Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is TURKEY DAY!!!
I'm super excited about it.
I know this has nothing to do with Photography but tomorrow a lot of people will post pictures of their turkey dinner and it will be amazing. Yummm. Because of this reason I feel like I can't think about anything else than TURKEY TURKEY TURKEY! :)

Something I read about the other day is this article.
http://www.thephoblographer.com/2013/11/26/google-serious-adding-raw-capability-android-camera/

I can't believe it. They are putting us out of business!! (Us photographers)
Read it and come back to me.

.......
Raw is what my professional camera's capability is. So if little smartphones have this capability I'll be out of business. :(
I know technology is getting better every day and normally I'd be happy about it but now since I became a professionals.

Lighting Tests

I had to take some shoots for two classes of mine.
Lighting test.

It's good if you do this because then you know what you will have to do when you actually shoot a person.
It will be to stressful when you actually do your lights when the model is already there.
So I took a friend of mine and used her as my model for the lighting tests.
I love to use one light. One big soft light.

I love how it creates a shadow on the left side and how it makes the pictures a little dramatic.
Now I was able to see if I liked the lighting set up or not.
I moved the light around to see which set up I liked best.
I added lights and took lights away. For this next shot I added a Strip light.

The light stretched out evenly on her body. I thought it made the picture look a little flat so I moved it a little further back to get some shadows in her face. 

Now she has some shadows on her face and it doesn't make it look flat anymore.

Lighting tests are important. Now I know which lighting I will use ones I start shooting the real thing.

Stay tuned.

Retouching

Retouching.

I recently retouched a couple of images in class and our instructor told us different approaches to do so.
I will tell you how to make an action that will retouches your picture for you.

First you go to actions and select 'New Action' name it retouching.
Now click the recording button. It will turn red once you click on it.
First what you do is 'duplicate the layer' twice (Mac command+ J)
The first one you will name Texture and the next one you will name blur.
The texture layer should be the one on top.
Turn the texture layer off. (click on the eye next to it)
Have your Blur layer selected and go to the bar on top. Filters-blur- Gaussian Blur OR surface blur, either one is fine, don't go to high in Gaussian blur you want to keep some texture on the face.
Now click on the texture layer
Go to Image (top bar)- apply image
Dialog Box
Layer: Blur   Blending: (Play around to see which one looks best) Subtract
Scale: 2
Offset: 128

Click OK

Now above your layer are the blending modes choose : Linear light.
(Nothing will change when turning of the layer)
Go to the Blur layer now.
Stop the recording.
Now you want to retouch the picture, meaning use the patch tool to get rid of pimples and spots.
After your done click the recording button again.
Go to Layer (on top bar) New- Layer
Name it: Dodge&Burn
Mode: Overlay
check the box which says Fill with 50% grey
Drag layer on top of the texture layer.
Later click on blur layer again. Click Stop on action.

Now if you want to get a message when you apply the gaussian blur, during this action you have to go to the menu (corner right from action) -insert stop.

when your done click Save action as.

Now you are done and you can use this for any picture.

Stay tuned.

Before:

After: 

Photoshop CC

So like I said, I have been using Photoshop CC for awhile now. I still love it. You know when you have that one shot and you really like it but its just a little bit blurry? Everybody tells you to toss it but you really like it.now you can save it.
There is an option now where you can fix it. It's called Shake reduction
You open the picture in Photoshop and when you click on Shake reduction It will show you a dialog box where you can click on the spot that is blurry and it will analyze it. Once it is done it will fix "the problem" and your blurry picture is not blurry anymore.
Isn't this great? This is one thing I really like but there are so many more things that are new and I don't even know what they were all about yet. I will have yo find out and I will write about it. I have a picture that I fixed with Shake reduction I will upload it once I get home.

Stay tuned.



Like I said here is the picture before and after :)

Photoshop CC

I love it!

We went to a gathering last week with my Photoshop class. We got taught about the new Photoshop CC and he explained things I didn't know about. Really cool things. Such as when you take a pictures and it turns out to be blurry you can make it so it's in focus.

And many more. I am lucky to have a boyfriend who knows me and knows what I want. Photoshop CC.
I have it now and I love it so much.

I will try it out for the next week and report back soon.

Stay tuned.

Websites

I'm trying out all those different websites to fin one that I like. I want one where it's easy to access for other people and where it's not so complicated to click on things.
I started with squarespace.com.
I started with a trial version. I liked it. It was easy to upload pictures. I still need to figure out how to make pictures smaller on the website and how to make your logo bigger when you are trying to upload it onto your site. I will wait until we are through with every website trial we are going to do and then I'll decide. I don't feel like I can commit to something this big yet.

Right now I am trying out zenfolio.com and I must say I like it. The only thing I don't like is that I can never find the button that shows me my site, that is frustrating. Besides that I really like it. I like the style I picked and it's easy to access when you click on my website.

photodeck.com I did not like it a bit. The pictures where to big and they had a nasty watermark right over the picture which you could not get rid of. I didn't like the layout and I did not like the way you can access the pictures.

What to do when you run out of ideas

Hi everybody,

today is the day where you can't come up with anything. You know one of these days where you don't feel it and nothing comes to mind?! Creativity is gone for today.

NOOOOOO WAYYY!!

Of course this can happen to the best of us but there is no way that creativity just leaves us.
You can do anything if you set your mind to it. Isn't that something your mother told you when you had to come up with something to write/talk about in High School, or even earlier, Middle School?

Your mother was right!! :)

Now what you do is; don't think about something that you've have seen in a magazine before. Pull out a sheet of paper and start writing down ideas even if they sound "impossible" or silly.
You got nothing?

How about this I name a few things and you think of something to do with this.

Halloween, dramatic, black and white, gel your backdrop, funny, two person portrait, switching roles....any ideas now?

This is what I do. I write down what I either, always wanted to do, or I've heard about but what to di it differently.

This week I took a pictures of a Lego airplane. This was for a class I'm taking but it gave me great ideas what I want to do and not copy. You can play with shadows that are not really there, meaning the object that is shown has not the shadow it's suppose to have.

Now these are just a few ideas that I am happy to share.