Eclectic Journey Photography

Me and My Kid(s) Project for 2012

2012-01-15T03:46:44Z

Are you someone like me? Do you prefer to take the photos rather than be in them? How many photos of yourself do you have from last year? And in how many of those are you with your kid?

If you avoid the camera like the plague for whatever reason your head may come up with, I think this will be a great project for you to undertake. No, I’m not suggesting a 52 week ~~ordeal~~ selfie (self-photo) project. Instead I’m offering something much more simple and much more doable: The Me and My Kid(s) Monthly Photo Project for 2012!

So what does this entail? The details are very simple. Every month you take a photo of you and one or all of your kids. That’s it! Easy peasy! And by the end of 2012, we will have at least 12 photo memories to share with our kid(s) as s/he/they get older.

How many photos do you have with your parents? I can count mine on one hand. :cry: So think of how wonderful a gift this will be for your family!

Here’s how to participate:

Take (at least) 1 photo each month of you and your child(ren) before the end of the month
Upload the photo to the EJP Me and My Kid(s) Project Album on the Eclectic Journey Photography Facebook fan page
Add the submission month in the comments for the photo
Look for featured submissions in the blog
Rock on until the next month!

Other places to add your monthly photos:

To the Me and My Kid(s) Project album on the Google+ EJP Page
To the Flickr Me and My Kid(s) Flickr group

I think this project will be incredibly fun for everyone. Won’t you join up?

I Am A…

2012-01-10T01:30:30Z

Joanna Ivey, Macy Gates liked this post

Clickin Moms, my home away from home, has a great project going on now to benefit RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organization. They call it the I Am A Photographer project, but it is really about sharing who you are apart from being a photog or a mom. You are to shoot a photo of yourself (or have someone else shoot it) holding a sign that completes the sentence, “I am a…” It can be serious or light-hearted. And for each submission, CM will donate $1 to RAINN.

I had so many possibilities swirling around my head for weeks, but it took until today, the final day submissions are being accepted, to land on the right one. The result is not fancy, but it is honest and real.

I strive every single day to be a better role model for my daughter than some focus-on-my-looks-must-appeal-to-a-man-someday-my-prince-will-come-to-rescue-me stupid Disney pink princess.

Thank you CM for starting such a great project!

Pimp My Pic #2

2012-01-02T05:40:49Z

Courtney Haynes Wurz liked this post

Welcome to the second edition of Pimp My Pic!

I’ve had such a cruddy holiday week off with my blood pressure being elevated, the kidlet being a major pill, and my dear husband practicing throat clearing and snorting as if he were preparing to compete in these events during the next Olympics. Even though I did receive my coveted 105 2.8 Nikon micro lens and a battery pack for the Precious, I’ve felt so awful that I haven’t done much in the photography realm. I had such big plans to get the 2012 kidlet and client calendars done, as well as finishing a product guide for EJP. Sigh… It did not happen.

But today on Facebook, I saw an image so adorable that I just had to broach my friend Tara about Pimping Her Pic! She had a fantastic shot of her daughter, Kaia, that needed a little pimping to bring out its full glory. So after I put The Pill to bed, I got to work.

Here is the original image of this adorable cutie pie:

Step 1: Importing into Photoshop

The first thing I did was to import the photo into PS. Initially this brings up the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) dialogue box. ACR allows you to make adjustments before the file is even opened in Photoshop proper.

What we notice here is that Kaia’s face is underexposed while there are blown (overexposed) areas in her hair where the sun hit (red highlights). Were I to venture a guess about why her face came out underexposed, I would say that the most common culprit is matrix metering. When you use matrix metering, the camera balances the exposure choice over the entire frame rather than knowing that you’d prefer HER to be adjusted for. And in a back/side lit situation like this, the camera usually gets it wrong. Using spot metering and metering on the skin of the subject is a way to get the subject’s exposure right in camera, though it will still take some manual adjustments in many cases.

Step 2: Adjust White Balance

Adjusting white balance in this photo was very tricky because there were few neutral color items that I could click on with the WB dropper tool to adjust the white balance. You look for neutral gray, or you can use white in a pinch. I ended up using the whites of her eyes, but still didn’t feel certain that I got the color correct. I knew I would have to do more skin correction later in PS.

