Earlier this month I told you about being 'published' in the Montreal guide by Schmap. Well I have now been published again, this time in the Chicago guide. You can view my photo in the guide here. I am pretty happy with having another one of my photos used though I am not sure it has brought any more viewers to my Flickr page.
Read more...While over on I Heart Faces the other day I read about a really interesting year-long project. It is called 100 Possibilities and essentially you find an object and create 100 photographs of it that are completely different from one another. I really want to do this project and start is as soon as possible, but am having a really hard time finding an object that I want to use. Ideally it would be rather small (and therefore portable), but not too small that photographing it would always require a macro sort of setting. I am going to look around where I am now and hopefully I will find something that will work, otherwise it may need to wait until after my vacation is over - which will kind of suck.
Read more...
Right before the snow hit, Dave and I took a walk down near Prince of Wales in Ottawa (actually right near the CHEO Dream Home). There is a little nature path there that was really quite nice. Dave jumped off the bridge and down onto the rocks and let me take a few photos of him, which is really quite rare for him. I really want to go back here once the weather is warm again as there was a bridge extending the path onto the islands in the middle of the water that was closed for the season.
A while back Chris posted about Grotesque images on her blog - the image she used was one she found on the net of Obama transformed into a lizard creature. I found the image rather unsettling and can still barely look at it. Nonetheless, when I came across some texture images on the net the other day, one of the first things I thought of doing was 'grotesquing' an image I had taken.
The above image is one I took of Chris about a year ago for an assignment at Algonquin. I thought of using this one as one of the textures I had was a bark like material (aka bark) and I thought it might look like she was adsorbing the bark onto her skin.
I have run it past Chris and gotten the okay to post it, even though she thinks it is really creepy. I on the other hand, have gotten really desensitized to it as I have been staring at it for so long.
I don't know if I will be doing many more of these images, as the technique would be pretty much the same for all of them (with little variance) and I think I have gotten the hang of it pretty well here.
This week's photo contest over at I Heart Faces is texture. I have decided to go a more natural route and am submitting a photo from about a year ago of Chris.
Over on I Heart Faces they have a weekly feature called Fix It Friday. They give their readers a photo to fix-up. Every reader is able to fix the same photo and I think it is really neat to see the different approaches and end results. This was the original image:
First I cropped closer to the children and cloned out the truck on the right hand side. I then went into curves and pulled the left hand side in to make it a little darker.
I then created a desaturation level and applied a mask to allow the colour of the swings show through but nothing else. I increased the contrast and sharpness as well.
I then created another one using the same techniques, but with a more interesting crop.
Another shot from my fifth assignment in the composition and design course at Algonquin College aptly named by Christine Sweeton. I have been playing around in Photoshop, like I tend to do in my spare time and am spending a fair bit of time trying to learn the ins and outs of a feature called Duotones. We were shown it in the first class of the second Photoshop course offered at Algonquin and I was really interested in it. Basically, you take a grayscale image and add inks to it one at a time. You adjust the intensity of the inks you apply the same way you would adjust the lighting via curves so that part of it is familiar at least. You can have one ink (monotone), two inks (duotone), three inks (tritone) or four inks (quadtone) applied to an image.
The first image here is one I took way back in 2008 while in London, England. It is much more subtle then the below image from Chicago, taken last year. They are both quadtones (four inks applied) but obviously have different colours and intensities applied. The Easter Island image has three grays and a pink while the Chicago image has a black, blue, purple and pink applied in that order.
When using the Duotone feature you have to keep in mind that it is best to apply the colours from darkest to lightest. The logic wasn't explained to me by the instructor, just the rule. But it makes sense as the inks are applied almost like screens. If you place a darker screen over a lighter one you won't see the lighter colour at all.
I am far from perfecting duotones, as you can clearly see in the images I have done so far, but I like the effect it has and how it can range from subtle to in-your-face so easily. This is definitely something I am going to continue working with.
This is one of the family portraits I took of the Konings and I at Christmas. It didn't come out exactly how I had intended, but it still works.
Another shot from the 'guitar shoot' with Jess.
Jess and Jeff playing Wii Boxing during the Christmas celebrations.
Little Olivia loves the piano no matter what house she is in.Photoshop Beyond the Basics is the fifth course I have decided to take at Algonquin College. So far it is rather boring, but definitely has potential. We will be stepping out from the basic commands like different brush sizes, etc (as the course name implies) and into more complex ones like paths and channels, which I am looking forward to.
According to the Algonquin website(and course outline therein):
"Students expand their working knowledge of Adobe Photoshop using more advanced image manipulation tools. Students also learn to use Adobe Bridge and Adobe Image Ready programs located within Adobe Photoshop. Image manipulation, special effects and image enhancement techniques are discussed, demonstrated, and practised. Advanced Photoshop tools include colour correction using Curves, Channel/ Layer/Filter application techniques, device calibration, Scripts and Actions, Path/Pen tool as a selection tool, Advanced Text treatment and applications, Filter use and effects in creating 3D graphics."
To be honest, I am a little hesitant with this one as the last Photoshop course wasn't as magnificent as I thought it would be. It wasn't bad, and I definitely learnt a fair bit, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. We'll see what this course teaches me in due time.
I Heart Faces is "a photography site focused on the art of capturing faces and their various emotions. Each week, people from across the world have the opportunity to enter their favourite face photos into a themed photo challenge." The top ten get displayed on their homepage. I heard about it through the blogging grapevine and thought I would take a look. Turns out I have some decent 'face photos' (portraits) and have decided to take a shot and enter one this week. I have chosen an older photo of Olivia (Dave's youngest cousin). I don't expect to win as there are some really good shots already submitted and over 700 total entered so far - but it is something to do to try and get my name (and work) out there.
You may have noticed in the last three photos that my signature has changed. For the past two years it has been the same 'Stephanie Beach c 2008' (that's right throughout 2009 my signature stated 2008 on it). I tried to change it a couple of times, but for some reason I had lost the font on my computer and was no longer able to edit the text. I made the decision about a month ago that I would wait until 2010 to change my signature and not post any new photos until I had updated it.
Unfortunately I could not edit it as I would have liked as I am still running without Photoshop on my personal computer. It was edited enough to no longer say 2008, but will need at least one other edit to get to the stage I have in my head.
Anyway, to make a long story short, signature changed, will change again.
Another shot from the shoot I am calling the 'guitar shoot' with Jess.Over Christmas Dave's sister, Jess, asked me to take some shots of her playing the guitar for a class assignment she has. Essentially she wanted some shots of her playing, some of her writing some chords/music and some closeup shots of the guitar, etc.
My setup was pretty basic, but I was able to use almost all of my new lighting equipment; the Gary Fong diffuser for my on-camera flash, Nikon umbrella kit and SB-600. I took about 500 shots and quickly edited that down to 300 and then later down to 25 or so edited ones (+40 when you include the fact that I converted some into black and white).
I am really happy with the outcome of the photo shoot and I will obviously be uploading a select few shots to this blog, but I have uploaded all the edited and signed photos to Flickr, if you would like to view them all now.
Well kind of.
A little while back I got a message in my Flickr mail from the Managing Editor of a site called Schmap. Basically it is a map website with tons of information about tourist destinations - like Montreal. They wanted to use one of my photos for their 2010 guide to Montreal. This is the link to the page where you can find my credited photo, though you may have to hover over insectarium and go back three photos (or forward a bunch more than three). I gave them permission to use it as they not only credit the photo with your name, but they also link back to your flickr account where they found the photo.
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