Senior picture time
I do intend to finish my trip journal at some point… and I also plan to get through my trip pics… somehow. All 36 GB of them. I will. Honest.
Anyway, in the meantime, I had the privilege last Saturday of going down to Old Sac to meet up with a former student (he’s attending a different school for his senior year) to take his senior pictures. I think we spent most of the time making fun of each other, but all in all, it went pretty well. I’m not done with the post-processing yet, but I wanted to toss up a couple that I liked from towards the end of the shoot.
I had so much fun with the light — I couldn’t have asked for better portrait-taking conditions. :-)
We interrupt these trip pictures to bring you a magazine cover!
Back in May, I got my first paid photography job — photographing some San Francisco-related things for a cover and the cover story for the magazine The Bourbon Review. Go me! Here’s a link to the article (opens a PDF)–the pictures on pages 1, 4, and 6 are mine, as is the shoreline one on page 5. SWEET!! Many thanks to Josh, who offered me the chance to do this!! :-)
Summer 2010 cover. Josh, is this where I get in my dig about being right about lining the picture up horizontally rather than vertically? ;-)
“…Her eyes as clear as centuries/ Her silky hair was brown…”
My post title is from a Paul Simon song that I’ve liked for years… it somehow seemed to fit for my coworker’s lovely daughter, whom I was privileged to be able to take pictures of a couple of weeks ago. Kristin, she’s beautiful. :-)
The aforementioned eyes. :-)
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She looks like she's using the flower to hide a grin. I love it. :-)
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I love baby feet -- they're just so dern cute! I was trying to get them to make a heart shape, but she wasn't having any of that. :-)
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And don't even get me started on how stinking cute that dress was. OMG. :-)
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So many good pictures that I don’t even know where to begin
[By the way, yes, I know this post broke the main page of my blog. I have no idea what's wrong, and this has been an ongoing problem, but I'm trying to get a ninja to help me out with it. Grrrrr.]
Here are the last of the pictures from Thursday’s photo shoot — the full gallery is here. I love all of these pictures. Thanks again for letting me take them, Holly! :-)
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I want to eat his cheeks
Holly is a friend of mine from… well, it’s kind of a long story, but she grew up in Davis (just outside of Sacramento) and went to Cal Poly at about the same time as me, and now she and her husband live just outside of London. Anyway, last summer she and her husband generously offered to host John and I at their flat for eight days, and as a thank you, I told her that when they came out to visit her family, I’d love to take some pictures of their son.
It’s tough to have such a cute model. I mean, I didn’t even want to take pictures–I just wanted to make him smile and giggle and pinch his cheeks. Even now I’m dying of the cuteness as I post this picture. Holly and Simon, you have one heck of a cute kid. :-)
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They grow up quickly
I love taking pictures of people’s kids, and it’s been a privilege to take pictures of my coworker Laura’s granddaughters several times over the past year. As I was working on processing the most recent batch from right before Easter, I was struck by how much the girls had grown up. I mean, I know that’s what little kids do… but when I don’t see them except to take their pictures, it’s neat to me to look at what I’ve taken and see that growth.
Chrissy, 12 months
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Chrissy, 26 months
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Lily, 10 days
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Lily, 11 months
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Chrissy and Lily, May 2009
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Chrissy and Lily, April 2010
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Before and After
I don’t usually do much Photoshopping of the pictures that I take. I shoot in RAW and I post-process, but that’s only using Canon’s free Digital Photo Pro app, and usually the only thing I really do in there is sharpen and tinker with white balance.
But for the photo shoot I did of my coworkers grandkids a couple of Fridays ago, I knew I’d need more than just a couple of quick adjustments in DPP to get anything I was really happy with. The shoot’s conditions were less than ideal (rain caused a move indoors, I didn’t have a wide enough angle lens to capture two small moving objects in a small living room so I spent a lot of the shoot with my back pressed against the wall, and I suck at using my flash, but I didn’t have much of a choice since I was indoors and the lighting wasn’t great.)
Photoshopping these things was fairly time-consuming. I’m not that great with Photoshop to begin with, and I’m stubborn and picky, so a job I thought was going to take 3-4 hours instead took around 8. (But hey, I finally understand what curves are in Photoshop and how to use them! Go me!) in At 4:30 this morning I finally hit submit on the blog post prior to this and turned off my laptop, more or less happy with what I had (and slightly paranoid that I’d look at the pictures in daylight and realized I’d over-processed them… Hey, I’ve done that before!)