Step 3: Adjust exposure

My goal here was to adjust the exposure for her skin tones and not worry about the background or the blown areas in her hair. As you can see above, I ended up increasing the exposure by a full stop (and I still wasn’t sure she was bright enough).

Step 4: Recovery

I used the recovery slider to get back as much of the blown areas in her hair as I could. I also added a little black for definition. I then opened the photo in Photoshop.

Of course when you fix underexposure so dramatically, you end up with a lot of noise in the image. I discussed this in the last PMP. So to fix this, I ran Noiseware at a low setting to reduce the grain that now appeared when you viewed the photo at 100%.

Step 5: Levels Adjustment

After running Noiseware, the first thing I did was to adjust the levels using a levels adjustment layer. If you look at the histogram above, you see that there was almost nothing on the far left (blacks/shadows), so I moved the black slider to where the histogram data started on the left (indicated by the blue arrow). This then made Kaia a little too dark, so I adjusted the midtone (middle) slider toward the darks (indicated with the red arrow), thus giving more room to the light side of the histogram (the right). We were looking better already!

Step 6: Brighten/lighten with Curves

I still felt that her face was not bright enough. So I added a curves adjustment layer and selected a point on her forehead to be the reference point for brightening. I pulled up the point slightly, but didn’t like what this did to the grass. So I ended up inverting the mask (making it black) and using a soft white brush to paint in the brighter area on her skin.

Step 7: Skin Color Correction

I’ll be the first to admit that skin color correction drives me mad. But if we look at the CYMK numbers from the spot on her forehead above, you will see that her cyan is 31%, magenta is 34% and yellow is 41%. That is not an ideal ratio. Yellow should be highest, and magenta less than yellow, but the cyan should be 1/4 to 1/3 of yellow’s value. As you can see we were way off.

I added a color balance layer and added more red to the midtones and highlights to get the cyan down. But I would have had to truly dial up the red in order to get the cyan down to 1/3 of the yellow. This led to a judgment call. I opted to settle for cyan being 1/2 of yellow rather than making Kaia the incredibly red girl.

We ended up with a cyan of 16%, magenta of 28% and yellow of 31%. And now she looks more alive! But the skin color correction did something very odd to the grass, so I masked that back with a black brush.

Step 8: Color Pop

One of the most fun tools you can use to give your image a little pop is to duplicate the background layer (or just use an unadjusted curves or levels layer) and set the blend mode to overlay, soft light or hard light. Overlay adds contrast, darkens your darks and lightens your lights. Soft light is a softer adjustment than overlay.

Above I wanted to show you where we started after color correction, and then after adding an overlay blend mode layer. As you can see, the overlay layer at 100% opacity is too, too, much! She looks neon colored. But when we pull the opacity down to 45% we get something more reasonable. So don’t let the 100% image scare you. You can adjust for as much or as little pop as you would like.

I find, however, that when editing young kids, I prefer the soft light blend mode to the overlay blend mode.

Above I added a curves layer and set it to soft light blend mode. I left the opacity pretty high at 80% because soft light isn’t as dramatic as overlay can be. I also used a technique to get rid of the yellow patches in the shadows (neck, chin). And now we are looking pretty darn good!

Step 9: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain!

The last bit of editing is slightly more advanced, but it took us a little beyond where we landed after the color pop. I brightened and sharpened her eyes a teensy bit and then also got rid of that dark blob above her head that was distracting. I removed a couple of facial ditzels and then sharpened for web. Sharpening always improves how your image appears on the web. It adds a hint of crispness.

Eh voila:

Pretty glorious, right? It even made a lovely black and white image too:

There you have it. Kaia’s picture is all pimped out!

This may all be a lot to take in, but feel free to pepper me with questions about anything I did in editing this image. And if you are interested in submitting your photo for Pimp My Pic, just send me an e-mail!

Anatomy of A Family Photo Shoot

2011-12-26T04:54:09Z

Hi Friends,

So here’s the question for the day: how many photos does it take to get the ideal Clark-Schecter holiday card picture? Now before you answer remember that this involves my being in front of the camera and not behind it. That added a degree of difficulty of about 200%.

What do you think?

If you chose any option other than the last choice, well, you must be one of those optimists!

