Summer fun alert: If you have kids that are a little bit bored here’s a great idea. Unleash their creative flair by turning them loose with cameras to photograph whatever they fancy. Yes, I am lucky enough to be a professional camera hog with at least four cameras in my world so sharing is easy but everyone has digital cameras these days and lots of them are not expensive at all.

The best part is that digital media lets you burn through photos like crazy with no film development costs or worries about the cost of flubbed shots. 

 My granddaughters are old enough to turn loose with my two small but very nice digital magic boxes. I toss one of these in my purse or backpack when the big Canon camera is too much work to haul along. I am never without a camera–even if its my Iphone with Instagram.  Ah Instagram, that’s another entry entirely. I 😛 Instagram!

 

I have Adobe Photoshop and use it for professional stuff but for just fun fooling around I absolutely adore Digital Image Pro from Microsoft. It does almost everything Adobe Photoshop does, okay, not everything, but it does a whole lot and its easy to use.

I started out by giving them the cameras and the chargers for the batteries, always important. I explained how the zoom worked and the basic features like close up and yes, you can take pictures outside at night and they can be pretty cool.

We had a couple of bumps in the road, but we even got two cameras and two girls to the beach with great success and no sandy cameras.

I showed them how to edit but for them the great fun at this point was in the taking of pictures. I gave them no direction and no guidelines. I wanted to see their response to the world around them. Wow, just wow.

 Some of their shots were incredible. Many of them were perfect right out of the camera. 

We uploaded all the shots to the computer and I stashed them in two files, one for each girl. We will put all the raw shots and the edited shots on a flash drive for each of them to take home. What a perfect memory of summer!

I got in on the collaboration by editing their first batch of shots. Some got cropped, all got resized for print and saving, and a few had filters or exposure corrections on them. I love the black and white effects too. I think I had as much fun making magic as they did!

It has been so much fun to see the world literally, through their eyes. Seeing what they saw, what they liked, what they took pictures of has been so amazing for me. I highly recommend it to any one with kids, cameras and a computer.