Durbin Digital

There will be some major changes happening here at DurbinDigital over the next few weeks, changes for the better!

I will be moving the digi-scrapping content over to the DurbinDigital blog. This will clean up this side of things to a great degree & bring this site more of a focus on Photography, Photoshop & other fun related stuff. I will also be adding a “Downloads” section, which I am very excited about! I have a growing list of interesting blogs, and creative people to introduce to you, too!

I am hoping that these changes will be as exciting for you as they are for me!

Stay tuned! ThanX for visiting!

This last Friday, I had the honor of writing up a product review for the Tamron 18-270mm All-in-One lens, over at DesignByFirgs!

So please take a moment and give it a read!

This update has been a long time coming.

I have sadly neglected my site, to keep up with my presence at MomShots, on Twitter, and to be a good parent. It all started with a parent in the hospital, a viral illness running through every kid in my household, Thanksgiving & Christmas, on-call WORK (the job I actually get paid to do), and many other little life detours. I admit, I allowed life to take over for a few months, but am now ready to take the reigns back!

No complaining! I do after all feel that EVERY little life experience deepens who we really are!

NOW on to the update!

Just over 2 weeks ago (my, my, how time flies) my very good friend Janine Smith over at Landailyn awarded me with the >Kreativ< Blogger Award! This is a very great honor! An honor that comes with responsibility of passing on or “paying forward” the honors of such award!

And here are the rules!

This is almost like a game of Creative Tag. I tagged these seven creative souls, now their mission, should they choose to accept it, is as follows:

1. Copy the award to your site.
2. Link to the person from whom you received the award.
3. Nominate 7 other bloggers.
4. Link to those sites on your blog.
5. Leave a message on the blogs you nominate.

So, It is my turn to pick 7 creative bloggers!

They are in no particular order:

Moon With A View (Cutzi Jobes) ~ I love her candidness of day to day life, her strong views  on adoption, God and life in general! A genuinely sweet, loving, person that I wholeheartedly adore! And her family is just so dang cute too!

MomShots (Jessica Stier) ~ I love this site! (So much so, I have become a contributor of tips!) The goal of this wonderful photography site is pretty much a personal mission to photograph her kids better, while sharing her learning and knowledge with the rest of us! She has wonderful insight, is open to new ideas about photography, and is a well of awesome resources for hobbyist photographers!

DaniDraws (Dani Jones) ~ Dani is a wonderful illustrator! She takes the time to post to her blog regularly with new illustrations she is working on, gives great advice for freelancers, AND hosts a live video stream of her work quite regularly (interactive too, so you can ask questions & get answers while you watch!)! Very fascinating watching her work!

A.J.Wood ~ This is the link for Photoshop Jedi AJ’s Tip Tweets! Very helpful Photoshop tips! AJ always has the best Photoshop insider information and tips! He also has a great blog too!

PioneerWoman (Ree Drummond) ~ This lady has a site packed full of photography & Photoshop tips and Photoshop ACTIONS! Her photos are wonderful! I am almost speechless about how much great stuff is packed into this site! And she has some really awesome giveaways!

I know that is only 5 and it says 7, but these fabulous blogs have already received the >Kreativ< Blogger Award, (but are more than deserving of it) so I am going to give them KUDOS by posting up links!

Janinealogy (Janine Smith)

DesignByFirgs (Elizabeth Gast)

PursuingPhotoshop (Karen Stansel)

Creative Wisdom (Leah Dossey)

Please check out these fabulous blogs and give these amazing people some comment love!!

I have joined the Technorati blogging crew, please show me some love and fav this blog!

Please click here > > > >

Don’t forget to visit MomShots for the weekly tip! This week is about COLOR!!

Photoshop CS4 is looking like it has some really nice improvements… NAPP has some great previews of the improvements they have made! Looks promising!

OK enough rambling on, back to work for me!!

I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that MomShots is hosting a sweet giveaway! You could win yourself a copy of “The Digital Photography Book” by Scott Kelby. To get an entry all you have to do is leave a comment on the giveaway post! You can even earn more entries by mantioning MomShots on your website! So swing on over and give MomShots some love!