Our first foray was on December 4th. I was going for a sun-going-down, golden hour look. It was unseasonably warm and the kid was cooperating. Honestly after that shoot, I thought I had nailed it then and there. Got some great shots. Rocked the backlighting. Of course when we had started, I had forgotten to tell Mason to take off his damn Transitions glasses! Those things have plagued me for years. I’ve spent way too long in previous years attempting to restore visible eyes behind those sun-darkened lenses.

But that notwithstanding, I was able to find some goodies. I then posted the ones I was considering for the card on Clickin Moms to get some feedback.

So I’m thinking to myself, these both look pretty good, if I do say so myself. Though I prefer the second one to the first because of Zara’s expression, I think the softness in our features from the backlighting might make it the weaker choice.

And then the feedback started to come in.

“Gorgeous shot, but that tree is too distracting,” one commenter said. From another: “I agree with the previous poster. Wish you had positioned yourselves differently.”

And I’m thinking to myself, OMG, there is a tree growing out of our heads. Am I mental? How did I not see that?!

The truth is that I had seen the tree but ended up at a loss about how to position us in relation to that tree. Somehow I thought that if there were three of us, it wouldn’t look as if the tree were growing out of all of our heads. But there is it, up close and personal. The tree IS growing out of our heads!

Other commenters attempted to assure me that those I would send the card to would not be nearly as distracted by the tree as we photogs are. Of course, by that point, I could see nothing in the photo BUT the tree! I decided to reshoot.

Unfortunately Saturday the 10th was nothing like Sunday the 4th. It was about 20 degrees colder and the ground was wet and mucky. The kid was cold and uncooperative and the hubby was surly because she was cold and he felt that I hadn’t dressed her warmly enough. I ended up rushing the shoot despite doing all I could to keep her in the warm car between set-ups. I then made the mistake of asking her to smile showing her teeth. She’d never had any problem with that in the past, but after getting back to my computer and uploading the images, I found that my kid must have decided that she was a beaver! I saw some of the most silly faces she has ever made.

I was so sad that night. What kind of photographer did I hope to be if I couldn’t even get a photo of my own family?! So my dear, supportive husband made me get right back in the saddle. The next day, he insisted in going out and doing it all over again. He’d dress Z in more layers and he would stop breathing down my neck in order to allow me to relax and do my thing. Of course Z ended up in one of her oppositional defiant modes again, but a total of 417 shots later, we had some good photos that didn’t have trees growing out of our heads!

Here are some of the outtakes:

Note the wonderful Transition lenses in these:

Yes, this still has the tree, but I love this shot!

So which photos made it to the card?

Front:

Inside top:

Inside bottom, flanking holiday message:

Back Panel:

Not so bad, despite all that work, right? I’m going to use these to make a canvas wall photo collection for the house.

But I do have to show you guys the beauty of digital editing, though. Now you all know that I’m massively huge these days thanks for my steroids. Even though I’m in a feel good about myself because fat is better than dead place, I still shuddered a bit at how round both Mason and I looked in these images. I opted to use a can-be-used-for-good-or-for-evil editing tool called liquify. Using this PS tool, I managed to give us a bit of a digital diet in some of the photos:

Before is on top and after below. We lost a good 20 pounds with the use of technology! Mason wanted me to go even further, but no. These tools cannot be used to suspend all connection with reality!

So there you have it, my friends. The fun of a family photo shoot when you are both photog and subject!

Hope your holiday was wonderful! Best to you in the new year!

The Little Running Man

2011-11-22T04:19:51Z

K Mason Schecter liked this post

Saturday morning was a treat. I headed out to do a family mini-shoot on a beautiful blue-sky morning.

Upon arriving, I was greeted by Kristine, Jason and my new buddy, William, who also became known during the shoot as The Little Running Man (or Running Guy, if you prefer!). You will soon see why he got that moniker.

But first, I’ve got to tell you how much fun it was to work with such a great family. I was a little sorry that it was a mini-shoot as I could have filled several CF cards with photos of this comely trio. And two-year-old William was so excited to head outside and take pictures with Mommy & Daddy. Sometimes the munchkins are shy or reserved. Not my Little Running Man. Such an adorable cutie pie!

We started with some relaxed shots on the deck to get started.

It soon became clear that William thought the best way for me to capture his essence was for him to run, run, run, and dare both me and The Precious (my camera) to keep up. Clearly he didn’t know how ancient I am, despite being the mom of a 4-year-old! But hey, I gave it my best.

