Upgrade?

Hello all of your lovely ladies, I am looking to upgrade all of my equipment. I'm starting to take more and more photos and I really think it's time to get serious with my gear.
First order of business, I am wondering what everyone recommends for me to upgrade to. Currently I have a canon rebel xt with the standard canon 18-55mm. It was used before I bought it from Rachel on here a little over a year ago. It's been used quite a bit since then but not too sure of the shutter clicks count:

Next I have a 70-300mm sigma lens, which I have never used. It's huge and comes with a case. I plan on getting rid of it cause it's not really my kind of lens. Maybe upgrade to a 100mm macro lens.

Lastly but definitely not least I have my favorite Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. I absolutely love this for close ups and just good quality photos. I use this a lot but I am willing to sell all of this to upgrade and then add more later: 

So I am just on here wondering what I should do? Should I sell it all and upgrade? What should I upgrade too? I'm thinking the T3 or T3i, I don't want a Mark because that'll be in my way future, just something with a little bit higher quality.

Thanks for looking/listening to all of my rantings  :)

Shooting kids!

Most of us have kids or love kids or like someone else's kids enough to take pictures of them :) But lets face it, they move a lot and are often not very cooperative past the first ten minutes of a photo opp. For some of us 10 minutes may be just enough time to capture what we want but sometimes we want more. Here are some things I've found significantly improve my chances of coming home with some great shots of the little ones I photograph.

1. Keep your shutter speed HIGH, at least 250 but I shoot for 500 with kids. Now this means you'll have to find good light. Like outside light.

2. Shoot in a safe place where kids can run and play. There's no point in trying to pin down a toddler or even an 8 year old. Everyone is more comfortable when you're having fun, running and playing. Be prepared and know your location before you start. Know the best light. Know where the kid will most likely go and be prepared to shoot there.

3. Shoot in AI Servo (continuous if shooting Nikon). This is an auto focus mode and if you look in your camera's manual you'll find that there are three options; AI Servo, One Shot, and AI Focus. AI Servo is a continuous refocusing mode so as you hold the shutter release down half way your camera will continue refocusing until it is pressed fully down. I use this one most of the time for my boys and around the house. I do switch it up several times if I'm shooting a wedding or something.

4. I always take candy but not just ANY candy. Be thoughtful about what you choose. Don't choose gum, they'll be chewing in all the photos. Don't choose bright blue salt water taffy, they'll have blue everywhere and be chewing in every picture. I take smarty's and pez. For little ones I take skittles. They are small enough and they won't turn their mouth blue or make them drool chocolate.

5. Allow props. Blankets, stuffed animals, even pacifiers, all of things will be on camera eventually and for me they capture the child's phase of life. They will eventually disapear for photos so let them be and when the chance comes move them out of the shot.

This is Jill's REALLY handsome son :)

6. Make lots of fun noises but save the best for last. I always save my dinosaur growl for last ;) That way when they are totally done I can get one last smile if I've forgotten a shot.

7. Show the kid their photo in camera. Kids LOVE to see their photo and sometimes you can get them to make a silly face, show them and then they'll be much more cooperative in front of the camera.

8. Come up with some games to play. Red Light Green Light is a personal favorite. I've also played hop scotch and sometimes I'll just bring bubbles or side walk chalk to play with if we're not in a setting where we can just play around.

9. Allow the parents to take time off. Sometimes parents can be the most distracting thing to face when trying to get kids to relax. They want them to say cheese or smile all the time and coaxing a smile is the last thing you want to do with a kid. Encourage parents to let you take the lead for the shoot.

10. Speaking of cheese, DON"T do it! When you tell someone to smile they look forced. I sometimes do it just to get the after "cheese" smile but for kids it works best to make them laugh. Ask them if fish can climb trees or if their favorite food is chocolate covered sand. Silly things make kids laugh. Be silly!

11. Don't be afraid to just let mom hold the little one. There have been several times when the kiddo just doesn't want to let go of mom or dad and prying them away won't help anything. More times than not the snuggly momma pictures are the ones I love and that my clients love.

