A lot of you have been asking for my SLR recommendations, so I thought I’d put a post together to answer those.  And this’ll serve as a handy place to send people when they ask in the future.  Yay for saving time!

Almost nothing I’m going to share with you in this post is going to be terribly frugal, at least not in the typical sense of the word.

Good camera equipment doesn’t come cheap, and that’s that.

But as you know, I’m a big fan of spending money in ways that reflect your priorities, and so if capturing life through a camera lens is important to you, I think investing in quality cameras and lenses can be a really wise thing.  And if you can manage to avoid the portrait studio by using your camera, it could actually pay for itself over time.

Just make sure you don’t overextend yourself to purchase any of this…save up and buy when you’ve got the money (also, Amazon sells most of the equipment I use, so you can always save up Swagbucks to help you afford your camera equipment).

Ok! Here’s a quick rundown of what I recommend.

Canon vs. Nikon

I use Canon equipment, only because my first SLR was a gift, and it was a Canon. I honestly don’t think one is better than the other (I think you could be very happy with either!), but Canon is all I know, so that’s all I’m going to talk about.

New or Used

Thus far, I have not been brave enough to buy any SLR camera equipment used.  I’m too nervous that it will have been abused, so I’ve stuck with saving up and buying brand new.

I know you can get good deals on Ebay or Craig’s List, though, so if you’re braver than me, those are options worth exploring.

Camera Bodies

If I were starting out with no SLR, I’d be inclined to buy the Rebel t3i, which costs about $600 for the body.  It”s the best of the less expensive camera bodies, and if you’re just starting out, there’s no need to go crazy and buy a super expensive camera body.  It takes HD video, and has a fairly extensive range of settings and options.

If you want to spend a bit less, you can get the Canon Rebel t1i, which I have.  It takes both video and still pictures, and  costs $500 for the body. (I opted for this one because the improved video features on the t3i weren’t important to me since I own the 7d.)

There’s also a t2i, but that’s SO close in price to the t3i, you might as well bump up to that.

I wouldn’t really recommend it for a beginner because it’s heavy and expensive, but I dearly love my Canon 7D, which sells for $1400. It’s got fabulous image quality and a ton of features…I lurve it to pieces.

Lenses

A good lens is WAY more important than the camera body.  I’ll take my $500 Rebel with a good lens over my 7D with a bad lens any day.

The lens that you can get with the Rebel camera bodies is typically an 18-55 zoom lens.  It’s adequate, but nothing fabulous.  I found it to be a good learner lens for my first year with an SLR, though, and I did manage to turn out some nice photos with it.

That above photo is actually hanging in my living room.  Check out how curly Zoe’s hair used to be!

I don’t really ever use that lens now unless I’m going to be shooting in very messy conditions (think windy beach). 

Buying the kit lens with the camera is the cheapest, simplest route to go. However, if you want to step up your game a bit, a better lens is the ticket.

My most favorite lens, the 50mm 1.4, sells for around $375. This is the lens I shoot with around 95% of the time, which means that almost all of the photos you see on this blog are taken with it.

If you like to take pictures of people,  I SO recommend getting a 50mm 1.4. It’s fast, small, light, and gives you lovely blurred backgrounds. (by the way, there is a 50mm 1.8 which sells for around $100, but the image and build quality aren’t nearly as nice as the 1.4.)

The 50mm lens doesn’t zoom in and out…it’s fixed right at 50 mm. If you’d like a zoom lens, you might want to consider the 28-135, which sells for $366.  It’s definitely a better quality lens than the zoom lens that comes with the camera body, and 28-135 is a nice all-purpose range.

I hope that wasn’t confusing. If it was, here’s something simple for you…if you want to get a new SLR with a lens, you could buy the Rebel t1i with 18-55 lens for $550. That would get you everything you need to get busy shooting, and you can always upgrade your lenses down the road.

Accessories

I prefer not to use flash whenever possible, but when I must use flash, the Lightscoop is super handy.

I wrote a whole review of this with before and after photos, but basically, it makes your SLR’s flash pictures look much less like flash photos. The Lightscoop is only $24.95, and so worth it.

