It's Been A Long Road to Hoe

There comes a time in a person's life when family trumps all. When something horrible happens to someone you love it can be both shocking and devastating. Photography for me is purely a creative outlet. Any aspirations I have towards photography are only insofar as bettering my craft. As such, when faced with a devastating blow personally and the loss of one of the people I have loved more than any other in the course of my entire life all desire to photograph or blog about photography was sapped from me. In my mother's honor I did some coloring and work on this old picture of her and my aunts and uncle. I absolutely love this picture. I have a number of very old family photographs I'll be working to restore in the uncertain future. And it is my intention to share some of them here with you. Hope everyone is well. ;)

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers, by Scott Kelby

ISBN-13: 978-321-50191-2
New Riders Publishers
Copyright 2008 by Scott Kelby


I love this book. Love, love, love it. Scott Kelby is famous for his photoshopping skills, but what's even better are his communication skills. No matter how complex a process or thought on CS3, Scott has a way of breaking it down and explaining it. Trust me on this, if I get what he's saying, you'll get it to. He's providing any number of useful tools that it would take a lifetime if not longer for you to figure out on your own or with minimal help. I'm finding his Portrait Touch-up tools to be very simple, practical and exciting. This is a book/manual that I keep on my desk and am sure that I will refer to time and time again. Below are a before and after of one of my shots touched-up using just some of the tools he provide in this book. Enjoy, this book is worth it's weight in pixels!

Denver Darkroom Portraiture and Lighting, Day 2

On saturday we had the second day of our portrait and lighting seminar. We finally covered strobes. I found this the most pertinent to what I'm doing, as I use mainly strobes in my portraiture. We had fun playing with lighting setups and two new models, April and Emily. My only regret was that I did not get a chance to shoot anything of Emily. Attached are a few of April I took.

The Littlest Superman

We know him as tall, brave - a man of steel. He came from a distant planet as an infant. As he grew into our superhero, all memory of his youth was lost to the ages. Or so we thought...

Be it fate, or direction by unseen forces - images of The Littlest Superman have surfaced!



How many of us could have imagined the pressure, trials and tribulations Superman went through as a child?



The angst and discomfort from being different? Even as a sprout Superman was capable of bending steel pipes!

Fun With Vignettes

Photographers will often use vignettes to make a 2D image seem more 3D (the goal of any good photographer, regardless of technique). Vignettes can be in the form of filters you put on the end of your lens while shooting. They can be added in during photoshopping. Or for the most fun, they can be found spontaneously while shooting and improvised with. These two shots were taken down the 6" wide barrel of a white lined plexiglass tube. I thought they were a lot of fun, the boys enjoyed it, and the color fade from white to blue/grey was an interesting pop to the composition.

A Stellar Black and White Conversion

I've been practicing my color to grey scale conversions based on what I learned from the Katrin Eismann tutorial. I'm attaching an image I converted that I thought turned out really well. I started with an amazing shot, f/1.2 at 50mm ISO 200. I worked the color channels, selecting the green channel because it gave me the most tone and least amount of noise. I converted to grey scale mode and did a levels layer to add a bit more black. Nothing else was done, any haloing was a natural light phenomena. I had a lot of fun and am enjoying continuing learning from the Black and White Artistry tutorial.