Freelensing Photography Experimentation!

I know I am a little late to the game, but I am finally learning a new photography technique called freelensing. You take off your camera lens and hold it against your camera while tilting it different ways to get a lensbaby-type effect. Here is a great tutorial.

I have a Canon Rebel and use the (affiliate link) Nifty 50 lens. Right now I am shooting up close, but I hope to learn how to capture ones with my boys like this.

I love the creamy bokeh! 

This rose hip looks magical.

I love the textures (sharp pinecone versus soft feather) in this one.

I shot up so the leaves would be highlighted by the sun.

This is a very interesting effect. When you tilt your lens you can also get a gorgeous flare effect. These colors are amazing!!!

If you decide to give freelensing a try I would love to see your images on my Facebook page!!

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{Friday Photo Bliss}: Macro Nifty 50

It has been hot as Hades most of the summer, so I haven't been out shooting with my "real" camera much. However, I started to miss her and even though the heat index has reached 100 this week, I decided to pull out my dusty beloved big camera and practice shooting manual.

I remembered this "Nifty Fifty Macro" tutorial I wrote years ago and decided to create some fun macro images.  These images don't have the sharp focus of a real macro lens, but personally I love the tilt-lens artistic vibe coming off them. ;-)

All of the images below were shot in my backyard in hot, humid conditions with a 80-pound puppy following me around everywhere. Try taking a macro photo of a tiny flower when your giant puppy keeps on trying to lick your lens.

I used the new Pretty Presets "Pretty Film Pastels Collection" presets on all of these images. I love these presets, and found they work on so many different types of images, not just portraits.  My favorite for these edits was "Warm Blush".

I also used the new gorgeous textures from the Flypaper "Tempest Painterly" Texture set on many of my images below.

If you have a less-than-stellar macro image (because you are shooting with a cheap but amazing 50mm lens that is backwards on your camera!), I use a little editing trick to turn it into something special. Make a copy of the image in Photoshop and apply a high pass filter of 10-20 to that copy, and put the layer in overlay or soft light blending mode. Then add a texture to the image in soft light or overlay blending mode.

 This is my absolutely favorite one of the set.

This was growing on one of our fire-pit logs.

We have a few trees (well, it is actually a bush) that have colorful fall leaves.

I took about 10 shots of this little tiny weed flower and just happened to get a perfect one with my little ant friend.

I have a few roses left on my deer-eaten rosebushes.

This final image was taken with my Nifty 50, but this time I tried the free-lensing technique. I need a lot more practice, but it is so fun playing with my lens!

Do you want to download thousands of professional CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop actions (including exclusive ones not found anywhere for free), textures/overlays, scrapbooking papers, clip art/design elements, photo storyboards and frames, and Lightroom presets from this site in one convenient zipped file AND help support this one-woman blog?

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CoffeeShop Tutorial: Creating Memorable Portraits Of Loved Ones At Home, Part 1

Today I am posting the first of a three-part set of tutorials (one has a new action!) showing you how I photographed and edited a memorable portrait of my son at home.  I shoot a lot of lifestyle/candid images of my boys but sometimes I want something a bit more formal.  So I decided to start shooting a series of images of my sons doing something special to them at this moment in time.  

Imp, who is 8, is a reluctant reader who loves Minecraft.  I know that most children won't read for pleasure unless you give them a book that they find interesting. So I purchased a series of Minecraft instructional books and suddenly he decided he wanted to read.  He spends hours on his bed or on the floor pouring over his Minecraft books and then going over every (boring) detail with us.  I am now a Minecraft expert and I haven't even played the game.

So today I will show you how I set up a simple home photo studio using a window, closet door, and stool so I could shoot with beautiful natural light and capture his love of Minecraft.  Part 2 of the tutorial will cover the B&W conversion (and it comes with an amazing new action called "Dark and Stormy Night" I just wrote!) and in Part 3 I will show you how I added a texture and fake window light to add drama.

CoffeeShop Tutorial:  Find the Light, Using a Window as Your Simple Home Studio

Light will make or break your portrait.  I don't have a home studio and usually shoot outdoors, but I wanted to capture Imp reading one of his favorite books using natural light.  So I set up my fancy indoor photo studio.

I dragged a stool to the third floor so that it was next to a window.  It was a cloudy day so I had beautiful diffused light.  I decided I could use my closet doors as the background.  If you don't have your own beautiful clunky closet doors available you could use a blank wall or even hang a simple sheet or backdrop on the wall using painter's tape.  Keep it simple!

