Last month, I had the opportunity to travel out west to California to see some friends. These friends are also expecting their first child.
One of the gifts I wanted to give them were some photos taken before the baby was born. A day at the beach provided the perfect backdrop for this beautiful couple’s impromptu session. Below are just a few of my personal favorites. I am blessed to call these two friends and I can’t wait to meet their little one down the road!
When Pure Photoshop Actions blogged a tutorial on getting snazzy Christmas tree photos, I knew I had to try it. Like most people at the holidays, I love staring at pretty lights and shimmery, glittery decorations.
I pulled out the tripod and experimented with apertures of f/16, f/20, and f/22 at different distances from the tree using a 50mm lens. While f/16 (the recommended aperture by Pure Photoshop Actions) did indeed deliver some beautiful starbursts from the lights, f/22 elongated the points even more, making them more dramatic.
Below are my final edits (all tweaked in Lightroom, no actions needed). It was really hard to pick a favorite – I love both the colors and the beautiful antique look from the black and white conversions.
Note: I don’t have a formal living room, fireplace, mantel, etc. The tree is in our little front room so the surroundings with the window blinds and lamp are just kind of there, despite my efforts to dim them (else they’d look really bad).
To see larger versions of some of the photos, check my Flickr account.
Happy happy, merry merry!
Howdy ho!
In honor of it being December 1 and the holiday season being in full swing, ZV Image Creations is offering a discount on gift certificate purchases!
This means you’ll get more bang for your buck and the person for whom you buy the gift certificate still gets the top notch quality service I provide to all clients and customers. It’s win-win-win.
All the nitty gritty details for this fantastic deal are below:
This is my submission for Rock the Shot’s November photo challenge: family! Not only is this family comprised of sweet people but there’s something I love about their green door in the background. It’s just so homey. And their baby daughter may not be looking directly at the camera but you can tell she’s enthusiastic.
The term “kit lens” seems to be a four-letter word in the photography industry.
Granted, it’s not the fanciest glass one can strap to a DSLR, but I think they get a worse rap than they deserve. They’re a far cry from a piece of hazy plastic we used to look through on those throwaway cameras wrapped in cardboard.
So what is a kit lens? It’s one that is usually included with the purchase of a DSLR camera that will specifically fit the camera body and work best within its parameters. Crop sensor cameras (the Rebel series in Canon, for example, or a D7000 in Nikon) are usually the ones that come with a lens which will only work on crop sensor bodies, and so “kit lens” oftentimes refers to these, rather than just any lens that comes with the purchase of a DSLR camera body (full frame or not).
Personally, I still use my 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens and I have gotten some lovely bokeh and shots with it. It’s not the gear but how one uses it. It takes some practice to find your groove with any lens in your bag; having shot quite a bit with this particular one, I wanted to showcase a few of the photos I took with it and think are snazzy. See below.
If I were to give anyone with a new DSLR a piece of advice, it would be: don’t be so hasty to replace your kit lens! It will serve its purpose while you’re learning with a sophisticated piece of digital equipment.
I hope everyone had a fun and safe Halloween! To celebrate the birth of November, I wanted to make clients aware of the official ZV Image Creations gift certificates available for purchase, be it for someone’s birthday, the holidays, or any special occasion.
As the information on the card states, you can purchase one for any dollar amount and they are good for both portrait sessions AND photo gifts; this also applies to the shots available in Art for Purchase!
Aside from gift prints, here is just a sample of the photo products available:
Essentially, if you can put a photo on it, it can be made. Just ask! And of course I would be honored to shoot a portrait session for someone you love. Happy gifting!
Yesterday was the perfect day to take advantage of the sunny, autumn afternoon here in Illinois and have a photo session with a beautiful mother/daughter duo.
Daughter was dressed as a candy corn witch for Halloween and she was all too happy to pose for the camera. I daresay she was the director of our session – she’s a girl who knows what she wants!
