A lot of my portrait shoots are done on location(usually outdoors in available light), which in Wisconsin leaves me with a bit of downtime in January and February when most people would loudly protest to the idea of being dragged out into thigh-high snow in the name of a family portrait. During these months I pick up other projects, like product photography, which requires the use of my flash units and lighting accessories – items I don’t often use throughout the rest of the year. It can be pretty easy to get rusty.

So today when I was feeling a little cabin fever/boredom set in(and since I have some product photography sessions coming up in the next few weeks that I need to prep for anyway) I decided to get everything out, dust it off, and make sure it was all working properly again. Of course, I’m always more inclined to want to shoot people when I have the option, but with my son at school and my husband at the office I was left with only one model today – me.

Click to enlarge.

I shot these self portraits against my white walls(inspired by Rachel Durik’s tutorial on Iheartfaces last week – one of those, “why didn’t I think of that?” type things)with two Alien Bees flash units(one directly behind me, pointed at the wall, and the other in front of me, pointed at me) fitted with white umbrellas, and natural side light coming from the patio door(left).

I processed a couple of them, and you can tell which ones; they have the slightly yellow tinged backgrounds, with my own Vintage toning action just for kicks to give the photos a “fashion” sort of look.

This week I chose a self portrait for Lisa’s B&W Wednesday – I think as a photographer it can become more difficult to get photos of yourself than anything else. Remembering to step in front of the lens(and maybe get a little silly) is something I should do more often, there’s hardly any photographic proof that I actually exist these days!

Check out the other fab B&W entries this week over at The Long Road to China.

Often when doing fixes for the Iheartfaces weekly fix-it challenges I take the provided jpeg and run it through the Camera RAW function in photoshop. I’ve had a couple of questions about how to do that, but I’m not always the clearest with directions, so I decided to put up some quick visuals for anybody who would like to give this neat little trick a try.

A couple of quick disclaimers:

#1: I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m entirely self-taught, so there may be better or easier ways to do the same thing.
#2: Since this feature was introduced for the CS3 upgrade, you need Adobe Bridge & Photohshop CS3 or CS4.

Alrighty. Onward.

The first thing we do is go into Adobe Bridge and choose the file that we want to open in RAW(it works on jpegs and tiff images) – the one that we picked to use as my example today is an image that was shot in color(raw) and then was mostly(95%) desaturated and saved as a jpeg:

Next we right click on the thumbail and select the “Open in Camera Raw…” option.

And then we end up with this:

We could end this tutorial right there, because that’s pretty much all there is to opening a jpeg(or tiff) in the raw editor…… however, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when it comes to SAVING the image, so I’ve decided to cover the whole process.

Alright, so we’ve got the image open and made adjustments to bring back some of the color – pretty good, not quite as good as it would be if we had been using the original RAW file, but the color was recovered really well and is looking pretty good, so I’m happy with these adjustments.

Now we could click done, and Camera RAW would create an XMP file and attach it to the image with all of the adjustments… BUT those adjustments would only be visible in Bridge & Camera RAW in CS3 or above, so we need to save a copy(I always save a copy, I never save over originals, you never know when you want to go backwards!) in order to be able to use this altered version anywhere else. To do this, click on the “save image” button at the bottom of the camera raw window(As an alternative, we could use the “Open Image” button to open the image directly into Photoshop, and then we could continue to alter it and save from there when any other editing is finished, but as a personal preference I always save first and then move over to Photoshop afterward, it’s just what works for me).

Next we set the destination and file name options to whatever is desired – I simply chose to put “_copy” on the end of the original file name so that when we save it in the same location the files(original and adjusted) show up next to each other and we can easily compare them in and image browser. When that’s finished we just hit “save” and the dialog box will go away and you can select “done” on the Camera Raw window.

Now back in bridge, the two images are next to each other, but both look like the edited version. That’s just the XMP file talking, the original image really hasn’t changed at all, and like I said above, outside of photoshop and bridge, the adjustments to the original image won’t be visible.

Since we now have the two files sitting together it can be a little visually confusing when we’re flashing through them quickly in bridge(or in the Open window in Photoshop, since both read the XMP file) so if we want to revert the original image back to it’s desaturated state, we right click on the thumbnail, chose the “Develop Settings” menu, and then select “Clear settings”:

This gets rid of that XMP file, and the original image preview returns, like so:


So that’s how it’s done(in my book anyway). Was this helpful to you? Is there anything that you would like to have explained better? Do you have a question about my work flow that I could use for a future tutorial? I love feedback, don’t be shy!