I had Imp sit down, handed him his book, and had him turn to face the light.  I set my camera on manual using a wide aperture and high ISO (I am not afraid of noise/grain since I knew these would be B&W).

This is one of my images, SOOC (straight-out-of-the-camera).  Imp is really reading and kept on getting mad at me as I interrupted him to ask for subtle changes in his position until I was happy with the light.

I wanted to make sure his face and the book were well lit and in focus.  Everything else would happen in Photoshop. 

This is my final edit after running the action and adding the texture/light effect.  This image means so much to me as I captured his love of reading and Minecraft. I love the dramatic lighting and the intense look on his face.  It isn't a technically perfect image, but it makes me happy and that is what is important when you shoot for yourself.

Tomorrow I will post the new B&W action I used for this edit and later this week I will show you how I added the texture and fake window light.  Be sure to check back!  And please post your own before/afters on my Facebook page, I love to see your work.

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.

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CoffeeShop Photography Tutorial: Why I Shoot in Manual Mode!

Good Friday to you all!  I wanted to post the world's shortest photography tutorial today since I know many of you will be outside taking shoots of the little ones hunting for eggs and dressed in their adorable Easter outfits.

I am really lazy and often shoot in Aperture mode, where I select the amount of depth of field (how much blur is in front of and behind my subject) and let the camera pick the exposure speed.  But when I am taking posed portraits I shoot in manual mode if possible because I want to get a great SOOC image.

I also prefer to shoot in jpg because I hate messing with giant RAW files, so it is important to get a great exposure in camera.

I took this photo of Imp at the park with my 50mm f/1.8 II lens that I purchased five years ago and is still going strong.  I set the aperture to 2.8 because I wanted a blurred background, and I let the camera pick the rest of the settings.  The exposure was 1/800 sec.

As you can see in the screenshot above Imp's skin and eyes are a bit underexposed, even though I set my camera to expose for his skin.  I also shot this in complete idiot-auto mode and it looked basically the same.  My camera is pretty good, but not that good.

So how do you get properly exposed skin and eyes "in camera"?  The secret is to slightly over-expose your image.  Yes, slightly pushing up the exposure often gives you a perfect skin and eyes that need no editing!  This will also reduce the appearance of many skin imperfections.

In this second screen capture I changed to manual mode and kept the same ISO and aperture and just changed the exposure from 1/800 to 1/400 (I just dialed it up from what the camera meter was suggesting).

As you can hopefully see (these are screenshots so they aren't very clear), in the image above Imp's skin and eyes are nicely exposed and the image is so much better.  I didn't do any editing on either image, these are just screenshots from Lightroom.

In this photo I shoot completely  in manual and just removed a tiny bit of green tint in Photoshop (darn shady green background) and sharpened for the web. His skin is perfectly exposed and his eyes are bright and sharp.

OK, I had to post one more…  Don't you love it when you capture that perfect instantaneous moment when your kids are being themselves and not hating your camera pushed in their face?

Hope this little tutorial encourages you to shoot a few frames in manual mode on Sunday.  These days we don't have to be afraid to waste film, so go ahead and try different exposures and really play around with your camera.  You spent extra money to have manual options, and don't be afraid to learn how to use them!

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

CoffeeShop Photography Tutorial: American Beauty Berry: Same Berries, Different Angles!

This year I dropped out of our homeschooling co-op to take a break.  I enjoyed being a part of a group once a week, but I decided that this year we would spend more time in nature.  My boys love being outdoors, and now that they are older I see that they are wrestling/attacking each other a little less and paying more attention to the nature around them.

Yesterday we went on a 4 mile hike in a local wooded park and saw a wild rabbit, a dying young raccoon (sad), a beautiful spiky green caterpillar that stung both Duke and me when we picked it up, a dead copperhead snake (also sad, apparently an earlier hiker had stepped on it, probably on purpose), and leaf-cutting ants.  The ants really impressed the boys, they spent almost an hour crouched by their trails and anthills watching them cut the leaves and transport them back to their home.  The boys would rub out part of the trail to remove the ants' scent trail and crack up when the little ants started freaking out and running off to the sides in panic.

I have enjoyed being a "lone wolf" homeschooler this year because it allows us the freedom and time to stop and study ants for an hour. As an adult I have a tendency to be in a rush, "Ok, those are ants, time to move on!", but I have learned that children need the freedom to stop and study what grabs their interest.  This is one reason I am skipping the homeschooling field trips this year.  When you go on field trips with large homeschooling groups, the adventures are usually adult-run, stressful, and rushed.

One perk of allowing the boys the extra hour to study an ant or a caterpillar is I can shoot photos uninterrupted.

