Recap of the KC Blogger Meetup Workshop :: How to Beautify Your Blog

 

Last weekend, I attended the first KC Blogger Meetup workshop. The topic was How to Beautify Your Blog. It couldn't have come at a better time because that's exactly what I'm trying to do...breathe some new life into this old blog of mine. If you haven't been here in a while, you'll notice that I've given it a little make-over! I wanted to match the look and feel of my main website, but ultimately, I wanted to have a fresh and airy space that would inspire me to write and blog more. So one step in the desired direction!

  

 

First to speak was Sarah of One Sparrow Creative. She is a Kansas City lifestyle portrait photographer whose work I've been admiring since I discovered her on instagram. She covered photography basics, including lighting, editing, and manual mode. As someone who takes about a million pictures a day, you would think that I would've ventured into manual mode by now, but nope. 

I have taken a couple of intro photography workshops in the past, but for some reason, my brain can't make sense of the counter intuitive (to me, anyway) settings for ISO, apperture, shutter speed, depth of field....or are two of those the same thing?? Ugh..see?? And for a couple of those settings, the higher the number, the smaller the opening or the shorter the depth or something opposite of what my brain wants to think it is. I'm not sure why I have to think so hard to process that information, but there seems to be a black hole in my brain where manual mode skills are supposed to be. So naturally, I gravitate to the wonderful and easy world of auto mode. Plus with the magic of photoshop, I can tweak the light balance in the levels setting and voila--a decent enough photo to get by on. But yes, I realize that if I want to take the next step into beautifying my photos, I need to switch to manual.

I'm so glad Sarah shared some of her photography tips and tricks, and am very glad I took notes. Hopefully I'll be able to share some of my ventures into manual mode in a future blog post, because that would mean that I didn't chicken out again and finally put things into practice.

 

  

Next up was Karrie, creator and artist of Happy Habitat, who then shared her success story. For me, it's always such a treat to meet local artists and small business owners that have found a way to keep doing what they love. And she was so sweet to chat with me and answer my business questions. I have zero technical business knowledge and often feel really intimidated by it all. So I really appreciated the fact that she took the time to give me some really useful and truthful pieces of advice. I'm trying to soak it all in and apply everything that I can.

To close out the afternoon, Lauren of Creative Reasoning laid down the laws on how to achieve a visually pleasing blog. I never gave much thought to font type, size, and color, or the colors used on a blog background beyond whether or not my color palette coordinates nicely, but as it turns out, these elements are pretty crucial. Less is more. I will need to go take another look at my layout and potentially make some more edits.

So with this refresher, I think I'm on my way to a better blog! And lookie here--I actually created a blog post! ;)

Thanks to the ladies of KC Blogger Meetup for a wonderful afternoon! If you're a KC area blogger and aren't yet a part of this group, you should definitely join!