Lucid Light
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  • May24th

    10.5 Months.

    Posted in: Childhood

    Gratuitous baby content ahead.

    Aiden, 10.5 months old!

    Aiden, 10.5 Months old.

    Baby tears

  • May22nd

    Here’s some favorites from Chris & Betty’s wedding. They’re a fun couple and had probably the greatest Irish blessing I’ve ever heard given by a guy who looked just like my Grandpa Kinsley (which was kinda bumming me out and making me smile simultaneously.)

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    Chris & Betty

    I have some show pics from the New Wave Cafe show last weekend to do and an engagement session next weekend! Gotta love the busy season!

  • May20th

    Had a quick shoot at Stephen & Co. yesterday to grab an outdoor pedicure shot for an advertisement in SOCO magazine this summer. My model was my stylist’s daughter, who has dimpled you could fall into and a beautiful smile. She did great. My most favorite smile unfortunately fell to poor composition from me, I amputated the bottom of her heel and have been beating myself up about it since yesterday. I will bear my horrible screw-up to you, blog readers, because I need some accountability for my mortal photography sins.

    Ad favorite #3

    Ugh. Way to suck, Pam. BUT I did get these other two that are better composed and still pretty. For all of these I had a 3/4 CTO gelled flash behind a shoot-through umbrella to camera right. We were in 9am daylight, in complete shade.

    Ad for Soco favorite #2

    Ad for Soco favorite #1

    I also was assigned to get a new shot of the front of the salon. I saw the older one in ads before and it was shot in seriously harsh light, portrait orientation and tight on just the front door. I did the complete opposite. Complete morning shade with the sun just about to come over the roof so it backlit the trees really nicely, landscape orientation and got the whole salon in the frame. I tried to get some nice greenery framing the shot. I had my lovely assistant hold my flash, still gelled, over a puddle to light up that sign on camera right. I’m pretty happy with it.

    Salon Front

    Now I’ve got to get back to editing Chris and Betty’s wedding photos! More on my first wedding shoot later. Wedding photography: not for the easily stressed letmetellya. ;)

    OH! Almost forgot, you can head over to http://www.stephenandcompany.com and see my shots up on their brand new website! There’s a few that are not mine, the group shot on the main page isn’t me though I think I’m doing their next one, there’s a few stock photos here and there and obviously the old salon front shot isn’t me but the rest are! Yay!

  • May4th

    I have had gray cards forever and never bothered to use them, dumb idea!! These things are great!

    A gray card is just that…a gray card. The color is a “medium gray” according to your camera’s reflective light meter. I’m not very science-minded so you’ll have to do a quick google for complexities beyond that but what I do know is that if you implement this little bugger in photography where color correctness is key (which is like, most photography) like food photography.

    Knitting is a major hobby of mine aside from photography, I’m just as obsessive about fiber as I am about photos. Both are expensive hobbies that cause my husband’s eyes to glaze over when I talk about.

    When I post my WIPs (that’s works in progress for you non-knitters) to Ravelry (biggest/best knitting community evar) I really hated putting that “color isn’t exact” disclaimer in the notes on my project pages. I see your eyes glazing over photogs, stay with me! Yarn color is a big party of the creative process when you select a pattern to knit, so I want to show it off right!

    Here’s the sample image, I used the eyedropper white balance tool in Adobe Camera Raw CS4 to get the proper slider numbers…

    Knitting with gray card (color corrected)

    And here’s the color correct photo. I used the numbers I got from the eyedropper white balance in ACR and set a custom white balance:

    Knitting with color corrected

    And here’s the straight from the camera jpeg for comparison:
    (with my camera set to Auto White Balance)

    Knitting with SOOC w/auto white balance

    Here’s another example where the difference is even more striking. Food is another form of photography that I can never seem to get “perfect” with AWB or even the sliders in Lightroom/ACR.

    Sample image, corrected with the eyedropper clicked onto the gray card:

    Pizza with the gray card

    Corrected image…yum…(that’s sun dried tomato pizza btw):

    Pizza with correct WB

    And the SOOC jpeg on AWB:

    Pizza SOOC w/Auto WB set

    Pretty cool, eh? I think I’ll be using cards more often!