Happy Halloween

What better way to celebrate Halloween than by turning my friends and family into ghouls. Ahem, also excellent editing practise!

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What time of evening is best for portraits?

Well last night I took my baby on an excursion (again!). The idea was to work out at exactly which point in the skythe sun would be best for evening portraits or at least how it differed as the light changed. I was looking for how it affected my camera and its settings and of course the composition. I started way too early. I had harsh sun, my camera struggled and the sun flare was crazy intense. I managed to semi salvage a few photos. These are a couple.

I will try again tonight.

A Story of Emily

Some of the others photos I took with Emily. As an experiment it was fairly successful. She came for about 3 and  a half hours although I think at least an hour was taken up by me trying to set up the lights. Actually it was the Godox octagonal softbox. I would never be able to construct that thing or deconstruct it without help. I am not strong enough. Perhaps there is a better method than I used but it was like an awkward tent. Until I can afford one that just pops up umbrella style it makes good light!

Practice, Practice, Practice

 

How is this layers? Editing. Think photoshop. They don’t come out of the camera looking quite like this.

I took these because I lost my mojo. Do you ever have periods where you think you’ve lost your photography mojo? I am obsessed with focus. I have been taking lots of indoor photos with not enough light and no good flash. It has been getting me down. I found a lot of photos that were rubbish. I have finally had an opportunity to get outside and take a few photos and experiment with window light. Unfortunately taking photos of a 4 year old is HARD. The sideways head was the best I could do. Hmmm…

Manual vs auto settings – Does my camera know best?

I have been taking some newborn photos. I have never had the opportunity to do any newborn photography and obviously with my own brand spanking new newborn it was the perfect opportunity to have a go at it. I haven’t mastered the setup and shoot thing yet. I don’t have the right lighting and my attempts at a background went horribly wrong, although it was a good lesson in shadow and light.

What I did have the chance to explore was whether I can make the manual settings on my camera work for me as opposed to the auto setting. I took a couple of shots with the settings on auto (mainly to make sure I didn’t end up with nothing at the end of the session) then I switched on to the manual settings. I much preferred the results on manual settings. They were lighter and cleaner. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed in editing shooting in RAW, but it saved me the hassle.

Original auto settings.

Original image with manual settings.

Then I wondered if editing was really necessary. Again, I think the results after I altered the image slightly were noticably better. I cropped the image to focus on the subject, lightened the face as it was slightly darker, removed blotchiness and reduced the redness in the skin.

I am happy with my first efforts at newborn photography. I am sure it could be improved, but its still going on the wall. Much repect to the talented people who get the newborns to sleep and in position for photographing! It would take me a lot of time and practise before I felt confident enough to shoot anyone else’s baby.

Music is his life

Music editing. I have no idea what he was making, but its usually good.

Lens flares weren’t meant for this.

I was looking through a few photos I had taken a couple of weeks earlier and came across this photo of a gerbera. It was OK. Not great, but I started to edit it and realised part way through that it wasn’t really salvagable so in desperation before I completely gave up on it I started playing with filters. I decided it might be interesting to make the centre of the flower look as though it was opening to reveal something with a bright glow, aka. magical being or whatever you imagine. Fake lens flares can be fairly cringe worthy so I thought I would go with it by using the lens flare filter in a way that was obviously not natural. Its not something I do really, but it was a bit of fun and what better place to showcase how I amuse myself than on my blog!

What do you imagine might be revealed at the centre of the flower?

Editing Portraits – Before & After

As someone who is teaching themself photography, editing can be tricky. Photoshop is complicated and my general philosophy is try and try again until something works. I have definitely improved my editing since I started. I haven’t shared that aspect of my photography yet so I thought I would.

This is a before and after of a portrait photo I took at my photography class. I didn’t get many photos of this woman, I think it was about 10-15 and most of them were unusable, but we were supposed to print out the good ones to give to them and I wanted all of our models to have at least one photo because they made the effort to come in and put up with us for TWO HOURS! So I edited this one and here is the result. I was reasonably happy with the result, but because the original had no smile and I don’t know how to put one there from another photo it still ended up looking fairly severe.

What I did when editing this image:
change the levels and contrast
remove blemishes and even skin tone
smooth out skin
highlight the eyes

I am sure there is more that can be done, but I don’t know how…yet.

 

I would like to thank Ms Blog Tutorial and Mr Trial and Error for their support of my journey thus far.

Travel Theme: Spooky

I am reblogging a photo I edited of my baby W to make him a zombie for this week’s travel theme: spooky. Now I need to go and look through my archives to find some more good possibilities.

Learning the Light

In honour of Halloween I said I would try to make normal images appear spooky. I wanted to start out with something that you would be hard pressed to think of as spooky. My baby is the least scary thing I can think of. I still feel a bit weirded out looking at him zombified, but its all in good fun and I just won’t look!

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I turned my baby into a zombie! The Photo

In honour of Halloween I said I would try to make normal images appear spooky. I wanted to start out with something that you would be hard pressed to think of as spooky. My baby is the least scary thing I can think of. I still feel a bit weirded out looking at him zombified, but its all in good fun and I just won’t look!