 12. Don't worry if they're not looking directly at the camera all the time. As you can see LOTS of my favorite kids shots are when they kid is pretending I'm not around. Having mom and dad or brother and sister stand behind you or off to the side and do something funny is a sure fire way to get a little one to smile!

 13. Some kids aren't smilers! My son was not a smiler until WAY late and so I have a lot of photos of him where he's not necessarily happy. Big smiles, while great, aren't usually the thing I go for. I go for the faces that only mom sees when they are playing pretend or reading a book in private. The photos of my son, where he looks like the son I see everyday are the ones I really treasure. Not all of them are him smiling :)

14. This one's a no brainer but bring your running shoes! Be prepared to move with and around the child at their pace... and keeping up is important!

15. Take LOTS of pictures. This is why I love digital cameras. The camera never tells you you've taken too many photos so just keep clicking! And refocus lots. Make sure you use that shutter release frequently to make sure you get proper focus. I always focus on the eye closest to me or either eye if they are facing me.

Those are just a few of the things I frequently use to get kids to let loose, have fun and make great photos. If you've got more ideas please share!

Curves what?!

So every photo has a curve aka; a histogram. You can actually see your curve in camera as you shoot and if you push info while looking at a photo in your camera is should pop up next to the photo. This thing may look scary and sound scary but it's not... trust me. Whenever my husband wants to pretend he knows something about cameras and photography he says histogram and ISO a lot in one sentence (he has no idea of what either are!) and then he prances around like he's just en lighted the world of how to take a photo... if he's not scared of the histogram then you shouldn't be either ;) Anywho so the histogram/curve shows you the distribution of color throughout your photo. On the far left side is blackest black and on the far right side is whitest white. So ideally and technically speaking you want to have a bell curve meaning the highest point of your curve should be somewhere in the middle with no extremes or peaks on either side. This isn't necessarily ideal because, like we talked about with the gray card, sometimes we shoot things that are black and sometimes we shoot things that are white. Within reason though a "good" curve is a bell shaped curve with no spikes or extremes. You can tell the exposure of your image via the histogram as well. If the curve is slightly to the left you're underexposing and if it's to the right you over exposing. That being said I've taken LOADS of photos with "terrible" curves especially when I was first starting out. Using Kate's photo of her friend we'll go through the steps of correcting the curve in photoshop starting with her original;

From here we'll go into photoshop and click the little half black, half white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and select curves. Then I grab the line somewhere in the upper half (the upper half/right side will adjust the highlights more than shadows, the middle of the line will pull up everything the same time and the lower half will adjust the shadows more than the highlights) and pull it up until I like what I see.

Now I notice that her face has lightened more that everything else and there is a gray wash over her eyes specifically so I'm going to do another curve adjustment after flattening the first. I close my curves window, right click on the curve layer and select flatten then I do it again. Select the half white/half black circle and here is where I change it up a bit. If I want something to darken like her eyes I have to work in the shadows or the lower left half of the line. So I grab a point down there (in the middle of the lower left half) and drag it DOWN instead of up because I want to even out that peak in the middle of my shadows that I can see in the histogram.

Now she obviously looks too dark in areas but I'm just looking at her face and that gray area has been resolved so I click okay on my curves window and before I flatten the curves layer I take my eraser tool, 11th tool down in my far right hand tool bar, and I erase everything except for her face and a little bit of her bangs where the gray was effecting. After that I noticed there was still a slight gray wash so I took my burn tool, the fist looking tool three down from the eraser and if it's not there right click to find it, and with an exposure of 18% I just brushed a little over her eyes and hair. That remedied the problem. Then I warmed it just a smidge using the same technique that I showed you in the last tutorial. Okay so that's that! The curve is finished and here is the final;

Now for a little sun flare ;) When I see a sky like this where the sun has just set behind the trees sometimes I wish I could bring it back up just a little but I'm not God and he knows when the sun should go down so I go with and use photoshop to give me extra light! Okay so first we've got the above image and now I'm going to add some sunlight flare to it. I select filter from the top tool bar then render and then lens flare;

You can then drag the little crosshatch where ever you want the sun to be, I chose right in the trees behind to the side of her head, and you can select the lens flare option you'd like by choosing from the different lenses listed. I chose the 50-300mm zoom lens flare and here it is;

Gorgeous shot Kate!!!