I love the American Beauty Berry, and I was excited to find this bush filled with berries.  As I was staring at my tiny screen image of it, I realized this photo was a bit boring and I wanted to see it in another angle.

Photography Tutorial: Late Afternoon Backlighting and LR4 Presets

I had the pleasure of doing a maternity photography shoot for my friends K&D who are expecting a little boy any day now.

We meet in a small field during late afternoon (and almost 100 F!).    I wanted to get some photos of this adorable couple backlighted by the setting sun.  I also took some with other outdoor natural lighting (facing sun, open shade) which I will highlight in another post.

This is the SOOC image (straight-out-of-the-camera).  I shot this in manual mode in RAW and had my camera set to 400 ISO (Canon EOS Rebel T2i) using the Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 lens.  Since I am not a professional photographer I can get away with my Rebel.  :-)  I often fantasize about getting a "real" camera, but I decided I prefer a lighter, smaller camera body and some extra money in my pocket.  Some of the perks of being a serious amateur and not a pro.  :-)

I wanted the background to be "soft" so I set my aperture to f/4.5 (the lower the number the softer the background) and then set my exposure to lighten their faces somewhat without completely blowing out the background and still allowing a ring of light around their heads (1/1000 sec in this case).  A trick to set the exposure on a face in extreme lighting situations like this is set your zoom and then walk forward until their face fills the screen, get a reading, adjust your exposure setting to expose the skin properly, and walk backwards to take your photo.

This type of image is best shot in manual mode as you don't want the camera picking your exposure settings.  At times I might want a silhouette effect, so I would expose for the background light.  Other times I might want to highlight their expressions so I would expose for their faces.  For this image I wanted to see their expressions but also silhouette that beautiful belly, so I tried to work out a happy balance.  I usually set my ISO and aperture and then adjust the exposure.

If you are new to shooting in manual mode, your best bet is to try several different exposures and then pick your favorite later when you start editing.  And remember, practice makes perfect in photography.  You can read books and go to classes as much as you want, but unless you get out there and use your camera you won't feel comfortable shooting manual and getting that perfect-for-you shot.

After I got home I decided to run some Pretty Presets in LR4 on the image.  I wanted to show you how many different edits you can do on this one simple image using presets.  I will also show some edits in Photoshop/PSE using my own actions tomorrow.

I also wanted to mention that some enhancements are more lovely on screen, others look better in print. And I would always keep a clean edit on hand because these "arty" effects can be very trendy and what you love today you might hate tomorrow.  I provided my friends a simple clean edit and then a few fun ones so they could choose their own favorite.

I ran the presets and did not other adjustments on these images.  Which one is your personal favorite?

 1.  Pretty Presets "Backlit RAW"preset from the Spring Color Flare and Haze set.

2.  Pretty Presets "Fine Art Film" preset from the Fine Art Film Collection.

3.  Pretty Presets "Bejeweled V1" from the Fine Arts Film collection.

4.  Pretty Presets "Sunflare Right + Up Light" preset from the Spring Color Flare and Haze set.

I was really excited to do this shoot, especially since I haven't done any maternity photography in almost four years.  I felt comfortable with my camera but I did realize I had deficits in hand/feet placement and best body positions.  I need to do another shoot so I can apply what I learned from this one.  I just appreciate that K & D let me practice on them!

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop Actions or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

CoffeeShop Fruit Still Life Texture Tutorial: Part 1

If you have been following my blog you probably know about my texture addiction.  I love reading the Flypaper Texture blog because Jill and Paul post before/after images with the texture "recipes" they used in their edit.  Honestly, with some limited photography and editing skills and beautiful textures (free or paid), I think anyone can create their own custom art prints.  If I can do it, anyone can!

I read the Still Life Photography Pears post at Flypaper and decided that moment I was going to do a similar edit for my kitchen.  I have the Flypaper textures used in the tutorial so I just needed to go shoot some pears.  Note: You can read Part 2 of the tutorial here.

I have a granite-topped island in the breakfast area of my kitchen across from some windows that has great reflection potential.  It has natural light, but unfortunately because of trees and porch overhang it is very dim,  so I had to shoot manual to make sure I got a sharp image.  I used my Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 , ISO 800, 28 mm, f3.2, 1/8 second.  My 50mm f/1.8 would have also worked for this shoot.  And note to self:  Next time clean the countertop because I had some smears in my final shot that would be a pain to clone out.

I set up the pears and placed my camera on the countertop across from them (as seen in the photo above), and set the auto focus point on the center pear.  Then I set the timer to 2 seconds and hit my shutter.  Since the shutter-speed was so slow I didn't want to shake my camera when I made the shot, so that is why I use the self-timer.  This really works when you don't want to set up a tripod.

