Veronica

Went down to the river today with the lovely Veronica and got some great shots.  Playing with my new lenses and trying out some new lighting as well.  Overall it was a great shoot and I'm excited to have some new photos to post.

Robert Slusser

Here is a great portrait of my friend and fellow photographer Rob.

fashion and beauty photography

I've compiled a slideshow of some of my fashion and beauty photography on youtube. Please enjoy. :)

I've got a video slide show of some of my fine art nude photography up on youtube now, please check it out if you're so inclined.

Sarah Williams

I had the pleasure of shooting with a wonderful new girl the other day. We went down to the beach and shot some amazing stuff.

retouching VIDEO!

in a follow up to my last post, I've finally gotten around to using my youtube account for something more than watching videos; I posted my first video today! I basically recorded the screen as I retouched a photo, then compressed that 58 minutes down to under ten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_KPAEvPrqA

To re(touch) or not to re(touch), that is the question.

I am often asked why I don't give out all the photos from a shoot or why I limit the amount a person gets, and I always answer that it's because I won't release unfinished photos and that it takes me a long time to retouch each one. Now, I'm not about to say that i'm the best out there when it comes to retouching, but I do place a significant amount of time and energy into producing the very best that I can. I spend about an hour per photo to retouch, removing blemishes, reigning in color, fixing problems. I probably look at a model's skin closer than any one else ever has.

To me, the photo straight off the camera is like a rough sketch, waiting to be fleshed out and finished. It's that concept that keeps me from so freely distributing everything I do. That, and I'm practically giving away my time and services on every shoot that giving anything more away just hurts that much more. A high-end retoucher can charge upwards of 50 to a 100 dollars an hour for retouching work./div>

I am soon going to start a web-series on retouching on my youtube channel, but until then I leave you with this before and after image, as an idea of what I spend my hour's time on per photo, and why me taking that extra hour per photo is worth it.

Ashley Ybarra

This last month has been an odd month for me, I've felt really down about my photography as if i couldn't do anything right at all. Well, I'm back! Today was such a wonderfully wonderful day of photography. I've yet to go through all the photos from today, since I shot well over a few hundred, but so far I'm liking what I've seen.

Shot with a new girl today, she'd never modeled before, but i think if she sticks with it she's got a shot at the 'real world'. Hopefully, I'll be there and famous at the same time that she is and our paths cross again. Needless to say I had to work on at least one of today's photos so I spent the past hour working on one of my favorites; and trust me, it was a hard choice to pick just ONE photo to work on.

I hope to work with her again soon, I think now that my photo juices are flowing again we could stand to make some great art, or at least some good photos. :)

new (old) shot of Nicole Bell

Reworked an old shot of Nicole Bell today after looking through my library. Something that I'd marked but never done anything with. I tried out a new toning process and am somewhat pleased with the results. Again, I like to do everything manually and have a bunch of custom toning procedures that I created and I think this one might get added to the list.

These kinds of nude are by far some of my favorite, where the model is nude but there isn't anything shown. There is something calming and tranquil about Nicole's pose here that I really love. Being that she's a former gymnast and currently dances does nothing but help. Great model to work with.

Aliciya Angel

I shot with my good friend Aliciya Angel (myspace / facebook ) on Friday. She's a very talented musician and I wanted to portray her in the spot light so i decided on a large front light and a snoot behind her and shoot with an angle that would give a lens flare. She's an up and coming star and I know she'll go far and shine brightly for some time and I hope that my photography plays on that concept.

She's been played on the radio and has played many live shows and I know she's already got a following locally. I recommend checking her out, you might just like what you hear.

Becky B. photo shoot.

I shot with the wonderful Becky again today. We went out to a field near sacramento and did some nudes as the sun set in the distance. I love shooting outdoors when the light is warm and low in the sky. I used a flash for fill but it was mainly the sun doing the lighting.

Post work was minimal, just some clean up and some curves. I toyed with the notion of black and white but I just couldn't stand to loose that beautiful warm sun light. in the end I'm glad I left it as is.

the process

This seems to be a topic of particular discussion these days, in my mind basically ignoring the image and exerting more prominence on the process rather than the end product. If I were to try and make an analogy I might say something witty and try and explain things away that way, but I'm tired of trying. So, I'll just tell you my process.

