One Piece at a Time

I’m in LOVE

Christmas came a little early for me this year. I now am the proud possessor of a very fast lens that takes absolutely beautiful pictures in low light situations. The best part is I could actually afford it. I’m pretty new to photography and I have been getting very frustrated with my current lenses now that we are having a few more hours of darkness. I have a Nikon D40 which is a highly recommended entry level DSLR that is very small and light. I bought it because it was affordable and easy to travel with. The big problem with this camera is that it doesn’t have an onboard motor for auto-focusing so, unless you like to manually focus, all your lenses need to have their own motors. I did buy an inexpensive fast lens but realized, well, I don’t see too well, so manual focus was going to be tricky. Luckily it was KenRockwell.com to the rescue. This site is an amazing resource for newbie as well as experienced photographers. He gave this new lens a very high recommendation and he uses it on his Nikon D40 all the time. It’s not a zoom so you have to walk around to get the composition you want but it’s great in low light situations. Yeah, no yucky flash picture this Christmas.

My Photo Studio

This past spring I was lucky enough to participate in a portrait photography class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. If you haven’t checked out any of their classes I highly recommend just about anything they teach.

Anyway, back to the class. It was great. We covered everything from depth of field to lighting. The only drawback was it seriously increased my equipment envy problem. I started off taking pictures with backgrounds like this.

Totally distracting isn’t it? Kinda makes you say “Pretty girl but what the heck is behind her?”

And light, my friends, oh the light envy. The instructor showed various shots done with her studio strobe system that almost made me want to sell the house just to buy these lights. I even thought about buying some non-strobe studio lights until I realized they were hot, like temperature hot. Those of you who know me, know that I should definitely not be trusted with equipment capable of burning down the house. Seriously, my iron still gives me nightmares. So, being broke and not wanting to burn down the house I thought of this. My bedroom has LARGE west facing windows.

Then I realized that the local camera store was having a sale on the background stand by Savage. It even came with a free roll of seamless background.

So, for a minor investment I bought this, pulled back my curtains, bribed my kids and TAAA DAA got shots like THIS.

 

 

Another note on equipment envy. During the last month of the class my camera broke. I decided to rent one of the cameras the instructor recommended for my last assignment. Here’s a picture of it next to my usual camera.

The thing was HUGE and HEAVY. After I got done with the photo shoot I was SORE. I hope by the time I can afford a camera like this I develop some upper body strength. The lens was very fast and very sweet and cost as much as the camera. Fun to rent for a day however.

Not Quite Ready for High Definition

Due to my recent web activities I found that I needed a …gasp…picture..of ..myself. The one I had been using was over 8 years old and very poor quality. So, intrepid amateur photographer that I am I plopped myself down in front of my Studio Gray background ( Annie Liebovitz eat your heart out) and snapped a picture (several really but I don’t want to talk about THAT). When I went to view this picture on my computer monitor I have to admit I was a little shocked. It might not look so bad here because of the smallness, but imagine it on a large monitor, yeesh.You see due to my bad eyes and being middle aged I normally look like this.

I don’t think I had ever seen myself in such horrifying detail ever before. So, I was faced with the unhappy decision between going to the spa and having my pores forcefully closed and my wrinkles scrubbed off OR learn some more Photoshop skills ( Photoshop Elements 6 actually). I opted for Photoshop. I’m just not a spa kind of girl. Luckily, Photoshop has some really great tools that can soften up your skin tone without making you look to freaky. Here’s my speed skin spa treatment.

The first step is to make a copy of your picture. To do this in PSE 6 press Ctrl-J.

With this copy layer selected go to the Filter menu along the top and select Blur then Gaussian Blur from the menu. When prompted for the radius value, start with 6. You might need to play around with this depending on the resolution of your image.

Now, you want to create a blank layer underneath the layer you just added the blur filter to. To do this Ctrl-click the New Layer button in the layers menu. You will then want to group these two layers together. To do this press ALT while you hover the mouse between the blurred layer and the blank layer in the layers palette. When you see two interlocking circles click to group these two layers. At first this will look like the original image. Our goal is to reveal the blurred layer only in the places where we want it without messing with the high detail areas.

To allow the blurred areas to show through you will need to paint on the blank layer with black. Don’t worry this isn’t as scarry as you think. When you paint in black on a blank layer PSE allows the blurry layer on top to show through but masks the detail areas. Let’s start. First, set your foreground color to black by pressing D. Select the brush tool and select a medium sized soft edged brush from the options bar. Now, making sure your blank layer is selected paint away on the areas of skin you want softened. As you do this you will see a nice blurriness as you paint. This takes some patience and you might need to zoom in and out a little and change your brush size to get the whole job done. Here’s my picture in progress. It still looks a little fake but we can fix that in the next step.

Once you have all the wrinkles and blotches adequately blurred you can vary the opacity on this painted layer to get the right amount of skin softening. I dialed mine down to @ 50%.

Now with a little digital dental work (a topic for another post) here something a little more Hi-Def friendly.

Playing with Texture

I have to admit my favorite photography subjects are flowers. What’s not to like? They are generally cooperative, don’t require bribery for posing and you usually don’t have to travel half way around the world to find them. Take these lovely poppies for instance. I found them in the garden surrounding, of all places, the local hardware store.

Here is a trick I learned recently in a class at JessicaSprague.com.

First, here is the picture straight out of the camera. (SOOC)

Although it looks overexposed I thought I would see what effects I could get with a texture layer. A texture is basically any JPEG file that can be added as a layer in Photoshop. Anything can be used really. The trick is to adjust the blending mode in the layers palate. Blending modes tell Photoshop how each layer will interact with the layers below it. For my poppies I used a combination of textures I bought from Ash Imagery each blended in a different way.

Here is another example of a previous post’s photo with a texture added.

As you can see there are tons of interesting artistic effects you can achieve with this simple trick.