Photo of the Week - Week 36

It's time of year again - Grandma makes beautiful costumes for the girls for Halloween! My challenge is to try and photograph them well enough to do the incredible work justice. While a took several photos, I'm just going to discuss one this time around.

I had a few goals in mind and some things that I wanted to try, both in-camera and in post-processing.

EXIF Info

Shutter Speed: 1/125s

ISO:200

Aperture: F/8.0

Focal Length: 50mm

Lens: EF50mm f/1.8 II

First was the lens choice. I really like my 'nifty-fifty' - 50mm prime lens - and have been trying to take more portraiture with that lens. I find that when I use my zoom lens, I usually end up at 50mm, or very close to that, particularly when I take singleton portraits.

I also wanted to try a few post-processing things, most of all a reflection.

The first step in doing this was to create a layer mask that had just the subject. Using this, I placed her on a solid white background, using the Refine Edge function to make sure everything looked good. Her hair in the back looks a little odd because she has a ponytail, which you can't see here.

Next, I made a copy of her on the white background and then flipped it upside down - this will become her reflection. I moved things around until it was positioned how I wanted it.

I then made a new layer, a graduated filter, between Natalie and her reflection. I adjusted the opacity of this layer until we got a bit of the shadow underneath and a dark 'floor.'

Photo of the Week - Week 35

This week's photos focus primarily on one of the new features in Photoshop CS6 - the blur tool.

Here is the final photo:

And here is the image I began with:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/80s
ISO:100
Aperture: F/8.0
Focal Length: 50mm
Lens: EF50mm f/1.8 II

The blur effect is most noticeable if you look at her hair and also at the collar of her shirt.

In this case, I used the iris blur, modified the shape and turned it a little bit. I liked it for this image because it helps bring more attention to the eyes and face.

I also used the content-aware tool to touch up a few other minor things in the image.

Photo of the Week - Week 34

This image is from a recent trip to Mindo, Ecuador.

As I took the girls for a hike, I noticed these blossoms on a tree - the very fine blossoms and the colors really caught my eye:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/125s
ISO:100
Aperture: F/8.0
Focal Length: 163mm
Lens: EF70-200mm f/4L USM

I cropped this down to a square because I felt that aspect ratio worked well for this particular image. This is also one of those instances where bright direct light happened to work well.

Photo of the Week - Week 33

I recently took the girls back to Cotopaxi National Park and got a chance to take a few pictures.

We got to hike around a bit and try to find some birds, which is a bit difficult for three small children who have been cooped up in a van for the past hour and a half ... a lot of contained energy there.

We finally did see a bird:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/50s
ISO:100
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 200mm
Lens: EF70-200mm f/4L USM

I kind of like the composition of this image, with the green sage in the bottom right kind of providing some balance to the bird and the other plants on the left of the image.

It's not a colorful image - nothing in your face, just mellow earth tones, kind of like the whole National Park there. I also like the level of detail with the depth of field - the brush in the background provide some texture, but it's not distracting.

The only thing I go back and forth on is if I should have cropped it a bit tighter, putting the bird closer to the top left corner. I left it like this because I wasn't too keen on having that much weight so high in the corner. The sage is in the corner, but at the bottom - I guess I feel that if something is in the corner at the top of the image, the image feels like it's going to tip over!

Photo of the Week - Week 32

This week's post highlights one of the fun tools in Photoshop - Puppet Warp. Just the name sounds cool, doesn't it? It's one of those amazing tools that lets you manipulate the image and do some pretty incredible things. My example from today is a subtle one that I used in a recent portrait, well, portrait by accident.

I had been asked to take some portraits of the Young Women's group at Church and while I was setting up for that, another family asked me to shoot a couple of photos for them.

Anyway, here's one of the pictures; since I was firing off quickly (and wasn't thinking about doing portraits for them) I got one image of this brother and sister, but her expression is less than ideal. In fact, she looks like she's about ready to say something really nasty to me. Not really the case - a super nice family, but just bad timing on my part:

Of course, I only had one image of these two together. In the other images, she is facing the wrong way, so I couldn't just swap faces. Enter Puppet Warp!

Puppet Warp analyzes the image and sets a mesh grid over the whole thing. You set pins to "hold in place" portions of the image and then essentially click and drag it around to move parts of the image selectively. In this case, I just wanted a subtle smile as opposed to the grimace above. Here's what I ended up with:

The final image also has a few other things done to it - cropping, removed some blemishes, etc. This is the first time I've used Puppet Warp, other than goofing around and making some wacky pictures. Again, not a perfect expression above - best would have been to notice the grimace and retake the photos - but in this case that wasn't possible and this helped salvage a photo.