Retouch Fridays!

Hey everyone!

I know I'm not a regular blogger, but I'm making some plans that will (hopefully) help me to become a better blogger.  My first idea is to do Retouch Fridays, where I post the original image and the retouched image and explain what I did. 

Soo....Here's an image Frank took earlier this week. We drove to the Fines Creek area and just had our own little photo shoot.  It was a lot of fun, but it was also very difficult to take pictures of yourself without someone else there to help.  

Frank wanted to experiment with sun flare.  This shot is a pretty good one compositionally, but it just needed a little "boost" to jazz it up a bit.

To me, in photos like these, it's all about color. So, I played around with the contrast slider in Photoshop, bumped up the saturations and played with Curves until I was happy with the end result:

very busy!

Hi everyone again!!

These last few weeks have been REALLY busy for Frank and me! We did our first wedding June 6 and we had so much fun! Granted, we knew the people who got married, but we had fun interacting with the families too!! Last weekend was Frank's cousin's graduation party. I always love visiting the Lowery clan -- they're so much fun and we ALWAYS play poker. We had every intention on taking pictures, but sometimes you just have to put the camera down and enjoy time together. lol, so sorry. No pictures of that to share!

This past week was VBS at my church. I thought the theme this year was really interesting. We normally go through Lifeway for our VBS, but we tried another company called Groups and tried a much more "involved" VBS. Jordan, the coordinator, said we had about 50 volunteers this year! We did Paul and the Underground Church and transformed our youth basement into the "catacombs" -- the prison where Paul stayed. A deacon at our church played the part of Paul and a newer member played the Roman guard, who started the week very grumpy and very against Christianity. By the end of the week, though, he came around. lol. We had the "underground church" on the other side of the youth basement and all the kids had to be reaaalllll quiet so they wouldn't "attract attention" from other people. All the leaders dressed up in costumes and we had a "marketplace" for the various crafts. It was just very organized and very cool this year. I, of course, LOVED taking pictures of it!!


These kids are SO CUTE!! This is probably the only time until they're like 15 they'll get along. lol!



Frank helped out with the 2nd-3rd graders, which I thought was adorable. Here he is sporting a most fashionable yellow sash around his head. Later on in the week, he fashioned a nice neck tie. How inventive. haha!


This is David Youmans... er... I mean... "Paul." He aboslutely loves this picture -- and I really do too! It's the best one I took in such low light -- but it really does have that cave-like feel, don't you think?



And this is Brutus -- back when he was grumpy.



Here are all the kids at the assembly. I was floored how many kids we had the first night! It had to be pushing 60...


This little guy is so adorable! Jordan, the coordinator, asked all the kids to close their eyes and imagine Rome. This is his way of closing his eyes. He looks a bit like Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes, don't ya think?


And this one just cracks me up -- 21st century social culture meets 1st century wardrobe. haha!


We've been very busy, but I've really enjoyed myself! I've got another few gigs coming up, I think, so stay tuned!

I was explaining to a friend of mine the other day that I didn't know of any professional photographer who would sell their prints and images straight out of the camera. Most people don't know this, but there's quite a bit of post processing needed after a photo shoot. I've had very few images come straight out of my camera where I thought, "Hm, there's not much I need to do to this one." Some photographers spend hours and hours manipulating photographs to make skin tones "perfectly smooth." My philosophy, however, has always been "less is more." For instance, I just went to a local photographer's Web site, and to be sure his work is superb, I could tell he did a lot of post processing. The skin of one bride was so smooth, it didn't look natural.

When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me, "The secret to wearing makeup is to make it look like you're NOT wearing any." This idea really perplexed me, but like makeup, the whole point of post processing is not to totally make over the image, but to enhance the natural characteristics that are already there.

To illustrate my point, I have two images: One is the original SOOC (straight out of the camera) and the other is the finished product. (click to enlarge)


Granted, the original image is pretty darn good (not to sound conceited or anything, but the colors are decent, there isn't anything distracting in the background -- minus a few annoying gnats! -- overall a good SOOC image).


However, this one has been brightened a bit, the colors are bolder and more saturated and their faces have been lightened to reduce the harshness of the shadows. I also went in and individually took out the gnats that were flying through the air, but you'd probably have to enlarge photos to even see them anyway.

So when you see my photos on my Web site, know that they are all hand color corrected and enhanced by me, so if it takes a few days to see your pictures, that's why :)

I might do a few more of these every now and then. It was fun and I think it makes people appreciate all that photographers do for their clients. Enjoy!