Spent Easter with the fam as I am wont to do, and we performed the highly-anticipated ritual of coloring eggs. This was, needless to say, a perfect opportunity for everyone to indulge in a little creativity.

In my family the whole egg-coloring deal has held to tradition for decades. This means that we’re almost notoriously steadfast users of the Paas line of vinegar-scented chromatic madness. While there have been years where a crazy new idea came out (thinking of the year my older sister came up with some way of using food coloring and vinegar for these fabu starburst effects), we generally just stick with the tablets, some warm water, and then try and do everything we can to get the most out of the basic materials.

Here are some of this year’s results:

We had a bunch of fun this year, and mostly we let the kids do whatever they wanted to do, and the adults kind of goofed around with it. I recall in years past we had some pretty amazing results, but we were laid back about it this year. I’m probably the only one who was bothered about it, as I tend to take five times longer than anyone else in search of the “perfect” design, color, and style. (Yes, by now you are all familiar with how I can take something simple and overdo it. One year at a jack-o-lantern carving party at someone’s house I took as long to do one as everyone else did to do two of them. I’m sure my obsessiveness is entertaining. You’re welcome.)

Getting a closeup on these, you can see better how we work with our limited resources. You have to get pretty creative (awesome!) with your execution when your coloring depends largely on dunking an oblong shell-coated embryo into a coffee mug full of tinted water. There’s the whole half-in-one-side/half-in-the-other-side, and then of course you can go for the “suicide” effet – putting the egg into every single color on the table, but after you’ve covered some of the obvious tricks you begin to want to reach for something a little different. Okay, maybe you don’t, but I do, and so does some of my family, apparently.

The first one on the right was done by putting the egg in multiple colors, then removing it, patting it dry in a few spots with a towel, and submerging it again. This thing looked fantastic when it was done. It had a crazy purple/gray/blue thing going on. My sister’s friend did it. I thought it looked almost like concrete. It was awesome.

Above is a closeup of the ones I did. The foreground one was partly accident-related. Before I got hold of it it had been dropped. Didn’t matter, I love the way colors react around the damaged area. Check out how the blue has come out of the green at the cracks. Super sweet. Look further up toward the top and you can see a spiral that wraps around the egg. I got that by using a crayon and drawing on it, then submerging it.

The one with the wacky stripes on it came from putting the egg in read for a short time, then pulling it out and letting it dry a little, then wrapping rubber bands around it in random patterns and putting it back in, this time in purple. Rubber band ones are always fun.

The orange and yellow one was another crayon work. I put it in yellow and then scribbled all over it with crayon. When I put it back in I used red. I left it in a really long time, and the colors turned out nice and vibrant on that one.

And now for a little photo instruction. Check out these two photos:

and:

Have you sometimes wondered why your photos look like snapshots and not photos? A lot of it is in the lighting. The first (really cute!) photo was done next to a sunny window. You can see that the left half of the face has a nice, soft light to it. Skin tones look great, and it adds a lot of character to the photo.

The second photo looks fine, but the lighting is just…flat. It doesn’t do anything. This one was shot from a different angle, and the on-camera flash was used. Now, most on-camera flash is harsh and bright. Works great over a large variety of situations, and does a wonderful utilitarian job of getting illumination into all kinds of spots so you can see the subject in a dark room. However, it’s not the kindest of light. It’s flat, and it has no “color” so to speak. It makes pictures look like the one immediately above.

My little quick tip for you is if you’re trying to take a picture and make someone look as fab as possible, put them next to a window with some indirect lighting. This will soften wrinkles and round all kinds of unpleasant edges. Sunlight also has very nice color to it and won’t make the subject’s skin look pale or blue or any other number of undesirable shades.

My other nifty little tip is this: if you are using a point-and-click camera, and you do have to use the on-camera flash, but you really want to soften things up a bit, tape a piece of disposable tissue paper of the the flash. How many times you double it over is up to you, but try it out for fun some time and see how it looks. You’ll be amazed at how much nicer it appears.

They sell things like this for certain cameras. They’re called diffusers. You can’t get them for most pocket cameras, nor would you really want to mess with one, but in some situations it can be pretty cool, like if you’re at grandma’s 80th, and you want to get her with mom, and you want to take just a minute or two extra and get that quick shot where everyone will go “Aw…that looks great!” forever after.

When I was in college I couldn’t afford a diffuser for my zippy little mounted flash on my Nikon. I hated the harshness of the flash so much I ran around with a handkerchief rubber banded to the flash always. I never took it off, and I always preferred how that stuff turned out.

Hope you all enjoyed the recent holidays and that you had a chance to do some playing and have some creative fun.