Lastly, I like to take my smaller SLR with me everywhere I go, so I love my Jo Tote. It’s a camera bag and purse combined…so perfect for me!

It comes in lots of other fun shades, so if you want to be more colorful than me, you’ve got options!

For times when I want to bring all my equipment with me, I like to use my LowePro SlingShot bag. It’s got room for several camera bodies, lenses, memory cards, and more. I can fit a crazy amount of stuff in that bag.

I know that’s a very basic overview, so please do ask questions in the comments if I didn’t cover something you wanted to know.

Oy.  That’s a lot of black in one post, isn’t it?  Here’s something a little more colorful to finish things off.

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Today’s 365 post:Practicing what I preach

Joshua’s 365 post: Pool!

disclosure: this post contains affiliate links

If you follow me on Facebook or read my 365 blog, you know that at Mr. FG’s company Christmas party, I won a Canon PowerShot Elph camera.

At first, I felt bad and I was a little like, “What in the world do I need this for?? Someone else should have won it!”.

Which is sort of understandable, I think, because I own two SLRs, one of which is super-duper nice (Hi, 7d!)

But I’m discovering that it’s fun to play around with this, and I like the challenge of trying to take good pictures with a camera that is not as good as what I’m used to. Plus, I can happily let Sonia take pictures with it (she’s always asking if she can use my Rebel, and I’m almost always saying, “No, sweetie.”)

Want to see how well this camera works?  I went around my house randomly photographing things so I could show you!

Here are a few sets of photos.  In each group, the first was taken with the PowerShot and the second with my Rebel.

See the bokeh in that last one?  I’ve never been able to get that with a point and shoot because they’re designed to keep as much as possible in focus (that’s why it’s hard to use them for lovely portraits…the background is almost always in focus.)

However, as is usually the case with any camera, you can take a fairly nice picture if you follow some simple photography rules (I’m working on writing an ebook about that, actually).

Or if you break them all, you can turn out something like this.

For comparison’s sake, here’s the same set of photos taken with my Rebel and my 50mm lens.

Good.

Not so good.  Although, it’s harder to take a terrible picture with an SLR.

(props to Sonia for being my guinea pig)

There are a few things I really miss when I’m using a point and shoot.

-image quality

I notice this especially when I’m photographing people.  Point and shoots just don’t have that fabulous clear, crisp focus.  This is less noticeable to me when I’m taking pictures of nature (check out this sunset photo!), but as we all know, I don’t do that terribly often. 

-the ability to focus on people’s eyes.

With an SLR, I always manually choose my focal point, and when I’m taking a picture of a person, I put the focal point right on the eyes.  I can’t do that with a point and shoot.

-the ability to adjust for non-optimal shooting circumstances

A point and shoot can produce some fairly decent pictures if the lighting is good, but they generally have trouble when you’re shooting in low light (gotta use the flash then), or when your subject is backlit.

-the ability to change aperture.

I don’t mess with my shutter speed a whole lot, but I do love to change my aperture.  There’s no way to do that on a point and shoot.

That said, I do think this Elph is quite nice as point and shoots go.  I really like that it barely hesitates to take a photo after I press the shutter button (that’s normally one of my main gripes with point and shoots), the size can’t be beat, and the picture quality, especially outdoors, is good for a point and shoot.

The black/grey Elph sells for $109 at Amazon, although the snazzy blue one I own is $169.

That makes no sense.

I mean, the blue IS very snazzy, but not that snazzy.

Anyway, for $109, I think this is a good camera.  It’s not as good as my SLRs, but we’re comparing a $500 body and $400 lens to a $109 camera/lens combo.  That’s almost an $800 difference, and if you take that into consideration, the Elph photos are pretty impressive.

If you’re looking for an affordable, simple, small camera, the PowerShot Elph could be a good choice for you.

Now, I wanted to also share with you my SLR recommendations because I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking me about that.  I was going to add all that info to this post, but it made an already long post unbearably long!

So, come back this afternoon to read about what SLR equipment I like.

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Today’s 365 post:Practicing what I preach

Joshua’s 365 post: Pool!

disclosure: this post contains affiliate links

It’s been a good (almost) four years.

Since that Christmas day in 2007, you’ve helped me take better pictures of my children.