Tried me some texture

So I loved Ashley's post on texture and bokeh. I'll post my original edit and then my two different bokeh styles so far.. I love love love this! It just adds a little flare :)

Please let me know what you guys think? Too much? Too little? 

Creative Live- Post Processing Live Course

For those of you who want to get to know photoshop better, specifically in re-touching your photos there will be a free live course taught by David Nightingale October 7-9. This course is held through Creative Live which is a site that often hosts free live courses and then sells the course after the live feed for, usually, $99. I've watched a few and they seem to be hit and miss as to whether they pertain to anything I am interested in because they cover everything from video to landscape photography to all kinds of other topics, posing, lighting etc.. I like to tune in when I can to the live feed just to check it out! Here is the link for registration info on the course. Again the live session is free but the recorded video after the fact is $99. Should be a great intro to the basics of photo editing in photoshop and beyond!

http://www.creativelive.com/courses/dramatic-images-practical-hdr-david-nightingale

first senior session

Hey guys :)
Thought I would share some thoughts about my first senior session. I was really nervous about this one, especially with the posing...but I think it went pretty well. I am going to be showing the gallery to them tomorrow, so I am a little nervous to see the reactions to the images. The session started out really bumpy when we found out that we could no longer shoot in the location we had planned on because they changed the rules (they were no longer allowing professional photographers on the grounds and we could be ticketed!- yikes!)...the mom of the senior was super upset about this...which didn't help at all :( We decided to head to a park a few miles away, but couldn't shoot there due to a fair that was going on and the parking lot was full!
At that point I was telling my husband I was done with photography (unhappy mom + another failed attempt at a location), it was not shaping up well at all.
Luckily they agreed to follow us to another location five miles away and thankfully no one was there :)
We rolled with the punches and I think we ended up with some nice images...the sun was low in the sky so we had some nice light on her hair...even some sun flare. Our senior girl was really laid back and it was sometimes hard to get her to smile and laugh...we kept asking her sister what would make her laugh while she was changing outfits ;) Her mom didn't accompany us during the shoot, which I think was a great decision on her part...because I think she would have been way more uncomfortable and self-conscious.
By the end we had her talking a lot and we showed her one of the images and she was pretty excited about it...which she told her mom about when we got back to the cars (this helped immensely with the mom's mood).
Here is an image from the session...I haven't even blogged about this or sneak peaked it yet...I will post a link for that later (if anyone is interested)- I only do that after the ordering session now :)
The one thing I wished that could have been different in this image is the way her hands are holding her arms...I wished they were arranged differently and turned more inside. Any feedback or tips would be great...I am always on a quest to get better and learn more :)

A fun texture tutorial!

I've been smitten by a new trend :) I have long loved bokeh, the sparkly orbs of light that get caught in the out of focus parts of the frame. I've been redecorating my nursery room in preparation for this little girl of mine, due in December and I found this wonderful etsy artist who took this shot;





 I love how there's bokeh in the sky! How'd she catch that I wondered and then it hit me, a bokeh texture!  AHA! Genius! So I purposefully took some shots at the State fair this year thinking this would work great on a carnival type photo and I love it! I'm going to slap bokeh on everything in true "Ashley" form, if something works slap it everywhere ;) So here's how I do it;

I take the original photo and open it in photoshop. Then I grab a bokeh texture. If you type bokeh into google you get thousands of bokeh images. Pick a freebie and grab it. Open it in photoshop and then just drag and drop it onto your original photo. This is the bokeh I used;


Once you've got the bokeh on top of your photo you'll have two layers;

Using the arrow tool in the top left corner grab a corner of the bokeh and drag it to fill the entire frame;

Now that your photo is hidden under the bokeh photo we'll turn it into a texture. Double click the bokeh layer in the layers pallette and a layer styles window will pop up. Under general blending options select the drop down menu blend mode and change it to overlay.

Now you have this!

