Something out of Nothing

A few of the other photography blogs and online forums that we follow often post little "excercises". I figured since the weather hasn't been cooperating enough for us to do some of our photoshoots why not have some fun around the house. The challenge this week was to photograph items that you see everyday and would never think about photographing. The idea is to put yourself in a position that you might not typically view something from, and try to get a creative picture out it. So camera in hand I walked around the house snapping away...I heard an occasional "what the heck are you doing" come from the living room. It might be a little weird to be laying on the bathroom floor, or kneeling on the kitchen counter top...but it was actually a lot of fun. And it for sure makes you think outside of the box. Here are some of the pictures that I came up with...nothing award winning, but again the point was to shoot it from an angle you wouldn't normally think to view the object from.

So if you have a camera (even if its a cell phone camera) give it a shot. And hey share your pictures with us, we would love to see what you come up with!

Rainy days!

A couple pictures of our little girl since we can't seem to get outside with all this rain!!!

Edited by Jerad.

Feed the Fish while your here....

haha I know its kinda dumb...but click your mouse around on the fish above and feed them a little bit :) OH and while youre here check out our new SENIOR PICTURE packages...

Photoshop

Alot of times people ask what we use to edit our photos...So I thought I would show a very very quick photo editing process. We use a combination of both Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Lightroom. Both programs probably aren't needed but I like certain features in each one.

So this is the picture right out of the camera: nothing to special. Spacing is off, lighting is bad, White balance is out of whack....basically it needs some work and thank goodness photoshop allows us to fix everything that needs to be fixed. (the goal is to obviously have the camera settings adjusted to get the picture that is taken look as best possible without needing to do much editing) Because I know that I am going to make this a black and white photo I change the background to blue...sometimes having a colored background makes the black and white version look better. Using a "paint" tool I fill as much of the background as I can with a blue paint.

Obviously there was alot of excess "paint" that needed to be removed. So using my eraser tool I clean up all the edges and make sure that there isn't any "bare" spots. I also used some lighting tools to brighten up his eyes to make him stand out a little bit more.

Once I got everything filled in I click on one of my Black and White actions and decide if I like it or not. Pretty simple process really. Now, obviously there were a lot of small details that I left out. This picture took me about 10-15 minutes to edit...so you can see how doing an entire CD of 35 images could take a lot time.
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