Even when all I had was your kit lens.

You were with me at the very start of my blogging career.

And I loved you just the way you were.

Then I got my 50mm 1.4 lens, and ooh, baby!

You were like a whole new camera.

You’ve been with me on many a photo shoot.

You’ve documented family, friends, babies,

and babies in progress.

I would have kept you by my side much longer, were it not for the fact that you refuse to turn on anymore.

And since repairs beyond a simple battery fix (that’s not your problem) tend to run in the $200-$250 range, I think we’re through, much as it pains me to say that.

Your life isn’t over yet, though…you’re headed to Ebay, where you’ll be sold for parts.

So, dear Rebel, thanks for all the good times and for the thousands upon thousands of pictures you’ve taken for me…we made a good pair, and I’m sorry our relationship had to end.
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(I bought a CanonRebel T1i , body only, and it arrived yesterday. They sky has been dreadfully dark and rainy since it arrived, so I haven’t been able to properly try it out.  I’ll let you know what I think of it once the clouds clear a bit, as even my 7D was having difficulty producing nice photos yesterday.)
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Today’s 365 post:Silhouettes

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

How often do you go through your pantry? Do you often have crackers, rice, or pasta that goes bad before you can use it? Sometimes I buy a new product to try and we don’t like it (I currently have a large jar of dried edamame that I can’t bring myself to finish). Do you force these types of things down the gullet or do you just cut your losses and toss them?

-Cathryn

I go through my pantry less frequently than I probably should! But pantry waste has not ever been a huge problem for me, even back before Food Waste Friday.  Pantry foods have a really long shelf life most of the time, and I can usually manage to use them up before they go bad.

However, I do sometimes have waste of this sort..I recently had to throw out a container of steel cut oats because they’d gotten rancid.  They were still safe to eat, but I am just not desperate enough to each rancid-tasting oatmeal.  So, to answer your question, no, I don’t force myself to eat stuff that I really can’t stand.

If the food is still edible, though, I think it’s a good idea to give it away to a friend who would be interested in eating it.  Maybe you have an edamame-loving acquaintance?

If you frequently have pantry waste, you might need to adopt a regular pantry-cleaning schedule.  I have to do that with my fridge or else I completely lose track of what is in there (knowing what food you have is half the battle!).  A regular perusal of my fridge’s contents is very helpful to me, and maybe it would help you with your pantry as well.

I have a question about composting that I’m hoping you can clarify. I am using your method of the rubbermaid container, and I’ve been filling it up for about 5 months now. This morning I went out to add my weekly bucket of scraps and I was greeted by a swarm of flies. I have livestock so I’m used to flies, but these guys were beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Do you have problems with flies or am I doing something wrong with what I’m adding to the compost pile? I’ve kept my composting to kitchen scraps and yard waste as your instructions indicated but I do have three other capable adults who live here (OK two of them are teenagers but close enough to grown up that I count them that way) who may add things when I’m not looking. Any ideas on what I can do to get rid of the flies? Seriously if I put out those fly paper trap things they’d be filled within minutes. I’m surprised my neighbor hasn’t complained. I’m tempted to dig a hole in my pasture and dump everything into it, bury it and call it a failed experiment. I thought I’d check with you first before I did anything drastic.

-Rockzann

I’m guessing these were fruit flies, which are the main pests that hang around my compost bins. I’ve also had some smallish black flies which are different than the normal house fly…I’m not sure what they’re called!

The best advice I have is to make sure that you are adding enough browns (leaves, shredded paper, shredded cardboard, etc) to your pile. If your kitchen waste/browns ratio is off too much, your compost will be wet, stinky, and full of flies.

When I add compost to my bin, I always cover it with a layer of browns, which is my case is usually leaves or paper shreds. If I don’t do that, I have fly problems galore.

(it would be much better if my leaves were shredded…they’d compost faster that way. But compost doesn’t have to be perfect to work!)

The browns on top of the pile are too dry to compost at first, but they always get covered with another layer of wet compost in a short while, and they they have enough moisture to decompose.

