Day 23-Maternity

This past Saturday, I shot my first official maternity session.

I was not looking forward to it.

I went so far as to entertain ideas of calling and canceling or hoping that the snow we'd been getting would be a big enough deterrent that they wouldn't risk the hour drive. It didn't help that I was in a snippy mood and had gotten sick the night before.

Nonetheless, I spent an hour and a half getting my 'studio' ready and about 5 rushed minutes attempting to create dramatic lighting with my sister sitting in.

Marsha & Matt arrived by their 1pm appointment and as soon as I met them and showed them downstairs my fears were just about gone.

I'm a big self doubter.

The problem, or not so much that as an inconvenience, with maternity shoots is that there's tons of room for creativity, but no one seems to be utilizing it. I poured over pages and pages of maternity shots thru Google and Flickr and never found anything I hadn't seen a million times before. I wanted to offer them something unique, not to just make the generic-what everyone else does-photos.

Still, I had asked her to send me a few ideas of what she was looking for before the shoot and I think we hit on those pretty well.

Below you'll see a few photos that I've edited already. You'll notice that the faces/heads of the couple are cut off a lot. Somehow in editing I realized how much I had been shooting that way and found I liked it. After all, the photos aren't just about mom & dad. There's a baby in the picture and I'd like to focus a little more on its presence.

Problems I ran into:

• I don't have a lot of studio space so doing lighting effectively or shooting anything bigger than a close up was a little difficult.
• I need a dressing area.
• My basement is freezing! I can plug a heater in but I blow fuses over and over again.
• Clients are in my 'studio' for at least 2 hours and while I have a little table with some of my prints on it, there's not much in the way of self advertising for them to look at while they wait.
• We end the shoot, they pay, thank me and then leave. I have to get in the habit of sitting them down, showing them products and deals and stuff that I can offer them in addition to buying digital files.
• I need to keep a checklist of what the client wants and what I want so that I make sure I hit all those ideas.
• When I post unedited photos for them to look at and go thru, they tell me what numbers they like. But then I have to go in and figure out what number matches what image I have on my computer to edit. It's a long process. I need to fix that.
• Making the photos NOT look like engagement photos

Day 17---PROPS

Tuesday night I traveled down to Ikea and spent some money on photography props!! Here is a real quick photo of what I bought!

On the left you'll see a whicker basket, it's standing upright and is very shallow and egg shaped. Less than ten bucks. The pink chair was about 15 dollars, and then I got the two stools--one green, one white---that were about $9 each. The rug on the floor is from Ikea and cost 25 whopping bucks, but is totally worth it!!

The blanket on the couch I bought today at Big Lots for $15, it's hairy and has cool swirl patterns. I have a shoot tonight and am hoping to use all but the chairs!

Day 16

Along with my Nikon d80, I have 4 lenses that I use. I have a 18-55 which I use most of the time when not doing actual photography, a 55-200mm, a f/2.8 fisheye that cost a pretttyyyy penny, and my absolute favorite, my portrait lens---the cheapest but most worthwhile purchase: Nikkor f/1.8 50mm.

This lens is pretty boss because:

1.) It's tiny!! it's half the size of my 18-55 and easy to cram into my camera bag.

2.) It can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Depending on what your aperture is at, this lens can make your picture sharp as all get out. Or, if at it's biggest aperture, really gives you depth of field.

3.) It was reallly cheap. $100-150? I think. It was in my budget at the time, that's all I know!

4.) I can be doing really bad portraits with my 18-55 and will put this baby on and BAM! suddenly i'm working magic, like in the engagement photo shown below!! Suddenly everything clicks and poses come together, and lighting and oh man. I love this lens!!

That's todays lesson! Invest in one good portrait lens :)

Somers photoshoot

Just some photos from my latest family shoot!!

Day 13

BLAST FROM THE PAST!!!

Over a year ago, I had a photojournalism class and our end project was doing a photo story on someone. I did mine on Dave Butcher, Emily Butcher's dad and a member of my church.

This is what I had to print out super big and turn in : ) (Basically a photo story is a group of photos that tell a story. Dave Butcher is a father, a farmer, a janitor. I captured all those aspects to tell about him thru the images)

Page 1

page 2

You can click on the images to see them bigger!!

Day 12

Thought I'd show you a before an after. Edited the photo in photoshop, using Portraiture and a black and white action.

Before:

After:

this was a complete accident, which is how most of my better photos turn out. I was trying to fill in the paper background around them where you see ceramic wall and I zoomed in to see better, and I liked the cropping. So I immediately stopped what I was doing and cropped it as it was. Then gave up on the paper idea and filled it in with the black paintbrush. I cheat

Day 11

Started experimenting with adding texture to photos...here's my first try:

One way you can accomplish this:

0.) Edit the picture how you want it. You can do this at the end of the whole process, but I like to do it before.

1.) Search on Google for free photoshop textures. pick a few, download them, save them to your computer.

2.) Open your photo in photoshop

3.) Open your chosen texture file in photoshop. Be mindful of the colors in your photo and that of your texture, because they'll mesh and get ugly.

4.) Drag your texture on top of your photo. It may show up really small, so you'll have to enlarge it for it to cover the whole photograph.

