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

Heads in the clouds

I had a little fun with Photoshop and Lightroom last night and came up with this photo of a friend of mine and his daughter.  I really saturated the colors to give it a bit of a surreal look in my opinion. 

I made it by combining this photo...

with this photo that I took from my back porch last night of the clouds over Reno.

 

It's finally Friday which means we're heading into another fantastic weekend!  Enjoy... and remember, if you're not having fun, you're probably not taking enough pictures.

Keep shooting!

Ryan

"Just Between Brothers"

I love taking candid shots of people without them knowing.  If you're lucky you can capture a moment or an emotion that might have been lost had the shot been posed.  I took this shot of these two boys at scout camp.  Their parents are friends of our family.  I noticed the older brother instructing his little brother on the finer points of rock climbing.  This was the picture that came out of my camera.

This is an OK picture... but this is what I saw in my mind.

Much better!  An intimate moment between two brothers.  That's why I love Lightroom and Photoshop, they allow me to recreate what I saw in my mind... something a camera cannot always capture.  Converting the photo to B&W in Lightroom seemed to really enhance and soften the natural lighting.  It also enhanced the weathered look of the climbing wall behind them.  I cropped out the distractions and added some vignetting (darkening of the edges) to really focus on the subjects.  I really like this picture and it probably took only about five minutes in the digital darkroom.

Keep shooting!

Ryan 

From Picture to Portrait!

Here is a picture I took of a friend of mine and his son at scout camp this summer.  I thought it was a nice picture, but all the people and activity in the background really detracts from the subjects, don't you think?

The trees and sky are really over exposed and, since our eye is drawn to the light, we are pulled toward the trees, almost missing our subjects altogether.  No problem!  Using Lightroom and Photoshop (my two favorite programs on the planet!), I was able to turn that picture... into this portrait!

Much better don't you think?  This went from being a nice picture of my friend and his son, to being a great little candid portrait that they will hopefully cherish for a very long time.

The original picture was shot with my Canon 20D with a 17-85mm lens at 44mm; shutter speed was 1/60 @ f/8.0; ISO 800; no flash. 

Keep shooting!

Ryan

The Disappearing Kid

A buddy of mine sent me this photo recently and asked if I could photoshop the girl in the yellow and the guy in the black out of this picture for him.  The little girl with her arms around him is his niece.  I have no idea who the others are or how the little girl in yellow ended up so prominently in the photo.

A couple of hours later this is the photo I sent back to him.

Poof!  Like magic they're gone.  Pretty cool, huh?  I did a little adjusting to the exposure and sharpness in Lightroom to remove some of the original photo's haziness.  I cropped out the guy in black since he was close to the edge of the photo anyway.  Then I moved over to Photoshop to remove the little girl and repair the lettering on the sign.  I finished things off by using a slight Gaussian Blur to throw the background just a little out of focus and pop the subjects off the page.

I recently started using Lightroom and it is a fantastic program.  I used to think I could do everything I needed to do in Photoshop and didn't want to "waste" my money on yet another program.  Boy was I wrong!  I am finding that I probably do 80% of my photo processing work in Lightroom, using Photoshop for the "heavy lifting," such as removing little girls dressed in yellow!

Keep shooting!

Ryan