10 Tips For Taking Better Product Photographs With Your Phone

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One of the biggest challenges I faced when I started blogging about beauty was how to take decent product photos. In the beginning, I had zero photography skills and nothing but a cell phone camera and ancient point-and-shoot to aid me along. If you look at some of my early posts, the photos are... well... bad. I may not be an expert photographer or anything now, but I've come a long, long way since then.

These days I'm lucky enough to have a DSLR camera, but there are still times when I reach for my phone instead. Let's face it, DSLRs are kind of heavy, and therefore not ideal for throwing in your bag when you travel or when you want to take 800 selfies. And truth is, while having a full-featured camera is nice, you don't have to have one to take nice pictures for your blog. Today I'll be sharing a few tips for taking better product photos with your phone—most of them are easy and can be done with stuff you already have around the house!

Blog Tips: Dealing with the "Summer Slump"

Ah, summer. The season of family getaways, outdoor picnics, ice cream, and sticking to your chair. Unfortunately for some of us, it's also the time of year when our blog traffic takes a bit of a dip.

Obviously this doesn't happen to every blogger. Depending on your niche or location, summer might actually be a great time of year for you! Or if you're new, your traffic may be naturally increasing throughout these months in your first year. But based on my experiences running a few different websites over the past 10+ years, I've discovered that it's not uncommon to find yourself in a bit of a summer traffic (and motivation) slump. The good news is that your decline in traffic probably isn't because you're doing anything wrong: People are just busy doing stuff. Vacations and picnics and ice cream and whatnot. Things usually start to pick up again in the fall, but in the meantime, here are a few tips for dealing with the slump.

Blog Tips: Staying Organized & Keeping Up With New Posts

Time to talk about the sexiest aspect of blogging: Time management!

This month's topic was requested by Tracy of Fanserviced:

An excellent suggestion, so thank you! Time management and organization seem to be oft-discussed topics in blogging advice posts, because (a) balancing everything can be hard and (b) everybody seems to do things a bit differently. Hooray for keeping it simple. If you read my blog regularly then you've probably noticed that I post more than once per day on average, which obviously takes a bit of forethought, so I today I'll be sharing my methods for planning ahead and keeping track of everything. Will my insane process work for you too? I have no idea. But maybe it will give you some new ideas, at least.

Quick tip before I get started: Right click - open in new tab if you want to enlarge any of the images.

Blog Tips: How to remove the navigation bar in Blogger

Hey, so remember when I said I was in the process of moving to Wordpress a couple of weeks ago? Well, I'm still working on that. It's taking me a while because I'm new to Wordpress and there are a lot of fussy little things that need to be fixed manually (blah), plus I'm posting new stuff at the same time so I don't fall totally behind. This stuff can be time-consuming, yo. Anyway, rather than whine about that endlessly, how about I share a quick tip for bloggers who use the Blogger platform?

Let's talk about the Blogger Navbar. Not sure what I mean? This thing:

Right click - open in new tab to enlarge.

Sometimes it's transparent. Sometimes it's blue. In any case, I don't like it. If have the Navbar on your site and you do like it, feel free to ignore the rest of this post. But I'm going to explain how to get rid of it for those of you who want it gone. It's very easy!

Blog Tips: Photo Editing When Photoshop Isn't An Option

Get your tiny violins ready: Today I'm going to tell you a blogging tale of woe.

Photoshop has been my go-to photo editing software for years. Living and breathing those Adobe commands, yo. But a couple of weeks ago it just... died. For some reason Photoshop won't run anymore, and because I'm a disorganized jerk I can't remember where I put the installation discs. Perhaps it suffered exhaustion from all resizing all those extreme moisturizer close-ups? RIP, Photoshop.

Background image by Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I'm still looking for those install discs, so in the meantime I've been using a few free bits of editing software for my blog photos. I figured I'd share 'em with you, since I'm sure there are plenty of you who also need to edit your blog photos and don't have the cash for Photoshop.

Blog Tips: Get organized with free printable worksheets

Hey everybody! How's your week going so far?

I've decided that I'm going to start doing occasional posts about blogging here because I know I have a lot of fellow bloggers reading and people seem to like that sort of thing. That, and I enjoy being meta.

Image source: Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net

I noticed that a lot of other bloggers wrote "get more organized with blogging" in their posts about goals for 2014, and I'm right there with you. There are apps for that these days, but being an old-school dinosaur fart I tend to prefer keeping track of things like that on paper. Last year I just used a plain blank calendar for planning, but as my blog grows I find that there are too many things to keep track of and a regular calendar just doesn't cut it.

Thankfully, there are a number of bloggers and graphic designers out there who have been kind enough to create free some printable blogging worksheets for our old-timey convenience. I've started to compile a list of my favorites over on Pinterest here, so if you're in need of some organization yourself I recommend checking out the board and doing a little downloading! I will be adding to the board as I discover more good ones, so follow me or the board for updates. If you know of any other good resources for blogging printables, feel free to let me know in the comments and I'll add them to the board!


Do you prefer to use paper or digital planners? Are there any topics you'd like me to cover in future posts about blogging?

Six Months of Hello Pretty Bird: My Blogging Mistakes

It's happened you guys: I've been updating this website regularly for six whole months. Well, more or less - I deleted my introductory post when I changed the name of the site because it no longer made sense (more on that later). But we're right around the six month mark in any case.

Six months is not enough time for me to claim expertise on all things beauty blogging, but it has been enough time for me to sort of get into my stride and figure out the basics. I haven't had any major problems during my relatively short time in this corner of cyberspace, but of course there have been a few small missteps here and there. Being the self-deprecating fool that I am I thought I'd share those things with you - perhaps if you're a new-ish blogger you can learn from some of my mistakes? Or at the very least you might be able to commiserate and/or laugh at me.

Accidental bad hair selfie: also a mistake.