First of all, and this is probably a big point to make here, the bulk majority of people who are making these claims are 99% of the time ONLY talking about black and white photography. Yet they fail to understand this, or frankly are unaware of or oblivious to this.

As a little lesson in color photography, it is a very very very tricky process with very specific and inherent complications. Unlike black and white printing, a color dark room is for all intense purposes pitch black, there are no safe lights. You are working very much in the blind as any color, even that from a safe light, will affect the paper. Secondly, chemicals MUST be kept at a near exact temperature, there is little margin of error. Thirdly, and most importantly, the special processing and filters that you can do with black and white films does not, for the most part, exist for color photography.

Now, with all that said and done, my process is actually quite complex and methodical. The process from the click to the final print isn't a two step process. So, for the sake of being informative and helpful I'm going to walk you through my process...

Everything for me starts in the camera. this is perhaps a holdover from my film days when I strove to get the best in camera and on film as I could. The same holds through for my digital processing. i have a very specific and regular style of shooting in which I meter for the highlights and add about a third of a stop to the exposure. This is the same in basic affect to how you shoot for slide film, only that I add a slight bump to the exposure. the reason i do this is because of the way the digital capture system works and it produces less noise in the shadows.

After I get the photos onto my computer I do basic adjustments, if needed, for color balance, exposure, and saturation. these are global adjustments made in raw. once I'm done I can move to doing the local corrections using photoshop. this is generally a complex process involving many many layers and specific adjustments. My record holds at over 8 hours, perhaps even more then 10, on a single photo.

The process here is as you can see quite imposing for a single photo, however, I'll attempt to explain it as best I can.

The bottom most layer is the original photo, or in this case, the exposure for the clouds. Layer 1 above that is exposure used for the ground. Often i'll do two raw 'exposures' for single file which I liken to dodging and burning in the dark room. For this one however, I did use two frames exposed at 2 stops difference for the scene.

layer 1 has an image mask which masks out the top portion of scene so that only the ground layer is visible with the clouds transparent to the layer below.

layer 3 is a sharpening layer. It is blended to the layers below through a blend mode which sharpens the images below.

layer 2 is a spotting layer to remove any dust artifacts. This is done dust by dust.

Color balance 1 pulls a bit of the red out of the clouds and a little out of the ground, and gives the sky specifically a more vibrant blue.

Curves 1 uses a blending mode and mask to give the sky a tad more contrast.

channel mixer 1 uses a different blend mode to darken parts of the image, and is painted in much the same as traditional burning would be done.

group 2 contains group 1 and channel mixer 2 and channel mixer 2 copy. channel mixer 2 does a black and white conversion for the ground and a slightly different mix is used in channel mixer 2 copy for the sky. Each of the channel mixers is masked for it's respective area and the mix is tailored to the different tonalities in the image. This would be like using a red filter for the sky and a different filter for the ground.

group 1 is the tone group that gives the photo it's warm brownish look. Curves 2 is a custom green curve set with a color blend mode, whilst curves 3 is a custom red curve set with softlight blend mode. The group as a whole is set at 50% opacity to lessen the effect.

When all comes together, the image is much different and more involved than a simple black and white conversion. And, the time spent on it is considerable. This print took probably upwards of an hour of processing time, if not closer to two.

The process for this photo isn't simply a quick conversion, nor is that the case for any of my photos.

And as a last point I should add that the whole process is carefully calibrated and controlled. My monitor is calibrated to display colors accurately and the lab that I use to print my photos is calibrated and offers color correction to their system. Within a very very small margin of error the colors and processing I do on my screen makes it to the final print. Further, all my prints are done on archival chemical photo paper and UV coated for longevity. I don't believe in offering any prints on anything printed off of an inkjet printer.