We coaxed him back into position by giving him a special spot on the deck just for him. I got this one before he was off and running again:

It was so cute!

When we moved to the side of the shed for the next set-up, William decided it was truly on like Teflon! He became the Little Running Man in earnest.

Just too much!

Mommy & Daddy were able to corral him for a few nanoseconds for a very sweet shot:

Then we moved out front to our last location, where he ended up getting a lift from Mommy & Daddy:

(I totally love this shot and would kill for someone to take our family picture and have us look as effortlessly gorgeous as this family does. Though this would involve a generous application of Photoshop’s editing, de-aging, de-rotunding properties in our case! )

But they let him down and he was able to get his run on again:

A-ha, Mommy & Daddy, I have escaped your clutches and am now free to run again!

I did manage to get him to sit still for some amazing portraits. Oh the hair! The eyes! Watch out Jason & Kristine. He causes instant meltage of the heart.

Is there a better way to spend a Saturday morning than with a little running man and his family? I just don’t think so.

Look Before Depressing the Shutter!

2011-11-17T21:42:58Z

K Mason Schecter liked this post

This is a little lesson for all of us trying to balance the capturing of the moment with the antics of capricious children while avoiding turning our cameras back to auto mode.

It was a Tuesday in the summer. I had brought my camera with me to work because I knew that I’d be taking Z to Castle Park at the end of the day. I wanted to work on spot metering and getting my exposure nailed in camera since I had had a few snafus months before.

It had been ages since I had used my nifty-fifty lens (50mm 1.4G), so I had to get re-used to zooming with my feet, as it were. I shot what I could and what Z would allow, but then as we were leaving I saw this cool patterned crosswalk that I thought would look fabulous in a shot.

Now if I had a time-freeze button, I could have pushed it and taken the necessary time to scope out the best positioning and the best shooting angle in relation to the setting sun, other people, and the fact that it was a freaking cross walk that cars were crossing intermittently. But you can imagine that at the end of the day, with a cranky preschooler, I had no time-freeze button with which to avail myself.

It became a quick dance of positioning (No, Z I will not let any cars come near you, I swear!), framing, metering/focusing, and then pressing the shutter. This is what resulted:

Notice something besides the epic cuteness of my kid? Yeah, I screwed the pooch with the leading lines and the photos’ balance. It looks off, cockeyed, if you will.

Finally realizing that in all my quick prep I had failed to consider the overall balance, I moved my position a little and begged Z’s continued patience and captured this:

Ahh, now that’s a lot better for the eyes. Not so jarring. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better.

So this is a little reminder that you need to scan the scene fully before depressing the shutter, even in those I only have a second before my kid enters meltdown modes we often find ourselves shooting in. Your eyes will thank you!

Do Ya Like That Artsy Stuff?

2011-11-11T05:14:38Z

One of the interesting things for me along my photographic journey has been the way that I’ve grown to love some of the artistic styles I’ve been exposed to during these past few years. Yet the beauty of the art, as we know, often lies in the eyes of the beholder. And what happens when your client doesn’t dig your artistic vision? Or worse yet, sees your vision as a technical flaw? That can be an interesting situation.

It wasn’t that long ago that I could show a photo like this to my AdoringHusband:

And have him say, “Why isn’t she centered?”

He doesn’t say that anymore.

But even today, I can show him an image I love, like this one:

and have him say, “But I can’t see her face!” I then I try to explain that I was going for something different, yadda, yadda. It soon becomes like the old adage you hear about telling jokes: if you have to explain it after you’re done, then it just wasn’t funny. If I need to explain what I was going for in the image, then either I didn’t succeed, or I just didn’t succeed with my husband.

Yet it brings us back to the point about clients. There was a great discussion on a photography board today about how your artsy style might not be liked or appreciated by the client. In the example given, a photographer shot a wedding. In addition to the standard shots, she captured one that was backlit and had sunflare and haze. It was lovely and technically perfect. Yet some acquaintance on her blog commented, “how can you show such an image on your blog?! It’s overexposed!”

Now there was a beautiful and stylistically perfect image being thought of as being a bad shot. Ouch!