I already love it but I like more subtle tones so I'm going to erase off some of the overlay bokeh from the ride thingy (whatever it was, it looked like a death trap!). Using my eraser tool I make sure the bokeh layer is selected in the layers palette and erase away.

Ahh, there now isn't that magical!! So sparkly... I like sparkly things :) Have fun trying out some bokeh textures!! Here are a few more shots I slapped this technique on!

A little more antique

if you're using it on a person be sure to watch out for odd discoloration on the skin. I erased all the texture off his skin.

An objective way to correct skin tones

Skin tones can be tricky. No one's skin is the same color and editing or color correcting can quickly become a guessing game simply because matching the real thing is sometimes difficult. There are a few things we can do to nail skin tone in camera; find good light, slightly overexpose, and shoot in RAW (adjust the white balance in RAW editor). These things will get you as close as possible to the real deal but when something doesn't quite work out as planned we can fix it! Early on in my editing days I stumbled upon an article that relayed a simple and straight forward way to be objective in correcting my skin tones, taking most of the guessing out of it. Lets see if I can reiterate it correctly :)

Starting with the original photo Kate posted we'll try and assess what the camera did in adjusting the temperature;

Looks cold to me right away. I imagine her skin being more bronze and there's a blue undertone instead of a golden/bronze tone. My camera shoots the same way, btw. Always slightly cold. You can adjust that in your settings but I've never been that eager to. You can also adjust your white balance but then I forget to change it back and end up overwarming sometimes so I leave that on auto. I don't mind editing it to just the right temperature in my RAW editor and trying different white balances in there as well. So let's start, we've got a cold photo, lets warm it up! Using photoshop I'll show you the run down but you can also do this in MANY other programs including elements.


First before I start warming I did a little curves adjustment to lighten the lights and darken the darks (this gets the proper skin exposure without blowing other things). I'll spare you those details right now but if you'd like to know more about that I can do another post. To do the warming I'll go into my curves window by selecting the half black half white circle at the bottom of my layers palette. You could also go to levels>new adjustment layer> curves.

I then drop down the preset menu at the very top and select custom. Then I go down just a smidge to the channel drop down and select red first. I grab a point right in the middle of the red line and pull it up so the line is slightly bowed.

Then I move to the blue channel and move the blue line down from the center so it bows opposite the red line;

If her skin turns too yellow move the blue line closer to the center or/and the red line farther away from the center. So now I have the original and the warmed/lightened version;

 Now lets focus on her skin more closely. First thing is to notice the yellow tone. Since she is darker skinned she will naturally have a gold tone but we don't want it to go orange or yellow, just natural. To monitor this we can use our eye dropper tool and the info tab in the upper right corner. Using the dropper go over a small medium tone piece of skin, lets say her shoulder. you don't have to click or anything just use the mouse to go over her shoulder and watch the values in that upper right corner, specifically the CMYK values (that stands for Cyan, magenta,yellow and I have no idea what K is but we don't need it :). You'll notice that there is less than 10% cyan, about 18-20% magenta and 26-28% yellow. For tan skin I shoot for cyan over 10%, somewhere between 10-18%, for white skin it varies quite a bit depending on the hue. There's white/yellow, white/red and white/blue ;) To adjust these values go back to the half white and black circle and choose selective color (I'd show you but my photoshop isn't letting me circle things for some reason!). You'll see a colors drop down menu and I usually only play with red and yellow channels. Then adjust the magenta and yellow within those two colors. Ultimately you'll be changing the cyan values while changing these two colors. All of this, albeit more objective, still has to be looked at and evaluated based on what you saw when the camera snapped. Another thing that can cause orange is darkening the shadows too much. If you start out with tan skin, the darker you make it the more orange it will look. Same with red skin, if it starts pink it will turn red. Often times I will adjust the darks and lights and erase the skin at least a little bit to spare the color.

