A friend just told me when she logged in to make some edits on her web page that my web site popped up as one of the "featured sites" for the provider we use. Showit Sites is an application and provider used mostly by photographers and other creative types so their list of featured sites include some gorgeous web design and photography talent. It is so cool to be included in this group -- really something I take as an honor! Thanks Showit sites!
Two weeks in a row! I'm on a roll. Kaiser please. Anywho...
For this photo I was directing my valuable assistant and VAL (voice activated light) to cast a little light their direction. It was getting pretty late, nearly 8:30 pm, and being in a dugout, I needed the assist to keep the faces out of shadow. In retrospect, I could have (should have?) put a reflector behind her to pop a little more light onto his face. As it goes though, I like the result as her laughing expression is really the point and that's where the light falls. I made a few adjustments in Adobe Camera RAW to crop a tiny bit and straighten for better composition. In Photoshop I decided to just "play" with this photo and tried a whole lot of different things. In the end the stuff I kept were a black and white adjustment layer that I lowered to tone the color down, Topaz Adjustment filter on "Photo Pop", lowered to 75%, a warm photo filter for, yea, you guessed it, warmth, highlight and shadow separator actions from TRA actions, highlight recovery in Photoshop, a bit of noise reduction on the blue channel in LAB mode, and finally the Lux (soft) action at 90%, also from TRA. Phew, that's a lot, and not something I would do for a whole event's worth of photos, but it was fun to play around and do something a little different.
The confession being: Apparently I am an idiot. Or an Ee-jit as my friend would pronounce it when I do something really stupid.
What could be so stupid, you ask? For all this time I have had this blog, I have never knowingly recieved any comments to my posts. I knew that was normal because no one knew I was out here in cyperspace anyway. (I hate the term cyberspace, by the way.) Well a certain amount of time has gone by and still, no comments. I'm not all braggin' up on my work, but I think I post some decent stuff sometimes and I am trying to post Before and Afters because one thing I am passionate about in photography (and design and everything else I like to dabble in) is education. I LOVE to pass on what I know (after all, someone passed it on to me at some point). So it was hurting my little feelings that no one has ever commented. Today I was looking at the "guts" of my blog (all the boring admin stuff) and noticed I had SEVENTY-ONE comments "awaiting moderation". 71! I felt like Sally Fields "you like me, you really like me." I was an idiot for not knowing I had comment moderation turned on. And for not checking earlier to see what the deal was.
So forgive me. All 71 of you who have taken the time to comment! I was not being a snob, really, my momma' taught me to be grateful and to always say thank you and I do appreciate anyone taking the time to drop me a few words. There were comments from so many talented people, people whose blogs I read and comment on myself, and I would be ashamed if anyone thought I was being rude. I've turned off the moderation and I'm going to make it a point to go visit all of your blogs (if you left an address) and thank you personally.
Love , love how this turned out. An almost silhouette with a bit of mystery and steamy hotness. I imagine he’s convincing her to come back to his place, and she, of course, is being coy.
Another before and after of a shot I made last night. Like always for portraits, I capture in RAW. This was aperture priority at f/5.6, 1/40, ISO 250, auto white balance. Important to note the +2 exposure compensation to help the matrix metering better account for the bright sky. Could have also used spot or center-weighted metering on his skin. Always more than one way to skin a cat, as the (oddly gross) saying goes.
In Adobe Camera RAW I cropped and straightened just a bit, adjusted the white balance for warmth (5550, -10) and to remove some of that redness Nikon seems prone to, took the exposure down 1/3 stop, recovered some of the highlights (53) and bumped up the contrast (+48).
Once in Photoshop I did a little standard noise reduction using Topaz DeNoise from within Topaz Adjust and added a bit more contrast and saturation. I ran three ColorShift (Jesh de Rox) actions: Color of summer (50%), Memory of a Friend (40%) and Rainforest (40%) which I then masked, leaving the warm tones on his skin and the cooler rainforest tone everywhere else. Sharpened to taste for screen presentation. Took about 5 minutes total. Not a huge transformation but a nice one I think.
