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.

Photo of the Week - Week 31

I'm still working my way through the photos I took on our recent trip to Mindo. I took some photos of orchids and, after working on a few of them, I particularly like the symmetry of the below flower.

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/40s
ISO: 200
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 50mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

The above image began with a larger one (take a look on my Flickr site to see it) but I rotated it and cropped it to get the above composition.

Photo of the Week - Week 30

I'm continuing to play catch-up so I can get 52 posts in the year ... But here is another photo from Mindo. We really enjoy hiking around the trails that surround the place that we stay at in Mindo. I took an original image, but did so with some specific post-processing in mind to tweak it a bit.

Here is the final image:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 3.2s
ISO: 200
Aperture: F/22.0
Focal Length: 17mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

One of the things I wanted to do for this image is to create something of a starburst effect coming from the light area near the center. Just something subtle, not too much. After some hunting around YouTube, I found a video that did a quick walk-through of how to do that. I came up with the following:

I added this as a layer above the original area, moving it around until is was centered, then I played with the opacity and the layer effect until I had what I wanted.

I put the flattened image back into Lightroom where I added a brush effect in a few places to lighten and darken to try and match the starburst a bit.

Photo of the Week - Week 29

We recently had the opportunity to return to Mindo, one of our favorite places to visit here in Ecuador. That said, there is still a lot to see! We stayed at our usual spot - Casa Divina Lodge, a great, family-run lodge that is well-removed from everything.

On the road into Casa Divina there is a pasture area and there was a beautiful horse there. Clara, being enamored with horses, just had to go and see her. As we were taking a daddy-daughters hike around, we went to where the horse is. She was very social and trotted right over to us and loved all of the attention Clara was lavishing on her. She did see a bit camera shy, but I was able to get the below shot:

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/30s
ISO: 100
Aperture: F/8,0
Focal Length: 104mm
Lens: Canon/L 70-200mm

Just a little post-processing - the cream-tone conversion, added an iris blur to blur the scene surrounding the horse's head, and a vignette to finish things off.

Photo of the Week - Week 28

I had the opportunity to do another set of family portraits recently and have been learning some things in Photoshop and Lightroom.

Here's on of the photos, which I will use to walk through my process:

EXIF Data
Shutter speed: 1/100s
Aperture: F9.0
Focal length:  19mm
ISO:200
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

This is lit with three lights - one in a 24x24 softbox, just over the camera, and two shoot-through umbrellas on either side. Lights are at 1/4 power, if I remember correctly.

The first problem I ran into was the size of my backdrop - just not big enough - so I knew that I would have to do some post-processing to fix that. A formal family portrait just doesn't work with kids toys (mine, not theirs) strewn around in the background.

I tweaked a couple of things in Lightroom (exposure) and then sent it over to Photoshop. In there I duplicated the layer so it was two duplicates on top of one another. In the lower layer I used a large paintbrush to paint a white background, overlapping the subjects in the image. Back in the top layer, I used the quick select to outline the subjects, zooming in to refine it, and set that as the layer mask.

One of the great things about Photoshop is the "refine edge" mask - you can "paint" certain areas (like hair) and it will refine the mask in those areas to pick up stray hairs and make the mask look very nice; you end up with very natural-looking edges.

With that done, I finally had a white backdrop for my subjects. While I had a fair-looking edge around my subjects, there were some parts that were not that great. I decided to use a very fuzzy brush to paint around some of those areas; since I had overlapped my big white brush to make the backdrop, I would be partially revealing a white background - essentially making that edge look somewhat blow out. As I did this, it found that it looked like I had lit my subjects with harsh, bright light. When I sent the image back to Lightroom, I bumped the clarity up quite a bit to really bring out the details. The end product is almost like I ran it through a high-pass filter.

Photo of the Week - Week 27

One of the additional features of living overseas - that is often either in the very fine print or not there at all - is occasionally having uninvited guests show up in the house. In some places these can be monkeys or large rodents, but here we get large spiders and the occasional scorpion. With the cats we now just find pieces of large spiders, but they tend to be a bit wary of the scorpions.

I was on the phone with someone when the girls came upstairs to inform me of our latest visitor. Christy put a plastic container over it while the girls came to get me - and to tell me to bring my camera.

EXIF Info
Shutter Speed: 1/100s
Aperture: F9.0
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

I lit our friend here with an off-camera flash, 1/4 power with diffuser, from camera left. The flash is down on the ground about a foot or so away from the scorpion. It's triggered by my on-camera flash, which is powered way down, just enough to trigger the off-camera.

I cropped this in Lightroom and bumped the mid-tones contrast up (clarity).