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Photoshop

How Beautiful, A New Mother To Be

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Who loves babies? Me! Especially now that my youngest baby is 17 and my oldest 23. I also love pregnant mama’s. Probably because I know I’m not anywhere close to middle of the night feedings and dirty diapers.

I’m closer to being a grandmother (not that close kids) than a mother again and the prospect of cuddling a sweet-smelling baby, without the full-time responsibilities, is very attractive. There are two people in my life now who are pregnant and it’s a whole different perspective.

Maternity portrait
Maternity portrait

Professional maternity photography is very popular now. However, back when I was pregnant,  there is no way I would of even thought of doing a maternity portrait session, I didn’t want anyone to see me being as big as a whale. This was my first baby shower in many many years. The daughters of my friends are now getting married and having babies. Being the serious amateur photographer that I am, my camera is always with me.

This is one day it paid off. Both grandmothers forgot their cameras and were more than happy for me to document the shower. The result was an a group of professionally looking photographs I printed at work that everyone just raved about. The great thing about NOT being a professional, there is no pressure and no expectations. If they turn out good, GREAT! If not I just took snapshots to share on Facebook.

I have often said, “I don’t photograph people, I stick with things that stay still like landscape, scenery and food.” This young Mother looked so gorgeous in a simple tank top I had to try. Luckily there was a blank empty wall in the basement of the church that just screamed “BACKDROP” so here are a few I took that day.

It's a Boy baby shower
IT’s a BOY!!

I was able to give the Mother and her family  about 80 edited prints (all processed  in Lightroom 4) and it only took me about two hours post production. Have I said how much I love Lightroom? Obviously the collage I created in Photoshop.

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Photo Restoration: 1960’s Era

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Photo Restoration 1960s
Photo Restoration 1960s

I’ve finally removed hundreds of old photos from nearly a dozen “magnetic” glue photo albums. Not quite acid free. My Mother thought she was doing a good thing in the 1980’s by organizing and putting them into albums, when in actuality they would have been better off in the desk drawer in the original envelopes.

There aren’t many photos of me when I was little, so I want to preserve what few photographs I have of my childhood. They were so stuck I had to use the pointy end of a fondue fork to pry them off and carefully unstick the back. The paper came off on some, but at least now the family memories are back in a shoebox, in a cool dark location in the closet so I can start on the photo restoration part of the project..

At first glance the photos look to be in pretty good shape, but it only takes one scan and a white correction on levels to see how far these photos have faded. I am using Photoshop to adjust the color and white balance to bring back the vibrancy. The white border is the perfect point to select in either layer curves or adjustment levels.

I have just started scanning the snapshots, but the really old photos from the late 1800’s and early 1990’s I’m going to have professionally scanned at Hamilton Color Lab, where I work, they do professional photo restoration. My home scanner will only capture so much detail and they are too important to trust to a Best Buy over the counter scanner.

Photo Story: Here I met my brother for the first time. We were both adopted through Children’s Services of Connecticut. As you can see, although my brother Lance was a baby, he wasn’t a newborn when he went to our parents. My birthday is Sept. 21, 1965, yet I didn’t go to my adoptive parents until January 20, 1966.  Along with photos I now have my adoption records, certificates, and letters from the agency. Still don’t know if I will search or not. Even after witnessing my husband and his son’s adoption reunion.

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Use of Fill Flash Outside

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I’ve read about using fill flash, but I had never tried using this photography technique until last week. Now I think it is the most valuable tool ever invented on the camera (just kidding) .  Many people totally believe in natural lighting, while I can respect that I also believe in using tools to improve results.

Use Fill Flash Outside

When my daughter and I took a trip to Missouri and Arkansas to tour a few colleges we decided to make it a camping trip. Two out of the three days we camped out in tents by the lake and it was wonderful  The scenery is so unlike the plains of Nebraska I was itching to capture and play with different settings on my camera. My daughter was a willing subject on this trip and I was bound and determined to make the most of the opportunity.

With so many trees around she was constantly in the shade. The first photo above was disappointing  as I had too much shadow on her face. Then the brainstorm. “Let’s try the flash? Stay right there and smile. ”  I popped it open, heck why not? I set the intensity on the menu as high as it would go as I was using the 75-300 lens from about 20 feet away.

What a difference! The extra lighting opened up the shadows, warmed the tone of the photo, and overall enhanced the image.

Photo was taken with a Canon Rebel XS so it’s far from a professional camera by far, but I got much better results straight out of camera which is the ultimate goal of any photographer. Time saved in post production is more time shooting.

Using a Flash Diffuser

Many times people avoid using a flash for the dreaded “flash burn” on the skin and highlights. Professional photographers control this in the studio by using soft boxes or flash diffusers which cover or screen the bright bulbs. The same thing can be accomplished with using a diffuser.

There are even flash intensifiers such as the Rogue flash booster. This is designed when long range lighting is needed beyond the 10-15 feet of a pop-up flash.