You can see the shoot set-up better in this image.  We love fruit. :-)  If you have a busy background, simply tape a piece of neutral paper behind your subject.  It is best if the background has nothing distracting and is one color.

Here is my before image.  I did a quick contrast adjustment and noise reduction in LR3 then exported the image to Photoshop.

At first I wasn't sure how I was going to crop the image, so I wanted to straighten the countertop on the right.  Like most editing techniques, there are what seems to be a million ways to do an edit, and I am just showing you what I did for this image.  I selected the area and Ctrl-J to put it in a new layer.

Then I went to Edit, Free Transform and selected Distort (I think) and dragged the corners until the counter looked reasonably straight.  I then flattened the image.

I originally cropped this where the pears and reflections were centered in the middle of the image without much white space, but I wan't really happy with that edit.  I decided I needed some empty space above the pears and wanted to print a 11x14 metal print.  So I need more background on top.  Luckily I have a neutral background and can stretch it.

I added some extra white canvas on top of the image (Image, Canvas Size).

Then I selected part of the background that did not have any of the pears and Ctrl-J to put that selection on a new layer.

I then Ctrl-T and pulled up the area until I thought I had enough space over the pears.  Since I am gong to add textures it doesn't really matter that the background is a bit distorted.  You could also burn in the left side some, but I liked that it was lighter from the window light.  I flattened the image.

I used the crop tool set to 11 inches wide, 14 inches high, 240 resolution and cropped the image.

I wanted to sharpen the pears a bit, so I duplicated the background layer and used the Unsharp Mask filter to add a tiny bit of sharpening.

Tomorrow I will post the second part of this tutorial (the fun part!); adding the textures.

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop Actions or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

CoffeeShop Tutorial: HDR & Double-Exposure Fun on your Phone!

I follow the Kevin & Amanda blog because Amanda is always posting great photos of her adventures and food. She also has great free fonts and informative product reviews.  I want to hang around with her for a weekend, she sounds so fun!

I was inspired by this post to download the Pro HDR app for my iPhone (it is also available for the Android). I usually don't buy apps but this one sounded neat and was only $1.99.  The app takes two photos (one exposes for the light, one for the dark) and then combines them.

So I brought my iPhone and the boys to the park this morning and took some photos with my normal iPhone app  and compared them to ones taken with the Pro HDR app.  And the HDR ones were pretty cool!  This would be a great app to use for landscapes/cityscapes.

I really hate editing on my phone because the photo is so tiny and I have old eyes, so these edits were a little over-saturated/red for my taste.  You can make several adjustments to the image before saving it, but once saved can't be altered unless you remember to save the original.  Next time I will try to not add so much color/red.

You have to hold your camera really still because there is a lag between the two shots so I sometimes had some blurring.  But this lag gave me an idea.  I started thinking that it would be fun to do some double exposures with the kids.

I found a shaded area and posed the kids, told them not to move and started the Pro HDR app. Immediately after it took the first image, I told them to run and I captured this image.  It is not perfect (and a bit spooky); you can see through the boys in the original pose, but I like it!

I cropped it in Photoshop and ran the CoffeeShop  Velvet Ash action and burned in the edges.  I love this edit!

I took another one.  This time you can really see I was moving too much while taking the photos (probably screaming at the boys...), but unless it is printed large it is not that noticeable.

I processed this one in-camera with Instagram.  It looks really sketchy, but I love it!  I think it looks very artistic.   Isn't that what you say when you take a technically bad image and run it through some filters ;-)? But this would be really cute printed small and hung on the wall or fridge.

The key to take these types of double-exposure shots is finding an area with consistent lighting.  If there are areas that are really bright and areas that are shaded, your subjects might disappear completely in one blown-out or darkened exposure.  So you will only have one pose in your HRD image. Believe me, I had to take quite a few images to figure this out.

I will write a tutorial next to show you how to do this using your real camera and Photoshop or PSE. It is really easy using layer masks.

It was really hot this morning at the park so the boys were covered in sweat and I had to promise them donuts...  Poor kids.  I tried to tell them that their hard work in the park keeps me from having to work outside of home but at that point they would rather be anywhere where there was air conditioning...

Hope you had fun with this little tutorial!  Phone cameras won't replace our real cameras (at least in the near future), but they are great for snapshots and can even be used for artistic small prints.  I also have the Camera+ app (like it) and the Camera360 app (don't use it much, but like it).  I still love Instagram the most for my in-camera filters.

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop Actions or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.