Through and through my prints are true photographic prints of the highest standards. The technical aspects aside, photography is truly only about the final image, the process is only a side to that. advances in the process have come through the years and only those reluctant to adapt to new technologies herald the traditional processes as being the only process. Art isn't so much about being traditional as it is in moving forward and adapting to new ideas concepts and techniques. The digital aspect of photography is as much all of those combined into one.

in final a note, i leave you with the following quote:

"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practioner will again strive to comprehend and control them" (Ansel Adams, March 1981, "The Negative") Introduction, page xiii.

pictorilsim revisisted

Well, I personally think it's about time that we revisit the early days of photography. The effects of the hyper-real, super sharp photos have finally left me very very distraught. f.64 would be rolling in their respective graves, but photo-secession is back.

I started this project well over a year ago but never really understood WHY I had. Nor did I understand exactly what I was doing photographically and esthetically, but I think that after a year I've finally figured out my goals as a photographer.

To me, photography should mimic the art world yet have it's own dynamics. The irony is that a good painting strives for realism, where as in my photos I'm striving for a painterly quality.

I've had a photographic crush on Anne Brigman's work for now about a year, ever since I was first introduced to her. In my recent research I've found that she was part of a movement called pictorilism and belonged to a group of mostly east coast photographers who called themselves photo-secessionists.

It seems as if I fall in line with their way of thinking quite well indeed. And that brings us back to my most recent photo shoot. All in all it was a very decent shoot, but I'm drawn to a few shots about mid way through that I took of the model and to some degree could care less about the rest of the day's shooting. A year ago i started the nude in the field but out of focus series and about 6 months ago or less I started the vintage nude series though never really shoot anything for it. Yesterday I think I finally figured it out by blending the two together...

Aside from some weathering and vintage effects that I've custom built based off of a HUGE library of vintage images I've downloaded from the internet the photo is pretty darn close to as shot. I used the grasses in the foreground as the focal point and left the model in the back softly out of focus. The green tone was made by me using my reference library to design a custom curve file to do the conversion; I have about half a dozen different versions with different colors and tonalities.

http://www.paulparduephotography.com/

print available at http://parduepictures.etsy.com

Dead art

So I shot a girl after I had her dig her own grave. And yes, it was that morbid. But just so you know, she drove away totally unharmed. I'd seen a shot a few weeks back that i really thought was well executed and thought I'd try my hand at doing something similar; you might get away with calling it a copy cat killer photo. ha ha. okay, I think I should lay off of the bad puns before i end up digging my own grave.

So, for the shot I ended up setting up my gear as she helped dig a small ditch enough to lay mostly in. I lost my light meter on my shoot a while back and can't afford to replace that piece of equipment yet. At 500 dollars it's a bit out of my budget, even though it is nearly indispensable to me. Without it, it took a bit longer to set up and I had to mostly guess at my flash settings but I think that in the end I got it about where I wanted it.

I balanced the ambient and flash so that the ambient was a half to full stop under so that the flash would pop on her but not look to much like flash. I was going for a look of just a hint of light over the background to separate her just enough and I think I did it fairly well under the circumstances.

As for the post processing I did very little in terms of retouching and stuck mostly to working with the color and general tonality. I've fallen in love with a new warm tone curve that I've developed, the mixture between two curves that I created for the vintage series I have been wanting to work on. They two curves are done as adjustment layers (as always) and I've played with the blending modes so they act differently then their original design. it's one of the things that I love about working digitally is that there is a world of processing that can be done in post.

I had originally considered doing a pure black and white (well, brown and white to be more specific) but decided that a hint of color gave it just the right touch of uneasiness that i was looking for. Since the black and white and warm tone conversion felt a bit static, I lowered the opacity of the conversion to let a hint of the color version back in. This created a nice duotune look that had warm shadows but cool highlights which I'm particularly fond of for this shot.

All in all I love the eerie look to this photo; and while it isn't something that i've dealt with in the past, my head is now racing with ideas that i would like to try. I think it helps to break out of the box once in a while to try new things and experiment and I think that this is one experiment that even a mad scientist would be proud of.

http://www.paulparduephotography.com/

print available at http://parduepictures.etsy.com

The lens myth explained

It's a common misconception that the shorter a lens, the more distortion the image will receive. And while this may seem like what happens based on what we see, the simple fact remains that it is the object's relationship to the field of view that affects the final representation in the camera.

