius!

Also, be sure to check out the post on Tiny Prints new line of graduation announcements. A big thanks to Taryn at Parents for thinking of us!

By guest blogger: Rich Bucich

This is the second installment of tips to help you take better photographs of babies.
If you read my last post, hopefully you have a greater understanding of how your camera’s auto-focus works and the impact of good light on achieving a sharp, clear photograph. There’s much more to the equation however, and understanding the settings on your camera will give you a distinct advantage.

Good light provides a faster shutter speed for the camera. The faster the shutter speed, the more the movement will be frozen and “camera shake” will be minimized. In poor lighting, your camera will try to speed up the shutter speed by adjusting settings which may degrade the quality of your photo.

The camera will likely take the following steps to speed up the shutter:

• The camera will open the aperture (AKA f/stop) - this will let more light through the lens but will also require much more accurate focusing. The area achieving sharp focus may be very narrow, i.e. tip of nose is sharp, eyes out of focus. The term is called “depth of field.”

• The camera may increase the ISO* - a higher ISO will allow for faster shutter speeds but can severely degrade the quality of the photo. For best results with “point & shoot” type cameras, keep the ISO at 200** or below. Digital SLR camera will be much more tolerant in this regard, often being able to shoot in excess of 800 ISO with acceptable results.

• The camera may turn on the flash - the flash is your friend, but automatic settings will often create harsh shadows or over-exposed areas if too close to your subject.

*ISO stands for International Standards Organization and is essentially a measurement of light sensitivity.
**Higher ISOs settings may be required under extreme low light situations such as parties and events where shutter speed needs to be maximized. In these cases, the additional sharpness may trump any graininess. We don’t recommend high ISOs in baby photography because the skin tone can be severely degraded.

If manual settings are overwhelming, you will have a huge increase in your photo success rate if you just focus on providing as much diffused ambient light as possible.

Our Tiny Prints website also has many effective tips with examples which may be helpful as well. Please register and post a comment if you have any questions.

By guest blogger: Rich Bucich

This is the first installment of my tips to help you take better photographs of your baby. Over the next few weeks, I will be highlighting individual issues that will have a dramatic effect on the quality of your photographs. In this episode, I’ll go over auto-focus and how it is impacted by light.

Baby portraits are the most challenging photographs to take. At Tiny Prints, we receive a large number of pictures from you everyday and hear all of your struggles and frustrations first hand.

As a new parent, catching the perfect pose is as much about luck as it is about planning. The good news? There are a lot of things that you can do to help your odds without a lot of effort.

• First of all, the auto-focus feature on your camera uses contrast not distance to focus. This is why you can shoot through glass at distant objects.

• Secondly, in poor lighting, your camera may have difficulty finding focus or focus on an unintended area. For example, a sleeping baby’s face has little contrast which can confuse a camera. This is why you might have a well focused blanket but a blurry baby in your photographs.

• Thirdly, poor lighting includes most indoor photography, even in seemingly well lit rooms.

• While I will go into more detail at a later date, remember that the importance of focus accuracy increases as light decreases.

If you keep these issues in mind, you can see why light becomes one of the most important aspects of good baby photography. The same rules apply for many other types of photography, however. Our Tiny Prints website also has many effective tips with examples which may be helpful as well.

Leave me a comment if you have any questions and stay tuned for Episode II.

Moving to your dream house? You’re so lucky! The hardest part, however, is the moving part. All those boxes, and the packing and unpacking can be a little overwhelming. There are however, a lot of great websites you can go to for tips on the best strategies to make your move effortless. Check out FlyLady.net for some awesome tips. About.com also has a great article on helping you to have a smoother move. Here’s a few things I found on various websites and things that have helped me personally:

1. The next time you go to a market or store ask them if they have some boxes you can take. A lot of places have more boxes than they know what to do with.
2. Remember to bring cleaning supplies to get your new home in tip top shape.
3. Get lots and lots of packing material. Think tape, newspapers and bubble wrap!
4. Label the outside of our boxes. This seems obvious but sometimes people forget. And can you imagine the horror of having to open up every box to find something as important as toilet paper?
5. I think moving is a great time to discard old things that you no longer have any use for. Separate clothes and books that can be donated and other things that need to be thrown away. This way you won’t bring old clutter into your new house.
6. Make sure you let friends and family know where to reach you. A great way would be to get some really cool Moving Announcements. Here are just a few from the Tiny Prints collection.

Acanthus Damask

Urban Chic