Do you have any tips for first time buyers about what features and characteristics they should focus on when purchasing a dSLR body and lens? Also, I’m thinking about buying used. Do you have any specific tips for what to look out for if buying used? Would you recommend against buying a used (for the body/lens/both)?

-Carla

Hmm. Since I’ve only used Canon digital SLR equipment, I’m probably a little bit biased towards their products. But I’d probably recommend that you buy either a Nikon or Canon SLR camera body. I know some people love other SLR brands, but I’d be a little bit nervous about going with a smaller SLR company.

If your budget is limited, I would suggest skimping a little bit on the camera body so that you have enough money for a nice lens. A body is nice, but the lens is really where it’s at. For the Canon, I cannot recommend the Canon 50mm f1.4 lens highly enough. I love this lens to pieces and it’s on my camera somewhere around 95% of the time (my $1200 24-70 lens doesn’t get nearly as much use as my $350 50mm does!).

Anyways, I’d rather have my Rebel body and my 50mm lens than my 7D with a not-so-great lens.

I have not ever bought a used piece of camera equipment yet, so I’m useless for advice in that arena. I buy other used items all the time, but for some reason, I’m scared to buy used camera equipment from someone I don’t know (I worry that it might have been dropped, or kept in unfriendly temperatures). Then again, there are a fair number of people who buy SLRs and lenses, decide they’re in over their heads, and then want to sell their equipment.  So if you found a deal like that, it’d be worth going for!

Oh, and on my 365 blog, I have a list of all my current camera equipment, since I get asked about that so often.

Today’s 365 post: Zoe, in shadow.
disclosure

This post is part of a (very) irregular series about using Picasa, a free (whee!) photo editing software.  Because we’re all about saving money around these parts.  And because Photoshop is stinkin’ hard. If you missed the earlier installments in this series, worry not.  You can always access them  in the Picasa category.

Today I’m going to show you how to fix an overexposed picture.  Really, underexposed pictures are a more common problem, but I don’t have material for that post yet, so we’re tackling a less common problem first.  Because I am just THAT organized.

Before I took this photo of my nephew outdoors, I was shooting indoors in a room with a white background, so I’d adjusted my exposure up a few stops. This was perfect for indoors, but outside, this setting produced a washed out, overexposed picture.

Whoops.

Fortunately, I noticed this before long, so I managed to shoot some pictures that were properly exposed. If I hadn’t, though, I’d have needed to fix the overexposed ones. There’s a very, very easy way to do this in Picasa.

Just click on the thumbnail of your picture, and that will open it up, ready for you to edit.

On the left side of your screen, on the Basic Fixes tab, there’s an Auto Contrast button.

Just click it, and Picasa will adjust your picture’s exposure for you.  In this case, it’ll darken the picture.

Oooh, that’s better.

If you want a little bit more control over this process, click on the Tuning tab on the left side of your screen, and you’ll be presented with several sliders.  Since this picture has too much in the way of fill light and highlights, we don’t want to mess with those sliders.  Instead, to fix this picture I moved the shadows slider to the right until I was happy with it.

So, here’s the before:

And the after:

See?  Totally easy.

Even if you have a point and shoot and you can’t manually control the exposures (and thus screw up a photo like I did), you may run into a problem like this when you’re shooting a dark subject, like something with a lot of black or dark blue (this happens to me all the time when I’m shooting food on my black dishes).  Your camera will see the dark colors and think that it needs to compensate by letting lots of light in, and your picture will turn out too bright.  Fortunately, you know how to fix that now.

Happy editing!

P.S.  If you don’t already have Picasa, you can download it for free.

P.P.S.  I am in no way affiliated with Picasa.  I just lurve Picasa and want to share it with you.

Today’s 365 post: There’s nothing quite like local peaches.

Remember when I told you that I was going to share some Picasa tips with all of you?  I haven’t forgotten about that…and I’ve even had some posts ready to go.  Other post topics have just gotten in the way.  I did really want to start with a post about doing black and white photos, but that post isn’t finished yet and so we’re going to talk about sepia toning first.  Because this series doesn’t have to be perfect to bless people, right?

As a reminder, we’re using Picasa because it’s free (that kinda goes with the theme of my blog.) and because it’s super-easy to use.  You can do some great stuff to your photos without having to buy and learn Photoshop, and I’m going to show you how.

