I learned this neat border trick from Caryn Esplin’s book, Custom Images. To get this effect, I set a black mask over the image and a white layer behind, then I used white on an assortment of thick, heavy brushes to “paint” the image back in, leaving the white background layer to show through as a border. I really like the effect that the lowered opacity on the brushes gave me. I’ll definitely be using this again. This is the original image: This is another neat border technique, and a relatively simple one at that. I just duplicated the layer, set it to multiply, and then used the rectangular marquee tool to delete the center, leaving behind the darkened edge. I then applied a 10px stroke in a light lavender color and duplicated the multiply layer to darken the border even more. It ended up being too much so I scaled down the opacity on the second multiply layer. And, voila! This isn’t one of my favorite images, but I think the border helped salvage it, along with several other edits made in camera raw. The original is below: This border effect was more complicated than the others, only because I’ve never used the rectangle tool. I started by cropping it and then adding to the canvas to get the white border. Then I added a white rectangle using the rectangle tool, and masked out part of it using a black rectangle tool. I applied a motion blur to the inner border and lowered the opacity of the layer to soften the border. The original: This is a really elegant framing technique Caryn Esplin learned from Scott Kelby and shared with the class. I created the template by using the rectangle tool to create black “windows,” and then I posted the photo over the template and converted it into a clipping mask. I finished it off by adding my logo on the bottom. The image is a variation of the light painting I posted...
Read MoreNight and Light
This is a light sketch! I set my shutter speed to 6 seconds with a two second timer. I had to turn the lights on to get the camera to focus, take the shot, and then quickly turn off the lights and starts rapidly “drawing” in the air with a small LED flashlight as soon as I heard the shutter click. I was trying to draw Navi for The Legend of Zelda so I deliberately was trying to draw wings and ended up with this. I wish I’d had a flashlight with more focused light so I didn’t have to point it right at the camera to get light trails, bu ah well. As it was, I had to go to six neighboring apartments looking for flashlights and AAA batteries. I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop Elements to remove the speck of sensor dust from the image. I recruited my roommate Brit to help set up and light this scene. Most of the beautiful things in this image belong to her. It took several shots to decide where we wanted the light. I sat by the table manning the camera, while she turned of the light and used a tiny pocket light to illuminate the scene. the greenish light on the mask was caused by Brit shining the light through the glass candy dish on the left. I used a very subtle Gaussian blur in Photoshop elements to soften the whole image, and added a shadow vignette to add more mystery to the photo. If I didn’t know any better, I’d look at this image and think it was made in Photoshop simply by dragging a white brush over a black canvas–but it’s actually a camera motion shot! I pointed my camera at the moon, took the shot, and used my 2.5 second window of time to “draw” the shape by rapidly moving the camera. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I had to “draw” the heart shape upside-down in order to get it to appear right-side up in the image. It took a lot of trial and error to figure that out. It still amazes me that the light looks so crisp! For editing I merely cropped it in...
Read MoreBannack Best
I loved the dramatic shadows on this shot. I bumped up the saturation and lowered the exposure in camera raw, and then I experimented with the “cappuccino” setting in a sepia toning action made by ~paranoidstock on deviantart.com. It turned out far too dark, so I manipulated the hue and saturation levels and turned off one of the adjustment layers to get the effect you see here. This is an organ in the doctor’s house. When I think of organs I think of the massive one in the Salt Lake City Conference Center, so this was particularly interesting to me. The doctor that once owned this old house must have been a music lover, because his home hosted not only an organ but a piano as well. This might be my favorite shot of the whole trip. I used camera raw to lower the saturation and add a shadowy vignette. This gavel and top hat were laying on a table near a window in the Masonic Temple. The park ranger told us that the identification numbers used for this sect of the Free Masons was used to denote vigilantes. Law and Order, wild west style. I snapped this shot while the model was posing for another photographer. I liked her wistful gaze. I used Camera Raw to reduce the saturation. The detail on the window of this church was the first thing that really caught my eye when I entered Bannack. I got this photo of it as we were leaving for the day. I used camera raw to deepen the shadows, blacks, and whites, and added a vignette to get more...