If we can assume an object to extend out beyond it's edge on a plane lying perpendicular to the camera lens we can extrapolate the size of that object's plane in relationship to the field of view and further express that as a percentage of the camera's frame.

Basically, at any given distance from the camera we want to find out how long of a length is covered perpendicular to the lens. We can then use that information to determine the percentage that a given object has in relation to the fame size.

In the above diagram there are 4 "cameras" and 3 "objects". The red camera and the blue camera share the same field of view but a different position. The charts below show the effective size and the percentages of each of the objects in relationship to that specific camera's field of view.

The important thing to note is that while the objects remain stationary and their lengths unchanged, the relationship they exhibit to one another changes in a scalar form as the distance between the object and the lens changes. This is most apparent with the red and blue cameras which both share the same angular field of view with only a change in the distance from the objects.

As we move our position (the camera) from the position of the red camera to the position of the blue camera the difference in relationship of each of the objects to the field of view changes until eventually each of the objects has a 100% of the frame's size in which each object overlaps the one behind them totally.

Continuing on, as we approach the green and subsequently the purple camera positions the effect of each object in relationship to each other continues until we reach the point where the difference in each field of view becomes greatly distorted. At the point we reach the position of the purple camera the 2nd object which is 150% the size of the first object becomes distorted to appear to be half the size (or thinking of it in reverse, the smaller object appears twice as large as the (in reality) larger object.

This happens simply because the object fills less of the frame since it's relationship to the field of view represents a smaller percentage within the total coverage for an object at that distance.

(it should be noted that the view's for the green and purple camera's have a cut out in the top left 1/4 of the first object to show where the subsequent objects would fall in relationship. The blue and red cameras both show a representation of how the objects would stack normally)

What we can get from this is that in order for an object of the same size to fill the same amount of space in the camera's frame we must use a wider lens as we move closer and a longer lens as we move away. In fact, both the red camera and the green camera represent object 1 as 66% of the frame. This is evidenced by both the charts as well as the first diagram where the intersection of object 1's plane is shared by both the red camera and the green camera's field of view.

An interesting change in the relationship happens however if we were to move the purple camera to the position of the red camera (a distance 6 times as far). If we move the purple camera object one will fill 0.083 percent of the frame, object 2 0.093 percent, and object 3 0.1 percent of the frame. The reason this is interesting is that the relationship of the sizes of each object remains roughly equivalent. 66% is 83% of 80%, whereas 0.083% is 83% of 0.1%, therefore the relationship of objects at any distance remains roughly equivalent at any given field of view.

Photoshop 101 : Levels

Last week I went over how to set up a product shot using just a few supplies from around the house. Today I am going to work on some basic image control techniques. I would like to stress a small pet peeve I have about calling this editing or photoshopping; first is that editing is the process of selection, and second is that photoshop is not needed for any of the techniques below since most any photo manipulation software can do this.

I mention that last one for those that are using photoshop elements or some other program, since the buttons and names may be different. If you aren't using photoshop or similar and would like to have a decent photo manipulating without any cost to you (and legally too), consider GIMP. I've not used it myself but it is an option to you. gimp.org

To begin our tutorial I am using a photo I took in a junk yard. Notice how the colors are lifeless and the photo is flat. For this exercise (and anytime you talk about photos), the term flat is used to denote an image that has low contrast, or range from darkest to lightest. A histogram such as the two in the levels control windows below shows a map of the concentration of values along the tonal range of the image. Sound complicated? It's not... Starting at the left of the histogram is the darkest spot and we get continuously brighter as we go further right. The far right is the brightest spot. The funny looking shape inside the window is the histogram itself, and is just a representation of the percentage of pixels that are that particular level of brightness.

Looking at the levels dialogs there are

three controls under the histogram, those little triangle are the controls we are going to use for this exercise. Now, I stress that using tools like auto levels may be a one click adjustment, but in my mind it is not a solution. Auto levels picks these points for you; we are here to learn how to pick them ourselves. To do this, we need to remember that the histogram is just a range of the current image's tones, the triangles on the bottom are where our white mid and black points will be after clicking okay.