We’re going to use a photo that Joshua took for me. Though I try to make it simple by setting things up properly when I hand him the camera, odds are good that the photos he takes will need some editing (Who are we kidding anyways? A lot of the photos I take need editing!).

You can click on each photo or screenshot to see a larger version.  When you’re finished, just click the back button on your browser to return to the post.

In this photo, I’m tickling Lisey and Sonia and I like the realness of it.  It’s sort of dark, though, the colors aren’t that great, and I think it could stand to be cropped a little too.

A handy tool for lightening a photo is the Sepia toning tool.  For some reason, adding the sepia tone lightens a photo considerably.

To do this, click on the Effects tab, and then click on Sepia.

Now, this photo is lighter, but it’s pretty lacking in contrast.  So, I just click back over to the Basic Fixes tab and hit the Auto Contrast button in the middle.  This will add some shadows and increase the highlights.

Now the photo is a bit dark for my taste, though, so I added a little fill light.

Sepia tones can vary a lot, and I prefer a color that is not super dark.  So, I fix this by decreasing the saturation a little bit.  The Saturation slider is found on the Effects tab.

Finally, I use the crop tool to make the shot a little bit tighter.

If you want to view the photo outside of Picasa and keep your edits, just right click on the photo and click “Save”.  If you ever want to undo your edits, you can always right click the photo in Picasa and click “Undo Save”.

So, here’s the before:

and after:

It’s not a perfect shot, but I think it’s a lot more appealing than it was initially.

Of course, depending on how you like your photos to look, you could make your photo darker by skipping the fill light step, and you could skip the desaturation step if you prefer a browner-looking sepia tone.  It’s really all a matter of personal preference.

Go give it a try!  It’s super easy, and could save a bum photo of yours.

Today’s 365 post: This is my award from Sonia

I’ve done several posts on how to improve your photography without spending a bunch of money (more are coming, I promise!), and to go along with that, I’m going to do a series of posts on editing your pictures without spending a bunch of money.

You can, of course, buy some picture-editing software like Lightroom or Photoshop, but those fabulous programs come with a fabulous price tag. Also, Photoshop is, shall we say, not the easiest program in the world to use.

At least, it seems not-easy to me!

So, we’re going to talk about all the things you can do do your pictures with Picasa, a free (woo!) picture-editing program from Google. Picasa is no Photoshop, but you can do an impressive number of things with it, and they’re all super easy. There are other free photo editing programs out there, like Picnik and gimp, but since I have the most experience with Picasa, that’s what I’m going to blog about.

Why should you bother with picture editing?  Well, even if you’re pretty careful when you shoot, some of your pictures are bound to need a little help.  Plus, sometimes  just a little bit of tweaking can take a photo from boring to fabulous.  I use Picasa for about 99.99% of the picture editing I need to do for the photos I use on this blog, so if you like what you usually see here, you should follow this series!

With Picasa, you can make pictures black and white….

adjust lighting….

or add a sepia tone.

You can crop them…

make collages (you can make much more creative collages than this…I just usually keep it simple with two photos!),

add text,

and much, much more.

To get your copy of Picasa, simply visit Picasa’s website and download the software.  It’s very simple to set up and install…just follow the instructions.  When you install Picasa, it should scan your computer for existing images and organize them into folders for you automatically.

I use Picasa whenever I unload pictures onto my computer.  To do that, just plug your camera in to the computer or put your memory card into your computer’s card reader.  A window should pop up asking what you’d like to do with your pictures, and all you have to do is click on “Use Picasa to import pictures.”  That will take you to the import screen, and you should be able to just follow the instructions from there.  Alternatively, you can open up Picasa and click on the Import button.

Though I use Picasa for a lot of my editing, I also find it to be a great tool for organizing and sorting through my pictures…much better than Photoshop, actually.  Photoshop is a powerful editing tool, but it is a pain in the patootie for organizing and sorting.

So, if you haven’t already, go download and install the Picasa software so that you’re all ready to try out my tips.  I’m really excited about sharing this series with you, because making your photos look great can be fun, easy, and free!

