Friday, August 20, 2010

Light and Color

A few photos I took yesterday. I loved the way the sun lit up his blond hair so I used a silver reflector to light up the darker side of his face. I love the shadows and directional quality of the light (it was low in the sky). I am not a proponent of using on camera flash if you can help it. Often you can manipulate or position people to get the light to fall on the face the way you want and get different effects. When the sun went behind the clouds, I had less to work with. This time I blew out the sky in order to get enough light on his face. Sometimes black and white can really show the way the light falls in the photo:



 Here is a similar position, but I changed the colors in post processing a bit:




 I love the sky behind him here, and the silver reflector again brought punch to the photo by lighting him up on the camera side, so I didn't have to raise the exposure in order to get his skin tones lit up correctly (and then blow out the sky).



 In the following photos, the sun went behind the clouds and since he was moving around and I was moving to get different angles, we couldn't use the reflector. So I boosted the exposure in order to get him lit well enough:





 Do you see his adoring little fan in the last one? ;-) He was pretending the drain pipe was a "bazooka", and we were playing with the idea that he was heading into battle. He loved getting into action.

The last thing I will mention is that you might notice that the black and white photos are a bit more "punchy" looking than if you just clicked "grayscale" in your photo editing software. I intentionally worked with contrast, brightness, and the tone curve to bring down the darks and shadows to give a more textured feel.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Color Treatment

There is a hot trend among professional photographers to create photos with a rather sunny desaturated look. It gives me the feeling of an antique. I've been playing around with some of my own color treatment and thought I'd post them to see what you think. I've revisited some older photos I had taken, and changed the saturation of all the individual colors to get something I like:

Monday, August 9, 2010

Family Photography - Sunday

Every time I meet someone new,  I wonder how the photo shoot will go. I wonder what the people are like, and what their expectations are. Sunday afternoon I had the wonderful privilege of meeting this family and taking pictures of all of them. One son was recently engaged, so we shot some fun photos of him and his lovely fiancee. We also got some of the whole family - parents, sons, granson, and future daughter-in-law, and then some of different combinations of people.

I felt like everything fell in place. Everyone was friendly and warm; I saw a lot of love shared between them and with me and my husband (who I was happy to be able to bring along as an assistant). They had a lovely back yard, and take a look at the mural they had on one wall. Plus he had made some very neat southwest style furniture. We even had a sudden shower!

The mostly cloudy weather that showed up actually helped, as we were able to be fairly free in where we chose to take photos outside. I looked for where open patches of sky would light faces at good angles.

Here are several that I've completed some editing on.









I even got to watch a little "war" between grandma and grandson with the lego vehicles he had created for that purpose!