Why is this important you may ask? Well, each image and hence each histogram is different and we want to be able to learn how to move the controls appropriately. Remember those bell curves from school where the teacher took the highest grade and the lowest grades and made those the tops and bottoms of the test and your grade fell somewhere between them? Well, that's what we're going to do with levels.

In my sample image's histogram above you can see how the image is not distributed evenly, it has very little in the darkest areas. What we've done is move the dark triangle to the right. We are effectively saying that this point above the triangle is where we want the bell curve to fall. In this case, we've moved the black triangle to just slightly past the first little bit of of the hill. Why did we do this? Because moving it into the area rather then just at the beginning will give us a slightly punchier contrast which is what we want.

I also moved the grey slider a little bit to, it controls the mid point of our bell curve. We usually want to adjust our mid points to control the contrast of our highlights OR our shadows. This one is also more subjective and depends on the individual image so you should play around with this one yourself.

Lastly I felt that image looked fine tonally, but the color was a little lacking. So I opened up the hue/saturation tool and pulled in a bit more saturation here. BUT, in a step that is often over looked, I used the drop down menu to work on the red channel (and the yellow channel as well) since I felt the rest of the spectrum (blues and greens) looked fine. Here I added a small amount of saturation to the reds channel and yellows to bring out the rust of the cable and the yellow paint. This added a bit more pop to the image which to me was exactly what was needed.

In looking at the image before we did any corrections to it to our final image we can see a huge increase in the image's tone and color. We started at a washed out flat image and ended up with something that has a full contrast range and has colors that pop. End the end, we've only used two tools and a few clicks of the mouse but we've had complete control the whole time. It may be a little more then clicking auto, but in this sample clicking auto would introduce a magenta color cast and leave us with a flat image.

I hope that this tutorial has provided you with some tips and a little more info on how to use photoshop to enhance your images. I'd love to see some before and after photos.

Photography 101 : Products

As an aide to those interested in shooting small objects such as jewelry or in this case a tape measure I'm going to start off my tutorials with a tabletop product shot demonstration. First thing I want to point out is I am in fact not using fancy equipment (other then my dSLR) to achieve this. Most of what you'll need you can find around the house already, or improvise where needed. So first, what is needed for this shot?

Materials:

1. Camera (any kind will do with one caveat, your life will be a million times easier if the camera has a manual mode. I'll go into this in a minute)

2. Product

3. Five sheets of typing paper

4. Table lamp.

5. Tripod (or something to rest the camera on)

6. Tape or 2 paper clips

Let's build our set shall we? First, take a sheet of paper and fold it in half widthwise. Then fold that in half what would have been lengthwise. Fold both sides of that to make a letter W (or M depending on which way you folded). You want to end up with a W shape however. Now, take another sheet of paper and tape the top edge to the arms of the W... You want this sheet to rest against your table and curve up in the back. This is the stage where your product will sit.

Take two more sheets of paper and fold each in half widthwise and set them on either side of the stage fold side up. Take your last sheet and make a small accordion fold along the center

lengthwise. Open it back up and smooth it out only a little (you should have a notch running down the paper, but you don't want it to high, this is only for structural support). Take this sheet and lay it on top of the two folded sheets on the sides, you should have the accordion fold facing up.

Take the table lamp, hopefully it's the kind that is on the arm that you can move around since what we want to do is put the light over the top sheet of paper. What we've done basically is create a tent with the product in the center. The sheet on the back swoops up so it looks like we have a white surface that goes on indefinitely, just what we want.

Place the camera on a tripod or other steady surface (we want the camera above the item and looking down on it). It helps to to back up and zoom in rather then stay close. Make sure you aren't catching any of the edges of the sheets. Having the camera on a tripod or steady surface helps to eliminate motion blur since we're not usually getting a ton of light from the lamp.

Now for that caveat I mentioned about the camera. You can get through this even if your camera doesn't have a manual (or at least exposure compensation) function. The problem is that we want to overexpose the scene. The camera takes an average of what it sees and guesses at the exposure. It tries to put this at a mid grey exposure, so that large area of white is going to look grey if you let the camera do it's thing without intervention. If we can let in more light now we can save ourselves some trouble in having to adjust it in the computer later. If your camera doesn't let you change the exposure we can adjust that in the next tutorial.

