Who needs Jenny Craig when you've got istockphoto.com?

This is a picture of my sister-in-law's brother, Kenny, and our nephew.  When I showed this picture to him he said, "great picture, but can you shave 40 pounds off me?"

Now... Kenny's got a good sense of humor and I don't think he's going to kick my butt for this, but I wanted to have a little fun, and try out istockphoto.com at the same time.  istockphoto is an online source for royalty free photos that you can purchase at a fairly reasonable. price.  I have heard and read about istockphoto and decided to make a purchase just to see how the whole thing works.  I purchased a picture of a body builder and dropped Kenny's head on it.  Not bad... don't you think?  I definately shaved off the 40 pounds.

As for istockphoto.com... I messed up and accidentally downloaded the body builder image more then once and at different resolutions, which depleted my $20 worth of credits and left me wondering what the heck happened.  It was totally my fault, but I shot an email off to the folks at istockphoto.com and they graciously added the credits back to my account.  It really is easy to make a purchase... now that I have done it once.  I will definately use them as a resource in the future.

COMING UP NEXT WEEK... "Fill-in Flash... the basics"

Have you ever had this happen to you?  I was backpacking with my brother a few years back when we came upon this perfect scene along the trail and we had to take a picture.  I pulled my camera out of my pack and took this shot.

Arghhh! Have you ever done this?  The background scene looks great, but the subject looks like a bad version of the man in black?  Well, there's an easy fix and it rides a horse by the name of "Fill-in Flash!"  It is a really easy technique and it will vastly improve your photos.

You may already have a picture like this that you would like to "fix".  I will show you how you can greatly "improve" this photo in Lightroom and Photoshop.  I say "improve," not "fix" because I believe a photo always looks better in the end if you capture the best exposure possible in your camera.  But... you can make it look pretty darn good, and that's what I will show you. 

Well... that wraps up another week of the Photog Buzz.  Next monday I will be 2,340 miles from where I'm sitting right now, but I plan to be blogging and hope you'll check back in.  Until then...

Keep shooting!

Ryan