It’s been hard to decide which photos to edit, much less to pick for the sneak peek. Needless to say, it was a fun-filled hour!
Happy (early) Halloween!
What to wear when you have a portrait session scheduled is one of the top most frequently asked questions for photographers. It’s easy to say, “Avoid bright, neon colors and graphic prints,” right? (Which I do tell clients.)
But below are perfectly laid out ensembles for a family–note that these items would be worn in cooler months. Pullovers can stay in storage during the summer.
There’s not only a cohesive look to this family’s wardrobe, but all of the colors are muted in some way – even the creamy shirt dress for a teen/tween girl. They will look less harsh in bright light, as well. Granted, these clothes aren’t going to be everyone’s style, and you should definitely be YOU in your photos.
This just gives you some good ideas for what to pull out if you’re scratching your head and wondering what is going to best represent you.
Pick something you love (but perhaps not that twenty-year-old tee-shirt) that will not only look great in your final edits (and complement hair and eye color, skin tone, etc) but will stand the test of time as you look back on your photographed memories year after year.
This lovely family and I met up at a local park last weekend and I snapped as many photos as I could for the thirty-five minutes the kids were willing to be photographed.
Turns out, there are quite a few lovely shots that came out of this session, and here is a sneak peek with five of those images. The little one with her red hair was a doll and the young man was cheerful with a silly streak.
All in all: fun!
Some of you who drop by this wee photo blog of mine may be aspiring photographers yourselves. If that is the case, this post is definitely for you.
In this digital era of ours, it’s sometimes easy to forget about the other other half of digital photography: post processing! What that really means is any photo editing software which can enhance one’s digital images that go from camera to computer.
Photoshop is not a new concept, of course, but there are tons of programs out there from which to choose, and it can be overwhelming. Personally, I use Lightroom and Photoshop Elements. The pros from whom I’ve learned were right when they said this is a very powerful combination of software tools. I have loved delving into these programs and taking my photography to the next level.
When starting to use photo editing software, it’s important to seek out those who can educate you. Adobe makes some very sophisticated software. Fortunately, there are gurus aplenty. One such guru of Photoshop actions (and I believe she’s diving into Lightroom, as well) is Rita from The Coffeeshop Blog.
Run don’t walk to her website! She is one of the kindest, most generous, talented gals out there. She designs fantastic actions to help photographers–amateur and professional alike–achieve the best possible edits to their photos. (She also has a plethora of frames and other web-ready templates.) If you don’t believe me, you can check out her Facebook Page, where thousands of people flock and post their pictures. I have done so myself.
If you don’t know what an action or a preset is, these are recorded settings that “play” in your preferred editing program and after the settings have been applied to your image, you can tweak from there. Actions are like an invisible photographer’s assistant, though I should stress the importance of tailoring the look to your own particular style. When left unmodified, photos can look awfully garish with too many actions run as-is on them.
Because learning such software does take time and patience to become comfortable in, it is so wonderful to have in-the-know folks like Rita developing actions for anyone to practice with. Personally, her Perfect Portrait and Baby Powder Room actions are staples of mine when it comes to portrait editing. They really help me achieve the exact enhancements I am vying for within each layer. I’ll post a before and after below.
As I’ve developed my style in post processing, I still try to remind myself from time to time to remember just how far I’ve come. I have much more confidence with my edits. Rita’s actions are f-r-e-e (100%!) but she does accept donations if you find her stuff useful. And believe me, once you start using her actions, it’ll be hard to stop.
Some photographers prefer not to use actions, as they like to do each little step by him or herself. And I think that’s great! Whatever works. For me, actions help me see what can be accomplished with my software tools; they give me an extra leg up when I otherwise wouldn’t have known what to do.
So thank you, Rita. This is my tribute post to you and your body of work.
The top photo is untouched, the bottom uses at least one action from Rita. Taken June 2011.
ZV Image Creations by Zoe Valentine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.