That's it. We've just taken our first product shot and if you've done everything right you probably won't need to do much post-processing work. If you do, we'll cover that in the next tutorial.

I would love to know if you use this technique, leave a link in the comments section.

Thanks, Paul

what's old is new

I sold a print on etsy yesterday, actually two.  It's a nice feeling.  I had to plug in my external drive with my old library on it to get the images prepped for printing.  In doing so I decided to go through and revisit some of my older work.  I came across a series of photos I did years ago while on the way to San Francisco that I had done nothing with.  I thought that they looked good together so I did some black and white processing on them and am presenting 3 of them as a series.  I really want to get these printed large and have them to hang up.  I'm in love with these photos

The path of being a genius

is oft shared with that of being insane.  Case in point...  Ripping apart a 20 dollar plastic toy camera, folding up some paper bellows and rubber banding it all together to a digital camera body.

Not that anyone could ever consider it to be a quality camera or well crafted, but that's a holga for you.  But, anyone one taking it apart and putting the lens onto a camera that costs 75 times as much is shear lunacy.  What do I expect out of this?  Probably not much more then bragging rights.  Lens is crap, the bellows are held on by rubber bands, and the exposure is all over the place.  It was fun and gave me something to do on father's day since no one did anything for me.

edited for posterity, Jonah did call at 9:12 to wish me a happy fathers day

Field of dreams

So, I've officially named my project.  It's still a working title for now, but whatever.  I'm having WAY more luck in getting models for these projects then I am for the fashion stuff.  On one hand, it's easier to find someone that fits the model profile for this project, since there is no profile.  In fashion, you're always looking for the tall skinny girls because that's what the designers design for.  My project has no guidelines, anyone can be a model.

To me, I find it so ironic that we as people take for granted the natural world and consider ourselves to be lords of the earth when in fact we are nothing but a small part.  The series has a certain play on that theme by placing the models in fields but focusing on the surroundings and not on the model.

We are born naked and it is only our distaste for nature, our lust for 'civilization', and our shame of our own self's that we choose to cover up and hide away our true nature.  We are a part of this earth, and we must learn to live in balance with her.

In metaphor I've chosen to place the focus of the imagery on nature, and humanity as a prominent but not key element.  Humanity may be a significant factor, a deadly and destructive factor at that, but in the end, we are nothing more then a footnote on the pages of time.

Whether through our own self infliction or the course of time, earth will prevail long after humanity is gone.  The question is how much are we going to leave behind.

April 14 2008

I finally got to work with the wonderful Amber Kloss; it's been probably at least a year if not more since we first started talking about to do a shoot.  Amber has wonderful and abundent selection of vintage outfits so the plan was to shoot something for my class's 'Time Machine' assignment.  When she got here and we got to talking about the assignment, she asked if the assignment could be from the future rather then the past and pulled out the crazy red outfit.  We ended up shooting both time periods, 1960 and 2060.  Ha ha, I'm so cool.

April 4 2008

I'm posting a few for today because I've kind of fallen a little behind.

One of the great things about being a photographer is working with really cool models.  Monika is one such person.  Not only is she a great model but she is also such a pleasure to talk with.

Also, I found a really cool place to shoot, and will most likely come back here more then a few times.  You can turn around or walk a few feet and be in a totally different environment.  This is one of those places that I really wish I had a car so I could just go shoot at on my own time too.  The cool trestle, cracked mud, dirt paths, and over-grown plant life are just super cool...  I'd love to come back out and do some of my more artsy photography in this spot.

Picture of the day 30 March 2008

It's rare that I find so many ironies in life...  I had put up an ad on craigslist looking for some models for my class.  I had been in contact with this girl for about a week, we had tentatively set up a date in the middle of the week to shoot on friday but nothing ever got nailed down.  I send a text to her this morning since today was our fall back day to see if we were still going to shoot.  At first, she texted me back that she had gone out last night and hand a hangover this morning and that she probably wasn't going to do a great job...  I texted back that it was no big deal; I had no pressing reasons to shoot, no deadlines et cetera; so it wasn't a big deal.