But as the day wore on, I glanced at them a couple of times, and I was still satisfied with what I’d come out with, so I decided to post a few before and after pictures just so y’all could see just how bad they were when they came off the camera compared to the final product.
I don’t normally openly solicit comments on here, but if you wanted to comment on this particular post about what you thought worked and didn’t, please do. :-) After this post, I’ll have one more post with pictures from this shoot, and I have kind of a fun one planned for that. So stay tuned… whenever I get around to it. :-)
Click the link for more…
Sisterly love
IMG_5566-2, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
This was the last picture from my photoshoot of my coworker’s granddaughters during spring break. Shortly after this, hunger- and naptime-induced meltdowns ensued. I love this picture, though. :-)
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I really need to learn how to use my flash
Pic from today. I call it “mistake with fill flash.”, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
I’ve got a great flash–Canon Speedlite 430ex. The problem lies in the fact that I really don’t know how to use it. I can muddle through the settings well enough when I have time, but when I’m in a pressured situation (say, like when I’m working with a hungry two-year-old and it’s cold and rainy and windy outside) I’m not nearly as careful as I should be. Hence the reason I have 15 shots from a photo shoot today that look similar to this. Sigh.
Believe it or not, they were actually worse–I shoot in RAW, thankfully, so I underexposed this as much as I could and tinkered with the contrast and stuff. But still… it’s a LOT more high-key than I like.
Oh well. Live and learn, right? I’ll have some other, BETTER pics from this shoot later on. :-)
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I caught you a partridge, but I eated it
In case you don’t get the reference in the post title, it’s this internet meme.
A veterinarian friend of mine is holding a 12 Days of Petmas roundup on her blog, and I volunteered to take Day 4 (4 calling birds, in case you don’t remember the song.) So this evening I decided to take some pictures… I’m not sending her this one, but it’s my favorite of the outtakes… The aftermath.
Cat + Christmas Tree = bad news. The white thing he's munching on is a twin of the white bird in the foreground.
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So much for that partridge in a pear tree.
Beautiful Baby
A couple of things of note:
1.) I actually wrote this post last week, but it broke my website, so I took it down.
Well, it didn’t really break my website, but it broke the HTML, and everything was displaying all wonky. So I spent two hours beating my head against the wall and getting nowhere before finally giving up and writing the darn thing in Windows Notepad. Yaaay 1993. :-p
2.) While I’m writing this post on Thursday evening, you’ll actually be reading it Friday evening or later (I have it queued to autopost on Friday evening), when I’ll be on my first of the four legs of my trip to Rome! Whoohooo!! I’m taking my laptop, so I do plan to post at least a few pictures while I’m there. I’m going with two of my most favorite non-family-members ever — John and Joel! So if you see two weird guys in my picture, John’s the dark-haired one and Joel’s the towhead. And since I have two companions on this trip, maybe I’ll even get myself in a picture or two. :-)
Anyway, these pictures are from a fairly short photo shoot I did of a coworker’s granddaughter this past May — I’m still working on getting my backlog of pictures from last spring and summer onto this website.
As a sort of experiment, I’m going to post large versions of a few shots I like, and underneath next to somewhere near them I’ll post clickable thumbnails of the same picture edited a couple of different ways with regards to color. I’m kind of partial to the low-saturation and black+whites shots myself (the low-sat ones have kind of an antique look that I really like), but it seems like other people I’ve shown them to prefer the more saturated ones. But this is why I solicit opinions — it’s nice to get a feel for what other people like. :-)
As always, click for larger versions. :-)
Finally finished these pictures
Ok, so I’m a bit more tardy than I said I’d be on getting the rest of the pictures posted that I took of my coworker’s daughter. (Yes Kristie, those Annie pics are next on my list!) :-) I wanted to be able to put some time into finishing them, and I finally had that time today, and I’m pretty darn happy overall with how they turned out. Here’s a few more, and click here if you want to see the gallery with all of the pictures in it.
Bored of the whole process already
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Loving hands
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Curled up in her daddy's arm
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Daddy's girl
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Look what the Easter bunny brought!
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Mama's hand
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Teensy eensy baby
Today I ventured out in the pouring rain to take pictures of the newborn daughter of one of my coworkers. Sydnee arrived on March 27th, a couple days short of month early (Amy, correct me if I’m off on that) and was not quite five pounds at birth. She’s the tiniest baby I think I’ve ever held, and it’s hard not to get all squishy at something that little and cute.