One trick to nailing skin exposure in camera and assessing the value of your light, be it good light or mediocre, is to look at your palm. Find a room that's lit only by a window and walk around looking at your palm. Go over to the window, your palm color looks nice right? It looks normal. Now slowly move away and notice your skin color will darken, shadow, change slightly in color just because of the light. Now go outside and find some open shade. Go to the very edge of the shade and notice how pretty your palm skin looks! Move all over inside the shade and out noticing how your palm is changing, how shadows are moving and how the colors are changing. This is obviously what happens to our subject during a shoot. We move them all over, turning here and there. In order to nail skin tones we have to watch them carefully and choose the best light possible. Here is my final edit. I would have left the horizontal crop but I wanted to just focus on the skin in this tutorial. Again, a lot of editing is subjective and contrast etc. is totally preference based but for me I like the most true to reality shot that I can manage even after edits. Thanks Kate for letting me use your photo! It's really beautiful! Hope that helps anyone frustrated with skin!

Developing

I saw someone ask in the comments about a pro developing lab and I lost it, so I thought I would post! :)

A friend of mine did this comparison of a few non-pro labs and the results she got from getting the same file developed at five different places. (Used with permission)

If you are working professionally it's a good exercise to do yourself to demonstrate to your clients what a bad lab can do to good pictures.

I have had good luck with Costco for my own person prints. I choose for them not to do any auto-correcting, and they look great.

For my clients I use a few different labs depending on the products I need, how fast I need them, and who's having a sale :)

My favorite is MpixPro.com - love the overnight shipping, satisfies my need for instant gratification, also makes me look REALLY good to my clients who are only in town visiting for the week :) If you aren't pro, their pro-sumer side: MPIX.com is great too.

I also use:

www.prodpi.com
www.cpq.com

and Canvasondemand.com and BlackRiverImaging.com for canvases.

Photoshop ?

Ok - I am going to have to do some research...but thought I'd start here to see if anybody understands or knows what the "scratch disks" are?

One reason I needed a new computer is because my old one didn't have enough memory...

I always got the message "cannot complete_____ command because the scratch disks are full"
well, new computer - three separate hard drives...lots of memory and when I tried to batch edit some pics, half way into it I got the scratch disk message???

also - when I was trying to save & close the images into JPegs that had finished all my edits, I got this message:
there is not enough disk space left at the cache location
C:\users\john\app data\roaming\adobe\bridge cs5\cache\.
thumbnails & previews will not be generated or cached to disk. Please quit Bridge & add more disk space to the cache volume, or change the cache location in Cache preferences. The restart Bridge.

OK - so I obviously need some education! :)

Recent shoot, critique... editing:

I did this shoot for a friends Quincera (sp?), she is quite a gorgeous 15 year old. I edited my favorite picture from the shoot. I absolutely love the editing process but I am always so jealous of other photogs finished products. So below is my original and then after that is my finished edited project. Please give me all the critiques you want:

Thanks for all of the support and an awesome photog blog,

Kathryn

Encouraging critique anyone?

So one of the main things I want this blog to be about is helping each other grow in a way that is both encouraging and productive. I really want us to be able to gently help each other through different things as we all learn to take better photos and be better photogs. My first idea in getting this sort of interaction started is simply to do a photo critique where, if you want to, you post a photo for critique and we all, no matter our experience level, share how the photo impacted us, what drew our eye first, what areas caught our eye in good and bad ways (distractions or drawing you into the subject) and if there are things that might make the photo better. Of course there are all levels of photography so when we post a photo might I suggest we specifically ask for certain areas of critique ie; posing, lighting, exposure, angle, composition etc. just to narrow our initial field of what would be most helpful for each person especially those starting out. Lets all remember that we are each artists and all of us have a unique eye that may or may not like something. That doesn't always mean its technically wrong. Please take the critique with a grain of salt and if you like something that someone else doesn't, don't necessarily change it just for that reason. Evaluate each critique with a grain of salt and knowing all of us are here to be helpful. With that, lets begin! Here's a shot I took earlier this year of my sis in law for her photography headshots. I chose it for critique because, like Lisa mentioned posing is often hard for my little brain and I'm not so sure this pose worked? Thoughts on how to make the pose better? How to make the entire shot better? It's SOOC (straight out of camera) with RAW edits (warmed, upped blacks). Any editing thoughts would be much appreciated as well!
Settings;
Aperture; f/1.6
shutter speed; 1/320
ISO; 100
taken with my 85mm lens, no flash