Read MoreBannack HDR
I shot this image using my camera’s bracketing settings, which captured the image at three different exposures. I used Photomatix to compress them all together. The result: I decided to go for a more realistic approach when choosing the settings for my HDR, rather than the surrealistic style that seems to be pretty popular. I just wish I’d thought to use a gold reflector to get just a little rim lighting on the right edge of the bottle. I took this picture near the very beginning of the visit, when I was still trying to figure out which camera settings to use. I originally saw this as a throw-away image because it was so bright, but I thought I’d try to salvage it using a one-shot HDR process. I used Camera Raw to create two other versions of this image (one far too dark, and one evenly exposed but flat) and then put them all into Photomatix at let it work its magic: The colors are much better! The image is still a little lifeless (get it? Because it’s a Ghost T…nevermind) but it’s a vast improvement over the original! I added a dark vignette to help frame the...
Read MoreBannack: Macro Abstract
This was the spookiest thing I encountered at Bannack Ghost Town by far. It appears to be a cross-section of a bone. It was about five inches across, so it was far too large to be human, but what made it spooky to me was the partial exoskeleton of the bee clinging to the left edge. It reminded me of the opening sequence of the television show Ghost Whisperer. Suiting, no? I should also add I found this in the windowsill of the yellow-door house where several children supposedly died while in quarantine for illness. I wonder how secure these old door handles were. I didn’t think to look at the time, but I wonder if you can actually see through the locks, because I read that frequently in books. That never made sense to me as a child since modern locks certainly cannot be seen through. This is an experimental Abstract macro. I blended “Skeletal” with “Locked Away” using the Linear Light blending mode. The texture of the bone lends an interesting surreal look to the...
Read MoreBannack: Near and Far
At the end of town I found a little green house with a fascinating assortment of objects inside. The door was locked so I couldn’t go inside, so I aimed my camera at the window and tried to take a shot through. I noticed as I adjusted my focus that the room inside was completely obscured by the dust on the window pane when I used shallow focus. I liked the texture of the dust on the glass. No edits. This is what the room looked like inside, with a deep focus through the haze of dust on the glass. There was so many things inside it looked more like a storage shed than a living room. I like the old typewriter on the shelf on the left, and the set of crutches that can just barely be seen on the...
Read MoreBannack: Action Freeze and Ghost Blur
This is one of the last photos I took on the trip. I saw this peanut butter coated pinecone swinging lightly in the breeze and remembered I needed a photo showing frozen action. I swung the string higher to get a more dynamic shot. The birds were irritated that I denied them their treat for a few minutes. Once I moved away they happily flocked around again. This was a fun and tricky technique to try. I had to set my shutter speed extremely low and ask Meg to hold her pose for half the time, then quickly scramble from the shot while the other model helped perfectly still the entire time. The result was this ghost shot.” Because the slow shutter speed made the image extremely bright, I lowered the exposure, darkened the shadows, lowered the clarity, added dark vignette, and then used the adjustment brush in camera raw to raise exposure on the “ghost,” giving her a soft, eerie...
Read MoreBannack Portraits
For our “Bannack Shoot-Out,” all of the Digital Imaging students rotated through different stations setup at the Bannack Ghost Town barbershop and the Hotel Meade. Each station featured a different model in period clothing and different types of lighting. I worked in manual mode for the whole shoot-out, so I learned a lot about my different camera settings. For this shot my primary light source was a window. There was supposed to be a speedlite and umbrella, but they weren’t going off when I shot this photo. I thought about warming this photo up by increasing the saturation, but I decided I liked the look of the cool wintery light. Meg was a great model. I loved the way her satin dress fit her. In contrasted beautifully with her somber surroundings in the Bannack barbershop. My lighting was a large window. I struggled to get good shots of this model; I think my camera settings were ill-suited. My main source of light was the window, but this station also had a gold reflector to the model’s left. I cropped this photo to frame it better, reduced the highlights and whites, and boosted the saturation and vibrancy. This model had two huge lights to illuminate her. In fact my image turned out way too bright, so in Camera raw I darkened the shadows and blacks, lowered the exposure and contrast, and added a shadow vignette. I love the way the light on her hair looks so much like sunlight filtering through a window....
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