As a result of my squishiness, and her cuteness, I took way too many pictures… 822, to be exact. Whoops. So the following pictures are a few I pulled out so that y’all could see an absolutely beautiful girl, and I’ll have to finish narrowing them down (I’ve got it down to 150 now, and I’m shooting for no more than 40 total) and post the rest when I get back from visiting my family this weekend.
Sydnee and her parents
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Sydnee and her mom
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Daddy's girl
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Teensy feet
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The Easter bunny came a bit early this year!
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Sleeping
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More snowboarding pictures
Here are some more pictures from the ones I took on Saturday at Sierra-at-Tahoe. After spending pretty much the full day (and taking over 700 pictures) I’ve decided that I can safely strike “professional snow sports photographer” off of my list of potential careers. I spent most of the day crouched/lying in the snow with numb fingers and a slowly-soaking-through jacket and ski pants, waiting for people to come whizzing by me on the mountain, and I also spent a fair amount of time tromping through deep snow in my ski boots (contrary to the song, those boots are *not* made for walking!) and sliding down icy slopes that I was trying to climb up so that I’d have a good vantage point. I also have tree sap in my hair… don’t ask.
Over the past couple of weeks, knowing that this trip was coming up, I spent quite a few hours researching how to take good snow sports pictures, as well as going through various Flickr galleries and finding pictures with available Exif data. Exif data is information that most newer digital cameras (including my cameraphone, oddly enough) embed in the picture file. It contains various information about the camera’s settings when the picture was taken – what type of camera and lens were used, the shutter speed, aperture, focal length, what program (if any) was used to edit the image, and some other stuff. On Flickr, you have the option to make the Exif data publicly viewable, and it actually kind of irritates me when people don’t – for me, looking at other people’s Exif data has been a great way to learn how to set up pictures. I guess the photographers must be worried about some sort of artistic infringement, but I still really don’t get it. Anyway, to see it on Flickr, go to a picture’s page, and on the lower right side of the picture, under “additional information”, you should see something that looks like this:
EXIF data on Flickr.
Click on where it says “More properties”, and that link will take you to the picture’s Exif data. I always keep mine publicly viewable – click here to see an example.
As I was looking at Exif data for the pictures, I noticed a lot were taken with a wide-angle lens. Since I wanted to try one out anyway, I went ahead and rented one. I’ll post a full review of the lens in another week, after the rental period is up, but in short, I ended up using my 70-200 telephoto a heck of a lot more (and I think those pictures came out a heck of a lot better.) If I’d been a bit bolder, I might have stuck to my wide-angle lens and just gotten closer to the action, but I almost got run over once just when I was crouching on the sidelines (a woman lost control and careened off-trail and down the slope I was lying on – she was fine but it took a couple years off of my life!) so I wasn’t about to get out there in the middle of things and let people go around me.
Overall though, I had an absolutely fantastic time – I think I had more fun taking pictures than I actually did skiing (especially after my unfortunate collision with the mountain!) and I’m really really glad I had the chance to do that. I never thought I’d take my camera out in the snow, but overall it survived (I had it and the lenses almost completely wrapped in plastic bags while I used them) and I had a ridiculous amount of fun and learned a lot. :-)
Ok, here are some pictures, and click here to get to the gallery with the rest of them.
Wide-angle lens shot. I love the sun in this one.
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I love the rays of the sun in this one, as well as the fact that this is one of the few where I managed to catch someone against just blue sky.
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I love this because it gives an idea of just how far these people were jumping. This was a HUGE jump. This wasn't even the whole thing! I also love the sense of depth perception, which is one thing I like about the wide-angle lens.
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This person did nail their landing (there's more pictures of this jump in the gallery.) Crazy.
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There's something I like about this one. I can't put my finger on it though. The sense of depth? The look on the guy's face? Or maybe it's his shirt...
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Click on this picture to see the large version--you can see the mountain reflected in his goggles!
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Did I mention that it was an absolutely gorgeous day? Because it really really was! On a side note, if I hadn't fallen, I wouldn't have seen the potential for this shot. So maybe some good came from my pain. :-)
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I love that he's sticking his tongue out in concentration.
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A skiier, a snowboarder, and someone who's apparently along for the ride. Weird.
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I'm soooo debating photoshopping out the entire ski lift in this one... I don't like doing stuff like that, but it bugs me on a fundamental level.
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I find this one amusing because it looks like he's about to land on the dude below. For what it's worth, he wasn't anywhere near close to that guy.
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Weekend fun: Sierra-at-Tahoe
Yesterday I met up with a coworker’s son, and we went up to Sierra-at-Tahoe to go skiing (me) and snowboarding (him). He’s a senior in high school this year, and his mom asked me to get some good pictures of him for a senior-picture type thing, and she paid for my lift ticket and rentals.