Happy Tuesday :)

I love this photo. Another shot from my very first wedding, and it’s still one of my top favorites . It was such a sweet gesture between the two of them during the group portraits.  At first, I loved the way his arm is around her, holding her… and then looking at it further I realized that the real magic of the moment’s intimacy comes when you notice that she’s really holding him.  Actually, the moment itself was so lovely and wonderful that both my assistant and myself took almost identical photos of this same frame without realizing it until we got the photos back to the computer – it was just begging to be captured.

Check out the other great entries this week by clicking the logo below:

Before & After:

First I took the image through Camera Raw to pull up the shadows with some fill light adjustment, and then I corrected the white balance – although it turns out that wasn’t needed because I went with a monotone treatment instead.

Next I opened it in PS and ran the Noise Ninja plug-in on it. Then I chose one of my own actions to use on the image to give it the vintage black and white coloring. I burned a little around her hair so that it wouldn’t get lost against the background. Sharpened, & volia!

Program: CS4
Resources: Noise Ninja, Personal Actions

From my loving and wonderful husband – I hope everyone else out there in the blog realm had a happy day yesterday with family and loved ones.

My poor blog is so neglected in between iheartfaces challenges – It was part of my resolution for 2010 that I would start posting here more often, and here we’re already midway through February. How can I find the time? Frankly though, these challenges are so much fun I can’t miss ‘em and I don’t usually think about all of the OTHER stuff I could be posting about. Ah well.

This week’s theme is dancing, which immediately made me think of this photo, and it’s yet another wedding shot. Last fall I photographed a friend’s wedding at a beautiful old theater here in Madison. Their reception was held in the lobby, which is underneath a huge double staircase and balcony(that I spent much of the night hanging over in order to catch candids of the dancing couples). This is one of my favorites from that evening – not only do the bride and groom completely engrossed in each other, but I love the dancers around them as well.

To see some other dancing shots, head over to iheartfaces and check out all of this week’s great entries!

Although I really specialize in child and family photography, I really enjoy shooting the occasional wedding. I adore in-love couples. I love… well, Love. Shooting weddings I get very strongly emotionally attached to the couple throughout the day. This shot is from my very first wedding, and remains one of my favorite couple photos I’ve taken to date. Everything from their body language to the gentle expression on his face reminds me of exactly how I felt at my own wedding. <3 !

I’ve been a silent fan of Lisa over at The Long Road to China for a while now. I just love her stories… and her photos… and well, pretty much everything. A little while back she started Black & White Wednesdays over there on her blog and this week I was inspired by her beautiful story about her grandmother.

There’s this incredible woman who’s blessed my life also you see… my mother. She and I have not always gotten along as well as she had dreamed we would back when the doctor told her “it’s a girl!” the day I was born. She was so excited, after 7 loud messy boys, to raise a little girl who would dance around in pigtails and wear pretty dresses… and she looked forward to a teenage daughter that she could share stories with and spend “special days” with, no boys allowed. Instead she got me. I was louder than the boys, more stubborn than a a heard of oxen, and ultimately my youth involved far more tantrums and far fewer dresses.

No matter how hard I was fighting her at any given time, there always seemed to be one bit of common ground; art. My mother is an artist. Correction: My mother is an incredible artist. If she was unable to angle anything else into my stubborn head, it was her absolute love of art. When I think back to being a kid, what I remember first, every time, is all of the paint and glitter and markers. I don’t think a week went by where she didn’t have us doing some type of project.

She’s the reason that I “ran away” to art school when I turned 18 and set the rest of my adult life in motion(including the meeting of my husband). She is the reason I’m a photographer. I’m certain.

In the last week, my mom’s gone through a bit of an unknown health crisis, the result of which has been a very rapid loss of vision in one of her eyes, and some partial loss in the other. It breaks my heart. To me, that seems unimaginably devastating for a visual artist – and is perhaps one of my greatest personal fears… I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t see my photos… And yet, somehow, she’s been incredibly positive throughout the ordeal, showing the grace and strength and patience that that I recognize from my raging adolescence, when there was nothing she could do but ride it out and hope for the best.

Before:

I think this is a great base image. I have SO MUCH TROUBLE getting the correct exposure for people in the snow, and this is perfectly done. But, it is somewhat flat, and the background is pretty blank, which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t dynamic either and there isn’t quite enough pop in the foreground to make the background push away from it.

