Lightroom and the Stanrod House

 Posted by on February 14, 2012 at 2:21 pm  Before & After  Comments Off
Feb 142012
 

Recently I went out on a snowy evening to see if I could get some fun snow pictures.  The snow was not the big pretty flakes so it wasn’t doing what I had hoped.  So I tried to see if I could get something interesting with a house and show falling.

The long exposures (it was well past sundown) were useless for catching show in the air.  So I tried standing outside the frame with a flash and see if the flash would light the snow enough to see it in mid-air.  That showed promise, so I played with that until it was working well.  But the house was not anything great.  Then I remembered the Stanrod House.  It is a historic home here in Pocatello and is very pretty.  So I went over there and tried it.  With the light from the city reflecting off the clouds, mist, and snow made it hard to not blow out the light and still get the house, so I set up a flash aimed at the house and took some more.

It didn’t look like I wanted when I could see it on the computer.

Straight From Camera

 

Well, that really don’t impress me much.

But I wanted to see if I could get what I saw in my mind as I was there.  So I started working on it in Lightroom (a really nice post processing tool by the way).  I shoot in raw, so I was able to get a lot of detail out of areas that looked pretty dark.  When I was finished making adjustments, I was pretty happy with it.  I didn’t even open it in Photoshop.  It came out a lot like what I was hoping for and was in my mind as I was shooting.

After Lightroom

 

Sometimes I am surprised at how much I can do in Lightroom to get an image to look great.  I still need Photoshop for many things, but Lightroom gets a good base very quickly and easily.  And sometimes it’s enough.

Rose Hips in Winter

 Posted by on February 12, 2012 at 2:12 pm  Farm/Ranch  Comments Off
Feb 122012
 

Saturday we went to Blackfoot to visit a friend.  While we were there, we went over by the Snake River just north of town.  We really enjoy sitting or walking beside a river or stream and seeing what there is to see.

There were some wild roses there.  Of course the blossoms and leaves were all gone.  But the Rose Hips were nice and red.  Without the leaves, they really stood out.  It was a grey, overcast day so the light was very diffused, but not bright and not very good for colors.  But I decided to see what I could do with the situation.  I tried several angle for different backgrounds and f-stops to see what that would do for me.

When I got home and looked at them on the computer I found one that I thought was quite nice.  f/22 worked really well.  It kept more of the rose bush and rose hips in focus, but still made the reflections in the river blur nicely.

Rose Hips in winter

 

It was fun to be out and challenging myself to look for what is there and see what could be created with it.  Of course, it is always more fun when I have my sweet wife with me.

Malad Reservoir

 Posted by on November 6, 2011 at 5:25 pm  Farm/Ranch  Comments Off
Nov 062011
 

While we were in Malad last week, we went to the Reservoir to see what it is like.  We had seen signs for it, but hadn’t ever gone to see it.

Malad Reservoir

It is a small reservoir, no boat ramp.  The fall colors were nice.  Since we weren’t in any hurry, we took our time and looked around.  We found a spot on the dam with a nice view.  The water was pretty calm, so the reflections were really great.  A  little breeze came up while we were there which stirred up the water a bit, but just enough to have beautiful ripples in the reflections.  There are trees lining most of the reservoir.  There was still green on the trees, but there was also getting to be a lot of nice fall coloring.

The sky was pretty too.  There were some nice clouds drifting along, but good blue showing through too.  Just a nice mix of blue and clouds to provide texture.  It was getting to be evening.  Between that and the clouds, the light was very pretty.

Everything seemed to just come together to get a couple of the nicest landscapes I think I’ve gotten.  You can check them both out here.

Remembering Malad

 Posted by on October 29, 2011 at 12:50 pm  Farm/Ranch  Comments Off
Oct 292011
 

A while ago we went to Malad for a “Painters Campout”.  Penny Wolf hosted it.  She and her husband, John, have a ranch in Malad.  There is a really beautiful spot they have set up for camping.  It is a very nice and relaxing place with a fun, tree lined creek that runs through it.  Penny fed us meals, so we didn’t have to worry about cooking, or cleaning up.

Wolf Ranch

Some people painted, but Becky and I did Photography.  Saturday morning, we went into town to photograph a home that John had told us about.  It is one of the older homes in Malad and is very beautiful.  When we got there, we were surprised to find not only a beautiful home, but two log cabins in the yard.  As we were starting to take some pictures from the road, the owner came out to visit with us.  She was very nice and let us come in the yard so we could get whatever pictures we wanted.  Then she showed us the yard, the cabins (inside and out), and inside the home.  We had a great visit with her and her granddaughters.  They were very nice and friendly with us.

In the afternoon a friend of Penny brought over a miniature horse with a small cart and gave us rides.  The horse’s name is Hazel.  She was really cute and nice.  It was fun to get a ride.  Later, she brought down a full-size horse with a colt.  It was fun to see them and take some pictures of horses.

It was a great weekend of relaxing and enjoying good company.  Here are more pictures from that trip.

 

Photoshop Magic

 Posted by on October 24, 2011 at 10:09 am  Family Portrait, Military  Comments Off
Oct 242011
 

Photoshop is a lot of fun.  I have Photoshop Elements version 9, not CS5, but it is really fun to see what you can do with it.

We did a shoot with Powells Saturday evening to try for the images we wanted of a soldier and his family with a church steeple and a sunset in the background.  We had tried for it a couple of times already and the weather just didn’t cooperate (see this post, or this one).  It’s not that we didn’t get anything those time, we did get some fun stuff.  I just wasn’t the image we really were trying to create.

It looked like it could be nicer Saturday, so we arranged to meet them and give it one more try.  The weather was better, the previous tries had been very cloudy and Saturday was clear.  The problem was, it was a little too clear.  Not enough moisture for that wonderful, fiery, spectacular sunset.  But we did the best we could under the conditions.

