12M ~ November 2020

 The middle school hosted a COVID friendly drive through book signing for the new Diary of the Wimpy Kid book.  We purchased our book and waited in line for our time and then drove through and got a picture with the author Jeff Kinney!  Evan was beyond excited and I was so impressed with the whole thing.  Even the big kids thought it was great and wanted to do the scavenger hunt!

365 ~ 2016: Day 226

Learning more about location lighting today with SOPHA.  I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of creating an image that uses a light source while also being able to have a shallow depth of field!

365 ~ 2015: Day 156

Kind of fitting that on the day a horse wins the Triple Crown (which apparently has not happened since 1978), I was hanging out on a working horse farm all day doing the photo taking thing!

365 ~ 2013: Day 179

Today I participated in a group shoot on a horse farm.  It was put on by SOPHA, the studio that has helped me take my love of photography to the next level!  This wasn't a class per se, but I did learn a lot and it was fun to be able to talk to other photographers.  I must have taken about 300 images but I kept coming back to this one.  I knew as soon as I shot it that it was going to be my favorite.  This was on of the few set ups that was all natural light.  I'm drawn to this one because it just feels natural to me.  Shooting models is not something I am used to so all my favorite images are the candid ones!  It's definitely more me!

365 ~ 2013: Day 22

As I said in a previous post, I'm starting to notice distractions in my images, things that I would never give a second thought to before.  Unfortunately they can't always be avoided, so in those instances I'm thankful for Photoshop and the beauty of the clone tool, and content-aware!



Here is the before image below...much better without the distraction of a foot!

365 ~ 2013: Day 8

Part of my photography journey is to learn from others.  One of the perks of being a member at The SOPHA is that I get to join in on First Friday, a peer image review night!  I have gone twice now and both times I walked away with some great feedback both positive and constructive, with tips to improve my image.  Aside for the feedback I am also learning what to "look" for that come across as "distracting" in an image, like a stray hair or crack in the wall that can easily be removed in post.  I hope that the more I attend these reviews the more I will learn and the more I will improve.

So taking the advice from my peers, I did a re-shoot of my cozy socks image.  The feedback was to make the toes be the focus (you can see from the before image that the bottom part of the socks is where the focus is), and clone in some more green in the top left corner, as well as remove the white glow from the bottom left.  Also someone made the suggestion to "color match" the green in the socks to the green in the tree.  What a perfect opportunity to learn something new in Photoshop!  

So for comparison; here is the BEFORE image.  Since the focus is not something I can fix in post I needed to actually retake the image.

BEFORE

Here is the retake.  Focus is on the toes, the green is cloned to the top and fills the space evenly, and I color matched the greens.

AFTER

So you can get a sense of what I did to change the color, there may or may not be an easier/faster way to do what I did, but I don't have a strong background in PS and used the first tutorial that I came across in google!

I love the bokeh in the after image and think the color match was great tip and I'm glad I tried it out!  However, I like the overall composition better in the original image and really wish I paid more attention to where the focus was when I originally shot it so then I could have made these changes to the original image.  Oh well, live and learn!  And that is exactly the point of this journey.

 

365 ~ 2013: Day 1

Today marks the first day of 2013, a clean slate and the opportunity for new beginnings.  Last year I took on Project 365 and with last nights post I am proud to say I completed my resolution to take and post one picture per day!  This year, I look forward to continuing on that journey with slightly different guidelines for myself.  My rules for my project are different from last year in that I'm not putting as much pressure on myself.  I want to work on my skills but it is also about preserving memories and telling a story.  Some days are just not that exciting (shocking I know!) and forcing creativity defeats the purpose.

The rules for 2013 are pretty much the same, in that there will still be a picture per day, but it may not have necessarily been taken on the day it is posted.  I also plan to use my phone camera and my new underwater point and shoot camera (thanks Santa!) which was something that I did not allow myself to do last year and that was because part of my goal was to learn my camera inside and out!  Now that I am much more familiar with my camera I can focus on the art and creative side of photography!

Which brings me to my first post of 2013 and also the conclusion of the I Heart Faces December Photo Challenge.  The theme for today is reflection and what better way to reflect on the last year than creating a storyboard of some of my favorite images.  Each image has a special meaning to me in some shape for form, one picture sparked a debate about the subjectivity of art, another image was chosen to be featured on a website challenge, and others are just favorites of mine.  I also have been experimenting with different story boards and found this tutorial online using Photoshop (normally I use Lightroom) and this gave me the opportunity to try it out!

Thank you to all who followed along on my 2012 journey, I'm looking forward to seeing what 2013 has in store for me!



 Day 31: {1 Photo – 32 Days} December Photo Challenge ~ Reflection!