A few minutes later I get a text from her.  And here is where it starts to get weird.  See, a few years back I had taken a class at school with this guy named tim who since then has gone on and is working for a company shooting graduations and proms and stuff like that...  Well, a month or so ago I get an email from him asking if I would be interested in shooting with him.  Of course, being as cool as I am I say yes.  Well, flash forward to today and her text; Tim is there with her and says hi!  Of course, I seize on the opportunity to exploit Tim and text her back telling her to tell him to tell her to shoot with me.  YAY, we set up a time for later in the day.

We are shooting and Tim mentions that not only is she a photographer too, but she's also going to be working for him too...  And, to make things even weirder, her and I are probably going to be shooting together in 2 weeks.

Now, my question of the day (along with my picture of the day) is how small exactly is the world?

Picture of the day 23 March 2008

I've been in a funk recently in regards to my photography.  I haven't been finding the time to finish all that I've needed to get done for my class.  Models as they liked to be called keep flaking out, I've been sick, et cetera.  I've shot this whole weekend though, and I'm starting to feel accomplished again.

Shot Friday, stuff didn't quite go how I wanted and ended up spending hours on post on one image.  Shot saturday and the images came back much much better.  Shot this today and must say that it's not often that I am really floored by what I've shot.  There are a few turning points or markers in my path that I recognize as mile stones.  This image, in lack of better words, is simply stunning to me.  To each their own though I guess, it's a love it or leave it kind of image.

Picture of the day 22 March 2008

Shot a much better set then Friday's.  I really love this image from the set.  I can't really justify using the crappy cover shot that I mocked up, I think this one is worlds better.  In fact, I'm kind of ashamed of the other shot.

I only dream I could shoot for anthropologie.  Damn, that's something to pin on the cork-board.

Picture of the day 20 March 2008

Repair underway under the freeway. Near Old Sacramento and the Amtrak station. Really liked the sun coming in from the side and the linearness of the elements.

4 groups with layer masks, 5 adjustment layers, 2 layers. Probably about 1-1.5 hours time wasted.

Picture of the day 20 March 2008

Since I've been falling behind in posting, I'm posting a few pictures from my little excursion to Old Sacramento.  I may end up following suit, i.e., posting at least one picture a day, and more if I can.

No photoshop retouching on this, only minor raw adjustments in Aperture.

Picture of the day 17 March

I've been out sick nearly a week now, bedridden for most of it.  Really nasty little bug, and the antibiotics are making me feel pretty shitty.  Aside from going back in yesterday for surgery I can say I've been feeling better; comparatively I suppose to had I not started the medication when I did.  I'll never know.

On a lighter note, I was graced today with the pleasurable news that I would get to dust off the old camera in exchange for a sandwich.  The 2nd fastest way to my heart is with a sandwich.  The first fasted way to my heart is also the subject of my Picture of the day for 17 March 2008.

God has not and can not create a woman who rivals her beauty.

Handmade scarf available at http://www.jessmc.etsy.com

Picture of the day 11 March

This one is coming in a week late. Being sick for a week knocked me out in both shooting and editing. I'm back dating this one so it shows up in line though.

Picture of the day 10 March

Another post that I shot but didn't upload.  Silly me.  I took Jonah out to the train museum then did a little shopping today.  I picked up these glasses at Gap for him.  They are just a little loose on him, but he sure is my little man.  Couldn't be more proud of him.  I love being a father, but maybe it's cause I have such a great kid.  I'd love to have some more some day...  Jessica?

Picture of the day 7 March

Something about seeing your son and his mother playing that just warms the heart.  Helps that they're both very special to me.

PIcture of the day 5 March

Don't know what it was about this one, didn't get out to shoot very much this day but for some reason this one connected with me.  As plain as it is for some reason I felt like this was todays POTD.

Picture of the day 4 March

Starting off here I think on a great start.  I really really dig this image, which is a shame since I got so many other really cool images from scooting about in the back.  I really love the colors and the selective focus (gotta love a 200mm at 2.8).