Well, Sunday evening we got the sunset we had wanted.  It was so pretty.  So I took some pictures of it and fired up Photoshop to see what I could do.  Here is what we go on Saturday.

Sunset Salute

And here is the Sunset on Sunday.

Wish it had been like this

I went to work in Photoshop to see if I could replace the sky from Saturday with the sunset from Sunday.  Since it was a silhouette, it was pretty easy to select all of the dark to build a mask to get rid of that part of the fiery sunset.  I didn’t spend a lot of time getting the selection exactly perfect.  I may go back and improve it later so that a larger print will look good, but for on-screen viewing, I think it came out quite good.

Defending Freedom

I worked on another one where the whole family is there and they are lit so it isn’t a silhouette, it was a little more work to get the selection.  It definitively needs more work before it is ready to print up in a nice size, but it looks nice on-screen.

You can see more images in their Gallery.

 

Powell Family Agin

 Posted by on October 23, 2011 at 7:39 pm  Family Portrait, Military  Comments Off
Oct 232011
 

We took another try to get the Soldier at sunset images we have been wanting.  So we got Powells to come help us again.  It was a more focused shoot this time.  The weather was better but not quite exactly what we wanted.  We had hoped for a sunset like this one.

Wish it had been like this

Well, you don’t always get what you want.  So we worked with what was there.  It was a little more subtle, but it was nice.  So we got a couple of shots we were after plus some more that were fun and turned out nice.  You can see them here.  Here is the one we wanted the most.

Sunset Salute

 

Kate

 Posted by on October 18, 2011 at 10:17 am  Before & After, Family Portrait  Comments Off
Oct 182011
 

When we photographed Biffy & Greg’s Family, their daughter Kate was a lot of fun.  She was very photogenic and played well for the camera.   I had set up a background to shoot against and it worked fine for many shots, but there was one shot of Kate where she was doing a bold, fun stance and she extended beyond the background.  I really liked the shot of Kate.  It showed personality and energy and was fun.  But the background was not great.  Here it is.

Kate Before

It is a great image of Kate, but the background pretty much destroys the overall image.  So, what to do?

I decided to try something that I had learned about at a Professional Photographers of Idaho convention.  Bry Cox taught us about using pictures of textures to create almost like another background around portraits.  So I grabbed three textures I had shot and went to work.  It was fun to play with in Photoshop.  I had to do a bit more / different than Bry had taught us to make it work well, but I think I created a really fun portrait of Kate.  Here is what I ended up with.

Kate After

 

Powell Family

 Posted by on October 17, 2011 at 11:13 am  Family Portrait, Military  1 Response »
Oct 172011
 

Saturday, we took Powells out again to try for the Soldier shot we are trying to make.  We want one of those  beautiful, brilliant sunsets that we get here in Pocatello, but the weather was not on our side (again).  We did end up with something that is about right except for the background.

Salute

Other than the clouds instead of a nice, fiery sunset, this is what we were after.  But I don’t know that this is totally bad.  The dark, foreboding, and storminess fit with a soldier.  These guys, and gals, go into some really dark and stormy situations and they do it bravely to protect innocent people.

Since we showed up before sunset time, we did some family shots too.  They are a great family and we had a fun time with them.  We found a nice brush background to put them in front of and it worked well.  It’s fun to work with the kids.  The older two are so cooperative and have fun playing for the camera.  It’s a little harder with the youngest.  He doesn’t care about this camera thing and wants to do what interests him.  But we could get things set and he would usually do something cute, so if the rest of us were ready when he showed his cuteness, everything was good.

The Family

I did learn that it really is worth having some sort of weight on your light stand.  I had a light stand with an umbrella for lighting.  There was really no wind for most of the time.  But a very small breeze that poped up knocked the stand over and broke the shoe mount on the flash It was still attached (albeit loose), so we set a camera bag on one leg of the stand to keep it from going over again and were able to continue on.  Whew!  Now I get to see how well glue works.

You can see more images in this Gallery.

Biffy & Greg Turner Family Portraits

 Posted by on October 8, 2011 at 9:47 pm  Babies, Family Portrait  Comments Off
Oct 082011
 

Today we did portraits for the Biffy and Greg Turner family, and it was especially important to get baby pictures of their newest son, Tomas.  Because they are family, we spent quite a bit of time both taking photos and playing.  But they were really fun to work with.

The new baby, Tomas, is a couple of weeks old so it was time to get baby pictures.  And while we were there with our gear, why not do family portraits too.  Since they hadn’t had that done for quite a while, they were glad to get both done at the same time.

They are a great family and we had a lot of fun together.  They had so much fun together and playing with each other.  At times, people were laughing and joking so much that it was almost too jovial for great portraits, but it kept things in a good mood and moving well.  I think we got some really nice images for them.

We got the images on the computer, now it’s time to get creative.  Here are some samples.

The Family

Oil Paintings

 Posted by on October 5, 2011 at 10:11 pm  Art Photographs  Comments Off
Oct 052011
 

Tonight I photographed a couple of Becky’s oil paintings.  I have done some before and the results have been OK, but not the level of quality that I really want to be able to get.  I photographed a few pastel paintings for someone and they came out really well.  I had learned a few things from that that, so I was excited to try another oil painting.

One problem with oil paintings is that you pick up the weave of the canvas.  But worse than that, there has been a glare from the lights on the weave.  This time I tried a couple of things.  I used a polarizer and I put the lights very far off to the sides, so the reflections would not come back to the camera so much.  I think they came out quite nice this time.

Laurel's Fairies

 

You can see two of them in this gallery.

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