Pop-Up Universal Soft Screen Box External FlashRogue Safari DSLR Pop-Up Flash Booster (Black)Opteka PD-10 Universal Soft Screen Pop-Up Diffuserpangshi® Flash Bounce Reflector Card Diffuser ReflectiveMicnova Universal Soft Screen Flash Diffuser forProfessor Kobre’s Lightscoop, Warm Version Bounce Flash

 

How to use On Camera Fill Flash

Xpert Advice: How to Use Fill Flash for More Even Lighting

Before you shoot, turn on the flash and go into the menu of your camera (like the Fujifilm X100T) and select fill flash. Then you’ll need to fine tune it, so find the flash compensation menu. Turn the flash power down quite a bit; -2/3rds is a great …
Fill Flash In Wide Angle Macro Photography

Rather, I used a handheld flash set to sufficient power to bring the foreground caterpillars up to the same light levels as the sky. Fill flash is an effective technique. In the absence of a flash I could either expose for the sky, leaving the …
Fill Flash

We all know by now that natural light does not always work for every subject and one of those problems is the contrast that the sun can create on subjects that would be better off in soft light. Fortunately on-camera flash a great option for dealing …
How to Mix Ambient Light and Fill-Flash for Outdoor Portraits

If you would like to capture perfectly exposed images in ambient light, the real secret is to use fill-flash and a light modifier. Sure, if you have a reflector and an assistant you may be able to achieve similar results using only natural light.
Bit by Bit: A Digital Fill-Flash Technique for Improving Images

Many of the consumer and “prosumer” digital cameras have a built-in strobe flash that can be used for fill-flash — adding light to a brightly illuminated scene. But my Nikon D1X does not have a built-in flash, so I carry and use a separate strobe …
Using Fill Flash – Digital Photography School

In addition to helping with backlit subjects fill flash helps in more subtle ways also by helping to eliminate shadows cast by facial features (under eyes, noses, chins) or under hats – especially when light is shining down from above. It also might …
Eliminating Fill Flash Hard Shadows – A Controlled Test …

Defining the problem: While shooting a portrait outdoors, I usually add a fill flash to eliminate any “racoon eyes” and dark shadows on the face. The fill flash is set set at 1.7 stops under exposed for a light touch. My setup is a …

#16/52: My Favorite Country Barn, Edited with Lightroom

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I love country barns  (okay, it’s really a corn crib) in Nebraska is one of my favorite photography subjects, yet this shot is my favorite. I pass it at least twice a day and it sits in the middle of a field with nothing around it, solitary, no trees, just in the middle of a field with either corn or soybeans growing on all sides. It has different moods depending on the light and looks different in the early morning and at night with the sun setting behind the western sky.

My favorite barn gets my attention every time I drive past and have often taken photographs to capture the mode. They never come out exactly how it looks in real life though. But with the help of Adobe Lightroom this has changed, I can actually say that this is truly what the barn looked like that day.

Photographing Country barns
Barn against a Cloudy Sky

From what I understand in reading various photography blogs and sites a camera has difficulty collecting all the dynamic ranges of lights and darks. In simple terms you expose for the sky or your subject. That leaves the other parts of you picture over or under exposed.

The newest version of Lightroom 4 has an amazing capability of pulling out shadows, highlights, whites and blacks without leaving artifacts in the image. This was shot in RAW and I’m very impressed, puts my Photoshop CS2 to shame. The later versions of Photoshop do have more advanced algorithms that achieve the same thing, but I can only compare the programs I use.

I will still keep using Photoshop, Lightroom is only another tool to use and does not have text or graphic design capability. I still love adding drop shadows, borders and creating custom layouts.

Stay tuned for more Lightroom 4 examples, and possibly redo’s of previous photos as a comparison.

More Historic Country Barns

Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire StateBarn Quilts and the American Quilt Trail MovementBarn Find Road Trip: 3 Guys, 14 Days and 1000 Lost Collector Cars DiscoveredThe Barn: Memoir of a Family during the Nazi Occupation of Holland in 1940-1945

Country Roads and Friday Finds – Keeping With The Times

A Drive in the Country, barns, country, country living, keeping with the. Later in the day I visited Star Lake and ran into this fellow who was pretty much minding his own (business) … A Drive in the Country, barns, country, …

Barns along Polling Station Road | Hoof Beats and Foot Prints

Drive along with me on a windy country road. Polling Station Road in Harwood, Maryland offers views of a variety of country barns. Most of them from a past era of tobacco farming in southern Maryland and stand in the …

D.L. Marriott » Blog Archive » Living in a Fairy Tale

It draws up images of pumpkins and scare crows, hay bales and country barns framed in russet leaves. I grew up in the city, and although my husband and I have spent all our child raising years in the suburbs, pretty far out in …

Sometimes You Just Have to Hug a Horse

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Before and After, A Girl and her Horse

The first part of March my hubby and I attended the Great Nebraska Horse Fair in Lincoln Nebrasaka at the Lancaster Event Center. Meet some wonderful people including Jess and her yearling Belgian horse above. Photo was taken inside a horse trailer and lighting was just a little poor. Didn’t want to use my flash so just opened up the aperture.

I first rendered this in GIMP and adjusted the white balance. Although it rendered the image accurate the photo just didn’t give me the warm fuzzies. So after cropping in Photoshop I used a the Color layer adjustment with orange at about a 10% opacity to give the overall image a warmer tone.

What do you think?

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