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I am a newbie homeschooler (I’ve been doing it P/T while they are in preschool, but am starting full-time in the fall with Kindergarten!) and am wondering how you manage HS with all of your other jobs – piano lessons, photography, planning groceries/savings, baking batches, blogging, etc.!!! You seem to have it all together, but don’t you feel overwhelmed sometimes? There are so many days that I go to bed just giving up on my to-do list and it waits for me again in the morning! (I teach piano 2 days week, and my children are 1, 3, & 5)

-Georgia

I think I’ve answered a question sort of similar to this in a previous Q&A, but I think it probably bears repeating:

Yes, yes, yes, I sometimes feel overwhelmed. And no, no, no, I do not have it all together!

In the past, I’ve been able to manage homeschooling and all my other responsibilities pretty well, but this past year has been a little different (Sonia started school in the fall, so now I’m homeschooling 3 kids). In all my years of homeschooling, I have never, ever been so anxious for summer to arrive as I was this year, and I’m feeling like I may need to do some scaling back or reorganizing before school starts up again in the fall. Depending on how things go with my husband’s job, this may take the form of cutting back my piano teaching to an even more minimal level. Or, it may be that I just need to come up with a better organized plan of attack.

So yeah…I certainly haven’t got all of this down pat!

Something I’ve been pondering lately is how easy it is for a blogger to come across as perfect and together without even meaning to. It’s really, really easy for me to forget that you all don’t see the stuff that I don’t post on my blog…since I see my piles of laundry and dirty children and messy rooms, and since I obviously know when I’m feeling exhausted and out of patience, I forget that you don’t. I do try to share my failures and faults (I do this more often on Facebook or Twitter than I do on my blog), but I think I’m not doing as well with that as I could.

So, from here on out, I’m going to try to be a little more intentional about letting you have a better view of the imperfections in my life. The last thing in the world I want to do is to make you think that I’m a perfect, has-it-all-together mom/wife because that’s simply not the case.

Worry not, though…I’m not going to turn my blog into a depressing whine-fest! That’s just not how I roll, and it wouldn’t quite go with that whole “cheerfully living on less” thing I’ve got going on.

Anyhow, I definitely don’t have the corner on organization/balance/time management, but because so many of you have asked, I am really, really hoping to be able to put together a series on productivity this summer (because I have more free time when I’m not homeschooling).  Hopefully that will answer some of your questions.

How do you do photography sessions (& any editing) with your children? Do you schedule them when your husband is home, do they go with you, or do they stay with friends/family?

-Georgia

That really depends. If the session is close to home, and my clients (that sounds ridiculously formal, but I don’t know what else to call people I take pictures of!) are amenable to the idea, I do take them with me. They’re all old enough to generally behave themselves long enough for me to take pictures, and I often bring some snacks or something to keep the occupied while I’m shooting.

If my husband happens to be home when I’m doing a shoot, then of course I leave the kids at home with him. I don’t terribly mind having them along on a shoot, but given the choice, I definitely prefer to leave them home!

Sometimes, I manage to leave them with someone else when my husband isn’t available, though.  For instance, on Saturday, I did an engagement shoot for my cousin and her fiance (who may very well be one of the cutest couples ever to grace the face of this earth! See?).

(you can see more of them on my photo blog if you want.)

Since my husband was at work while we did the shoot, I left my kids with my aunt and cousins while I went downtown to do the shoot, which worked out great…my kids were thrilled to pieces, and I was able to work undistracted.

Editing time is a little bit trickier to carve out, and as my, um, clients know, it usually takes me a couple of weeks to get all the pictures sorted and edited.  I usually do editing bit by bit, with random bits of time I manage to find.

I don’t do tons of photo sessions because I find when I do, it starts to not be all that much fun anymore, mostly because I have to spend so much time editing.  If I wasn’t already mothering 4 children, homeschooling, cooking, blogging, cleaning, and doing a bunch of other things, I might feel differently, of course.  But as it is, a session here and there is just perfect for me…enough to keep my feet wet and to keep me challenged, but not so much that I feel overwhelmed.

Perhaps as my kids get older and more independent, I’ll get into doing photo sessions more seriously, but for now photography is having to take a back seat to a lot of other things in my life.  And that’s ok, because my kids are only going to be little once.