Back2Basics (B2B) is up and running check out the DurbinDigital blog to see what we are up to! There is a great TOP 5 to get you started on a plan to success!

In other news, I attended (as Tech Support Staff) the Social Media Conference that was hosted at WCC. The attendance was great and the speakers there were awesome! The speaker from Apple was top notch and very engaging. Very relevant information for social network marketing.

The TOW at MomShots for the week was spot color, a fun little effect for your photos. So head over there and give it a look!

And for any of you web “surfers”, if there are burning questions about the software programs you are using, just post them up here in the comments sections. If I don’t know the answer, I will find it for you, or direct you to the most relevant source… who knows, your suggestion might even make it to a Tip Of the Week!

Also, for any of you Digital Scrapbookers out there, I am currently working on an extra’s disk for my Scrapbooking class this fall, and if you have any suggestions on what you’d like to see for content on a CD let me know! If I use your ideas/suggestions (i.e. type of custom brushes, patterns for papers, embellishments etc…), I will mail you a free copy of the CD so PLEASE make sure you leave me your email!

Until next time!

OK, so I don’t get very excited about anything very often so this is a BIG deal. Over at ConceptArt they have started a new thread. It is for past weekly challenges that you didn’t quite get done in time, OR you just want to go back and try your hand at. There is going to be some Kickin’ artwork in there very soon! And I have already claimed my spot for adding my revisitations to! Sweet motivation to get some personal artwork done.

Also, for those of you following along, MomShots posted up my tip on color cast for last week, and the next one up will be spot color!

And watch my blog in the next couple of weeks for the “B2B” (Back 2 Basics) section, that is all about taking a step back and revisiting our foundation knowledge of art and photography!

ThanX for peeking in!

I am putting a suggestion to the MomShots clan (or anyone else that is interested in learning some new tricks)! I want to know what you are wanting to get out of the MomShots Tip Of the Week. What do you want to know more about? Are there images out there that make you wonder “How’d they do that?” Well here is your chance to ask up! You can comment me here OR you can leave suggestions as comments on the MomShots website!

Don’t forget… the Back2Basics will be starting in Sept.!

Twellow! This great site is the all mighty Yellow Pages of Twitter users.

If you are a freelancer, small business owner, blogger, etc. this is the place you want to be! There are many different ‘categories’ that you can list yourself/your business into. And it is fairly easy to use. If you have a profile on Twitter, you can import (or claim) your profile straight from Twitter. Once you have your profile set up you can take a browse around the different categories and add yourself to the category with a simple click (there is a little green plus in the title bar for the category). Another great aspect of Twello, is that you can add your other social networking sites, like Facebook or Digg.

So what are you waiting for? Get yourself out there!

Yes! I am bringing you something to look forward to!

I have decided that since school is just around the corner, and there is so much to learn, I will be bringing everyone “BACK 2 BASICS”. This Back 2 Basics section will be dedicated to taking a step back from our over-detailed, over-complicated, over-worked, lives back to the basic foundations of where our work started in the beginning.

As we Further our professional careers, we tend to get into the habit of skipping the vital, basic, building blocks of our work, because we are season pro’s we can take that chance, we can pull it off…..

Well the truth is, although we might be able to “pull it off”, our work suffers when we don’t plan a strong foundation to build our work on, we start losing our edge, because we get into the mind set that “we know it all” and can can cut those corners, when we can’t.

So, every once in a while, we need to take a step back and revisit the basics of what we do already know.

My goal is to bring the fundamental basics out of the dark closet, where they have been stored lovingly, dust off the cobwebs, and bring them back into the light where they can once again flourish, and plant new seeds of creativity! Whether you are a seasoned pro or a “newbie”, there will be something here for everyone, because we all need to revisit the basics!

Tip Of The Week!

Starting “NEW” last week, we went live on MomShots with our Tip Of The Week (TOW).

Last week was a tip on converting your photos to black and white.

This week is a tip for tinting your black and white with sepia tones.

Next week will be a tip on fine tuning your black and white photos using the Levels dialogue box in Photoshop Elements (4.0 and newer) and Photoshop CS (and newer).

Being the TOW contributor, I will be archiving these tips here as well once a month.