This type of comment/attitude is definitely in my mind as I work to refine my style. I didn’t appreciate sunflare, hazy and backlit shots until I got more proficient in taking them (and it is tricky, indeed) and recognized the ethereal, airy quality they possess. Yet again, I am concerned about a client thinking, why does she have this hazy shot in my gallery?! That should have been one of the rejects!

During this phase, I’ve been offering both the “hazy/backlit” and the “normal” versions of some images.

Haze:

No haze:

Haze:

No haze:

I can recognize and appreciate both versions, though I am starting to lean toward haze and backlight when the light is glorious and yummy like it was in the shoot above. Yet I wouldn’t want those tykes’ parents to look at the hazy shots and say, WTH was she thinking? Doesn’t she know how to take a sharp picture?

I’m getting to become more comfortable with my style, but I know that some people might be left scratching their heads…like my dear husband who looked at my silhouettes and said, “Well isn’t she a bit underexposed in these?”

“Yes, my sweetie, deliberately.”

“Oh,” he began, “I guess I don’t get it.”

You just gotta love him.

Glorious Girls

2011-10-27T02:42:40Z

Celeste Jones liked this post

Oh I’ve been so remiss in blogging my latest photo sessions! I’m going to be playing some mad catch up in the next few weeks.

But I had a shoot last Sunday that was so much fun! Two sisters aged 7 and 4 were the subjects of a glorious shoot at Lorimer Park. I just had to give the family a sneak peek of the images to come.

The elder daughter was quite the model. I think she would have posed for me until the sun set.

I was then able to coax the younger one out with her sister…that is, as long as her bear friend was allowed in the frame!

There are so many great shots from this shoot that I couldn’t contain my glee. I hope the girls’ family likes this little taste of their upcoming gallery.

Non-Crappy Vacation Photos

2011-09-09T02:42:03Z

JMe Lyn, Tara Karleen liked this post

Hi friends,

The family and I went on a little trip to Hershey, PA over the Labor Day weekend. And though I brought The Precious (my camera, for the uninitiated!), I didn’t want to get into too much photographer drama with good ol’ vacation snapshots. For goodness sake, I didn’t think I could run around Hershey Park staging shots with decent backgrounds or ask the roller coaster operator to slow the coaster down so that I could catch a decent photo of my kid on her first ride!

Instead I tried some new things that seemed to help me get many more keepers. Here’s my list:

spot metering (I got much better results in all the weird lighting that you can get in and out of rides)
prime lens (I returned to my nifty fifty prime lens over my zoom)
using dynamic area mode focusing rather than single area
back button focusing (that’s a topic for another post entirely!)
shooting in aperture priority rather than full manual (I worried about doing too much futzing in manual so I chose aperture priority and used exposure compensation when the exposure wasn’t where I wanted it to be)
cranking up the ISO for low light (Flash? Nah! And who worries about noise when there are so many good noise reduction programs out there?!)

Here are some of the goodies:

Focus isn’t nailed in this one but I really loved her expression the first time the ride dropped!

First taste of cotton candy!

What’s your greatest challenge with vacation shots? (besides keeping sand out of the camera!)

My Other Daughter (& Her Beautiful Family)

2011-08-30T16:51:27Z

Christine Seung-Lee, K Mason Schecter liked this post

Most of you have seen thousands of pictures of my daughter Zara, but many of you didn’t know that I have another daughter, Jackie. Jackie is the daughter of my heart, if not my “legal” daughter.

I met Jackie way back when she was 17 years old and first saw me as a patient. She has since grown into a beautiful, smart, and successful woman: a finance guru, wife and mother of two phenomenal children. She’s the type of woman you hope your daughter will become.

When I heard that my dear daughter was planning to take her kids to Sears for updated pictures, I think my head exploded. She assured me that this was not meant as an insult to my “art,” but was rather being done just for the sake of convenience. But in true Mommy fashion, I then proceeded to sulk and sigh heavily with enough guilt that she and the two munchkins showed up for photos within the next week. (Yes, I do that mommy-guilt thing well!)

So instead of some photos (and I use the term loosely) from Sears Portrait Studio, she ended up with these lovely memories:

One year old KD is so gorgeous:

And then we have the many faces of CJ:

As a family, they are utterly gorgeous:

I even got to get a little creative with some shots:

Now isn’t this a lot better than Sears?