Recently, I’ve taken over the grocery shopping, menu planning and cooking in my household. I don’t mind it but the annoying little plastic produce bags always bother me! I use cloth bags for all of my groceries but I still end up with so many of those produce bags and I just throw them away, and that can’t be very environmentally-friendly. I noticed that in your grocery pictures you don’t have plastic bags around your produce, do you purchase the fruit without bags or take them off later? Is it possible to purchase without bags?

-Mandy

Most of the time, I do try to purchase my produce without using plastic bags. Aldi has a lot of their produce pre-packaged and they don’t offer bags with their loose produce,  but when I’m shopping at Weis, I forego the bag whenever possible.

This does make it a little bit trickier at checkout (especially when I’m buying things like loose mushrooms!), so most of the time I opt to use the self checkout. That way I don’t annoy the poor cashier with my loose produce and cloth bags.

I guess this might seem a little bit unsanitary to some, but I’m not at all a germophobe, and I’d be kidding myself to think that my produce hasn’t been touched by a bunch of hands before it even makes it to the grocery store display.

And besides, I wash our produce before we eat it!

If you really can’t stomach the idea of leaving your produce bare, you could buy or make some drawstring mesh bags to use instead. These Acme bags are $4, but I’m thinking some of those mesh laundry bags (for lingerie) would work as well and would be cheaper.

Readers, what do you do to avoid the ubiquitous produce bag?

You all know by now that I am not a fan of flash. Whenever possible, I really, really prefer to use natural light for my pictures. But sometimes, even with a fast lens, there’s not enough light for a decent picture.

One solution is to buy an external flash unit, but those are expensive, and a little awkward to cart around with the camera. I’m obviously not opposed to dropping money on camera equipment, but since I’m not really looking to get into flash photography, I’ve been loathe to spend several hundred dollars on a flash unit.

So, I was thrilled to pieces when I got the opportunity to review a new product called The LightScoop (I got a free LightScoop from the company but I was not compensated for this review in any other way).

This hand-dandy little mirrored gadget slides onto the top of most SLR cameras, and helps to soften the harsh light of the flash by bouncing the light up onto the ceiling or onto a wall.  This is similar to the way a bounce flash unit works, but the LightScoop costs a mere $29.99 (edit:  You can also buy this product on Adorama for $19.99! Thanks, Emily.).

The light produced with the bounced flash is much softer and more diffused. I snapped a couple of shots of Sonia and Zoe to show you the difference.

Here’s Sonia with the bare flash.

And here she is with the LightScoop added.

The shot with the Lightscoop isn’t perfect (well, it’s not as good as it’d be with natural light!), but it’s way, way, way better than the one with the flash.

Here’s Zoe with a bare flash.

And Zoe with the LightScoop.

I tried this out with a food shot as well.  Here’s some stromboli with a bare flash.

And this is with the LightScoop added.  Can you see how much more dimension this picture has?

By request, here’s an additional set of pictures…this time with no flash, bare flash, and LightScoop flash.

It’s a dark and cloudy day, and this is in a chair that’s not near the window.  You can see that there’s not sufficient light to take a picture without a flash, even with my fast 50mm lens.

Here’s the bare flash picture.

And here’s the LightScoop version.

Just for good measure, here’s a black and white series of Sonia shots.

No flash resulted in a blurry picture.

Bare flash makes a picture that’s not blurry, but one that is pretty artificial looking.

The LightScoop is the best option out of the three, I think.

I’m so pleased with the results of this little tool…it’s a perfect fit for someone like me, who only wants to use flash occasionally.  I think I’ve used my flash something like 3 times in the 2 years I’ve owned my SLR, but now that I have the LightScoop, I think I’ll be utilizing the flash a little more often.

The LightScoop only works with SLR cameras, both because a point and shoot flash is not powerful enough to bounce and because point and shoots don’t have a place to mount the LightScoop.  However, if you’re an SLR owner (or you want to give a gift to an SLR-owner), I’d highly recommend buying this little gadget…it’s definitely worth the $30 investment.

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line.  I look forward to hearing from you!