Fix 1:

The only thing that I did for this one was switch the color mode to “Lab Color” and adjusted the tones and saturation, then I used a Curves Adjustment Layer to add some contrast. That’s it. And really, it’s all this image “needs” to be fixed.

Fix 2:

The photo challenge theme this week was “texture”, and since I didn’t get a chance to participate earlier this week I wanted to do it now. I love Patti Brown’s Gallery Collection textures, I really need to find more excuses to use them because they ALWAYS make photos look phenomenal.  For this one I used Dirty Watercolors(Multiply 100%), Beach Glass Bokeh 2(Screen 100%), and Mermaid(Overlay 90%) – after masking out her face and jacket and adjusting the contrast, the only other thing I did was sharpen her facial features just a touch so they didn’t get flattened by the color tones.

Program: CS4
Resources: Patti Brown’s The Gallery Collection

Ah yes, Friday again. I really look forward to the fix-it challenge because usually the ladies over at I♥faces choose photos that are very different from what I normally work with, and I think it breaks me out of my creative box and then I discover things that totally change the rest of my “real” workflow. This week feels a little more special than that.

This week’s photo comes courtesy of The Zwart Family, featuring their beautiful kids and mom and dad proudly looking on in the background. I do not know the Zwarts personally, but my heart goes out to this family, as they’re struggling with while I’m sure is a devastating terminal cancer diagnosis, but I’m inspired by their love and determination to live every moment possible.

Original:

Cropped:

After:

This week at I♥Faces the photo challenge theme is “We are Family”. I photograph a lot of families these days, but by far one of my very favorite families is the Collins Family, who fit together so beautifully, and who are so obviously loving, shooting them was like watching visual poetry.

To see more great family photos click the logo below:

Happy Birthday I♥Faces! In honor of their one year anniversary, they’re having a “best face” contest this week, and I really can’t participate in a best face contest without including Dmitri because, well, that’s just the kind of adoring mom that I am! I took this in December, on Christmas Eve in fact, just after the cookie eating had taken place(as you can tell by the sprinkles on his lips).

Click on the logo below to see the rest of this week’s entries!

Okay, we know the drill right? It’s Friday again!

So this is the original:

And this is my fix:

I changed the colors a bit and removed the lens flare spots. Then I changed the lighting slightly(deepening shadows and enhancing the candle flame) so that the focus was on that.

Program: CS4
Resources: Noise Ninja, The Gallery Collection textures, The Pioneer Woman “Seventies” action

Check out the other entries this week at I ♥ Faces:

I Heart Faces challenge this week is “outtakes” and I gotta say, one of my favorite thing about photographing children is all of the funny shots in BETWEEN the “real” shots. Kids are so unfailingly candid all the time, and when I go through my films after taking all of the photos, I often laugh out loud to myself at the expressions.

1. Erin & Ava: After a portrait studio fiasco the year before my dear friend Erin had one plea last year “PLEASE get a photo of Ava smiling for our Christmas cards!!!”  and I happily obliged of course…. this wasn’t exactly what E had in mind, though you can’t deny the joy on little Ava’s face!

2. Lucas the Elf: Lucas was an incredibly well behaved little guy, whose only complaint was that my flash was too bright. Every time it went off he made this adorable face that made me laugh out loud at every other photo in his films.

3. Tasha & Brady: I love parents who can play with their kids. Photo shoots don’t have to be all business and no fun. Yes, the overly goofy shots are probably not the ultimate outcome that parents who hire me are looking for when they ask for a posed studio session… but nobody wants stone faced kids smiling through locked teeth either. Tasha’s ability to join in Brady’s fun and be a kid herself loosened him up and made him feel comfortable with me and my camera, and before you knew it we had dozens of great photos of him with sincere smiles.

4. Ryan: is quite probably one of my favorite children ever… besides my own of course. His quiet personality is at first very gentle, once he’s warmed up though he transforms into a ball of energy and excitement. “Look at me and smile Ryan!” I said, he in turn screamed silly words at my flash unit and jumped in a circle.

5. Jacob in the Middle: There’s something special about getting younger and older children together for a photo. These siblings provided me with an incredibly fun shoot, the two older ones being a little “too cool” and little Jacob who provided comic relief throughout the hour. “Go lay down by sister!” said his mom, and Jacob happily obliged.

To see more hilarious outtakes check out the other entries on I Heart Faces this week by clicking below.