Well, I didn’t get in as much skiing as I’d planned… In fact, I really didn’t ski a whole lot. Part of it is that I was really tired yesterday (was out late on Friday) and I’m pretty out of skiing shape, and I also kinda sorta was going too fast and did a cartwheeling faceplant downhill into the mountain on my third run, which left me quite bruised and sore (and I’m still hurting today. Whoops.) But mostly, I was having a heck of an awesome time taking pictures of skiiers and snowboarders.
Tomorrow’s post will be with pictures that I took of other people, but for Laura today, here’s some of the pictures of her son. Click here for a gallery of all the pictures.
I’m still learning
This past weekend I got to go out and take pictures of a coworker’s granddaughter at a Sacramento-area park. The weather was beautiful (breezy and a bit cold, but still lovely) and the little girl was full of life and smiles. I went to Target and got a few inexpensive fun props to play with (a ball, a book, and a teddy bear) and then went out and had a TON of fun taking pictures. I looked at everything on the back of the camera… Beautiful. Totally awesome.
And then I got home. On my way into my house, I decided to stop in the neighbor’s yard–there’s been a couple of flowers that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of and kept forgetting to. I flipped on my camera and the back display came on automatically. Normally, I turn it off immediately to save battery, but this time I just happened to glance at it before I pushed the button to turn it off.
The ISO said 1600.
If you’re not familiar with ISO or the concept of film speed, let me quickly sum up. ISO is a measurement of how sensitive a piece of photographic film (or a digital camera sensor) is to light. The ISO on my camera ranges from 100 (the slowest) to 1600 (the fastest.) Typically, on a sunny day (like Saturday) shooting outdoors, one would shoot at ISO 100–there’s plenty of light to work with, so a slow film speed will allow nice, sharp, non-grainy pictures with good color saturation. Shooting at a faster ISO is good for lower-light situations or any time where you might need a faster shutter speed, because the pictures won’t come out (as) underexposed or blurry. The tradeoff, however, is that for the shutter speed to be able to go faster, the camera’s sensor can’t save as much information, and so the pictures lose saturation and come out grainy. While saturation is something that can be bumped up in post-processing, when the sensor doesn’t record as many colors to begin with, there’s just not much to work with, and so the color just isn’t as nice.
So anyway, yeah. ISO was set to 1600. Ever get that sinking feeling in your stomach, like you’re not sure if you want to cry or barf? Yeah, that was me. Literally, I got really cold all of a sudden. It’s not like this was a huge deal, but I’d had such a good time, and the pictures looked so great on the (teensy tiny) screen on the back of my camera, that this was a HUGE shock. Frantically I scrolled backwards through the pictures, and the feeling got worse. 100… 200… 300… I’d filled up the entire memory card (over 400 shots) from the morning’s session, and over 300 of them were at the wrong ISO.
Later on I figured out what’d happened. The button to change the ISO sits right in an area where it’s easy to bump it with my thumb. The first time you push it, it brings up the ISO menu. The second time you push it, it goes back one item in the ISO menu. Since 100 is the lowest and that’s what I had it set at, it went back to the end of the list, which is ISO 1600.
I went through quite a few emotions over the next 30 minutes or so, including door-slamming anger and mentally beating myself up for being so stupid as to not check my settings and notice. I mean, even if I keep the back display shut off, every.single.time I look through the viewfinder, the shutter speed is staring me in the face… It would have been a big fat clue, had I paid any attention to it.
Sigh. Live and learn, right? That’s what I figure, anyway. I know anyone who takes enough pictures pulls something like that sooner or later. So hopefully from now on I’ll be more paranoid/vigilant about that… because that just sucked. Oh, and I also managed to bump up the aperture (from 4 to 9) without noticing. I’d explain how I managed that one (I figured that out too), but it’s really not worth the explanation. Just another lame mistake.
Anyway, time for the fun part–some of the pictures, with a link to the gallery at the end of this post.
These first two are from before I messed up the ISO.
Smiley girl
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I love her impish face. She was having so much fun with the ball!
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The next ones are after I switched over to 1600. Notice that while the colors are bright, they’re much more contrasty, and the pictures themselves are rather grainy.
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Flower child. :-)
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Chomping on the ball...
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...and the bear...
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Happy little girl giggles
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Little feet
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Grandma snuggles. I think that of all of the pictures, this is my favorite one. :-)
[Click here for a gallery of more pictures]
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