A few questions cropped up in the comments on last week’s post about composting, so I though I’d include them in today’s Q&A.

Have you done a post on the ins and outs of composting? I would be very interested in hearing your full process.

Yes, indeed! A while back I wrote a post about easy, cheap composting, which explains how I set up and use my bins. And you can read all my compost-related posts in the composting category.

One question: what about the toxins in the ink on the paper from the shredder? Any info on that? I don’t think the black ink is edible, do you?

I hadn’t considered that before, but because of your question, I did a little bit of poking around and came to the conclusion that the ink is not a big problem. The 13 Common Composting Myths article at Earth 911 says that composting actually dilutes the hydrocarbons and that multiple tests have shown the amount of ink in the finished compost is not at all dangerous.

Of course, if you still felt nervous about the ink, you could only put printed paper into compost you plan to use for inedible plants, like bushes and flowers.

One question about composting shredded paper– Wouldn’t it be better to recycle the paper? It would take MUCH longer to grow a tree using your compost, and then turn it into paper, than just recycling it. Of course both options are better than throwing paper in the trash!

That’s an interesting question. I’m no environmental expert, but I would venture to guess that composting is, at the very least, as green as recycling. Consider that composting requires absolutely no outside energy, whereas recycling requires energy on a lot of levels….someone has to come pick the paper up, drive it to the recycling plant, and then at the plant itself, a lot of energy is used in the recycling process. And as Mrs. Green pointed out to me, paper can only be recycled 5-6 times before the fibers are too weak for reuse.

That said, I recycle WAY more paper than I compost, simply because I don’t have room in my composting bins for all the cardboard and paper that comes into our house. I generally only compost the paper that I shred, and that’s usually made up of papers that have personal information on them.

Another reason I am prone to composting my shredded paper is that the shreds have to be bagged up for recycling.  This seems kind of wasteful to me, and I am not at all sure that a single bag of paper shreds is going to safely make it to the recycling plant, especially if it’s in a paper bag (a plastic bag could be tied shut, but then it’s kind of a waste of a bag). The recycling here all gets chucked into the back of a garbage-like truck, so it’s sort of an indelicate ride to the plant.

A final reason I compost paper is that in order to properly compost all my produce scraps, I need to have some browns to include in my pile…if I don’t, the produce scraps take forever to compost and the pile gets stinky.

If someone else offers to pay for something extravagant (= more than you’d pay), is the purchase still unfrugal?  The thing could be a simple as a nice dinner; my point is that the purchaser is willing to spend more than you would.
-WilliamB

Hmm, I guess it would be frugal for me! I actually don’t tend to worry myself about what other people are spending…I focus more on frugality in my life. Are you maybe wondering if something like that would make me feel uncomfortable? If that’s the question, then no, unless it was a case where I knew for sure that the giver couldn’t afford the extravagant purchase.

The bottom line is that I figure that what other people do with their money is not my worry (which might seem sort of odd, given that I blog about money!). And I’m not one to be offended if someone wants to buy something for me…I just say, “Thank you!”.

I would love to know how you learned so much about photography. I would love to get started but have no idea what I’m doing! Your pictures are so beautiful!

-Erika

Thank you! I appreciate the encouraging words.

I think I first started getting better at taking pictures when I switched to digital. Getting instant feedback on my images helped me to learn how to best use the available light and it helped me to learn much better composition (I used to always shoot from too far away!). I have great respect for people who learned how to take good pictures when film was the only format available…I don’t think I’d do too well that way!

I have not taken any formal photography classes, but I’ve checked out tons of photography books from the library, and I’ve done quite a bit of reading on the internet too (Digital Photography School is a good place to start). In addition to reading how-to kind of stuff on the ‘net, I also like to just browse through photo blogs because they give me good ideas and inspiration.

Probably the best thing I’ve done though, is practice, practice, practice. I take pictures nearly every day, and I think I’ve learned a lot through simple trial and error as I shoot. I take lots and lots of bad pictures (I just don’t show them to anyone!), and I probably learn as much from the duds as I do from the more successful shots.

So, my best advice is to do some reading, look at good pictures taken by other photographers, and practice, practice, practice!