About Me:

I’m Nicki, a wife, mom and amateur photographer in the Houston area. I have 4 gorgeous children between the ages of 2 and 13. I’m a homeschooling Mom, an adoption ethics advocate, and a blogger. My blogging career began during my wait to adopt our baby girl but it has since grown to be more of an all-encompassing outlet for my thoughts and life experiences. Photography was taking over the blog and so Behind the Lens was born.

About My Equipment:

I have two cameras I use for just about everything. I have a Point & Shoot Canon S3 that I adore. I use it for macro photography, videos and very rarely other things. I also have a Nikon D40x and that is what I use for my daily photography. The lens I use for almost all my photography is an 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor.

About my Software:

I use two main photo editing programs. For small edits, boosts, crops & changes, I use Flickr’s Picnik which is free for Flickr users. It is fast and easy. For bigger edits, actions, etc I use Photoshop CS3 Extended. I have a bottom of the line computer that I adore but is not really equipped to handle such processor-heavy editing so I only use PS when I have lots of time or when I have a big project to complete or major processing to do. Many of my photos are SOOC (straight out of the camera) and unprocessed mostly due to lack of time and not so much because they are so perfect the way they are. I think there are very few photos that could not benefit in at least tiny ways by post-processing.

I take, on average, around 500 pictures a month and keep about half. The exception to this is December, March (blue bonnet season) and some vacations when I can easily take this amount in a single sitting. My kids love it! Or not. But they seem to at least tolerate it.

My Favorite Kind of Photography:

• Macro/Micro
• Black & White
• Natural Light

My Photography Goals:

• Get a good macro lens
• Get consistently good eye pop
• work on DoF

Contact me: nicki [at] steppingonlegos.com