5.) It should then look like this

6.) But now you can't see your photo beneath the texture. So go to your layers menu, click on the drop down menu (should by default say Normal) and you can choose from either Overlay or Soft light. Overlay is a little harsh for me, so I went with the latter.

7.) Now it should look like this.

8.) I didin't want the texture to be so obvious, so I went back to my layers menu and altered the opacity. Slide it around till you get a look you like.

9.) I did somewhere around 35%. This is what it looks like:

10.) You then need to create a layer mask. In your layer menu, at the very bottom, click on the square with a circle in it. Your Layer 1 will then look like this:

11.) Making sure the white box is selected in your Layer 1 (see above photo), choose your black paintbrush

12.) Next, paint over the parts of the picture that you don't want to be textured. The black paintbrush will essentially erase that layer. I painted over the baby and left everything as is. Here's starting over his face.

13.) Finished photo. Your Layer Mask box in Layer 1 should look like as seen below (should have the outline of what you colored over)

And now you're done!!

You can add multiple layers of textures, which is what I did in my final photo (seen at top) and just mess around.

Later!

on hiatus

for awhile. traveling to north carolina.

here's some recent tho, from anther fLint shoot and some left out from previous posts

and here's another one of my niece

and another of Jacob!

Day 9

Nothing new to post today. I was going to do some light writing but by the time I decided that's what I wanted to do, I couldn't let myself do it with just a boring old flashlight. I wanna get some glow sticks, some gels for the lights to give them color. I want to go all out. And probably run(lol) across the entire golf course in my backyard and do some huge project. so for now, here's my first venture into light writing a few years ago:

I found this guy on Flickr that's giving me a TON of ideas. If anyone wants to help, let me know! It could be prettttyyy cool.

Check him out, though!

Light Writing: Typically pretty easy, however, it's one of those things you definitely need to think out before hand, especially if you've never done it before. A lot of things can go wrong:

1.) While you're 'writing' your light source may at times turn away from the camera and will not get captured, so in the final photo your drawing has gaps

2.) Incorrect exposure. You need to use a really long shutter speed to do these--if your point and shoot camera has an M setting (Manual) or S (shutter speed/priority) then you have to use one of those. I mostly do these by myself so I usually put my shutter speed to 30 seconds to give plenty of time.

3.) Blur---use a freaking tripod!! Since it's a long exposure your camera has to stay still!

4.) Over exposure: The longer your shutter is open, the more light comes into your camera. If the room you're in isn't fully dark and you put your shutter to half a minute, then your picture is going to come out super bright and you won't see the light writing. At times like these you have to compensate---if you can change your ISO put it on the smallest number possible (100?). If you're shooting under Manual, bump up your Aperture to a bigger number (16, or 22) (changing both ISO/Aperture will guarantee a darker photo). As you practice you can adjust these as need be.

5.) Unfocused. You may think it doesn't matter if streaks of light are in focus, but personally I think it does. And being in a dark place doesn't really help your camera in finding something to focus on. Try putting your camera on self timer, turn the lights on in the room, go to your chosen spot and then press the shutter button on your camera or have someone do it for you. The self timer will blink and you'll have plenty of time to run and turn the lights off and go back to your exact spot before the camera opens the shutter.

You'll notice in your photos that you may show up as a big blur in them. The light you're using will often spill back onto you, illuminating your hand/arm/whatever while you're taking the exposure. You can fix this by cutting a hole in the middle of a paper plate (the size of the flashlight handle if that's what you're using) and then paint the front of the plate black, so that when the light bounces back onto the plate you wont see this giant white thing.

If you're taking the photo of someone light writing, you can do a few things to put them IN the photo.

1.) You can choose to do this at the beginning/end of the exposure, it's up to you, but you can (if your camera has the option) put your flash on REAR. This means when the exposure is done, your camera will flash and can capture your friend standing beside their work.

2.) Flick the lights on for a few seconds during the exposure. You'll have to experiment, but it works.

3.) 'Paint' over your friend with another flashlight from behind the camera. Again, it takes experimenting to see how much light you'll want and what's too much, but it will be worth it.

Hope this helps!!

Oh, my bad--if there are two of you making this photo (one behind the camera, one drawing) then it's often better to set your camera to BULB (B). If it has the setting. Mine, I have to put the dial to M for Manual, then I have go backwards thru all the shutter speeds (2 seconds, 16 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, etc) until the last thing it comes to, which is Bulb. This means you have to keep your finger on the shutter button holding it down for however long you want your exposure to be. That way you don't have to wait the extra time if you finish early on say, a 30 second exposure. Hope this makes sense.

Erin.

Day 7

For over a year now, I've been interning at Little Monsters Photography in Flushing, Mi (about 30 minutes from my house). Kari Coon, who is the photographer, is pretty awesome!! : ) She helps me out a ton---she's bought me smoothies, given me rolls of background paper, lent me her dog for a few hours, let me use her studio a few times to take pictures of Drew & Kailyn, and now--for this entry--lent me her son(in her studio) to photograph for a school assignment!! (Thanks, Kyle!!)



This is a picture of the set up. 1 softbox shooting into a reflector.
Camera settings: ISO100, f8, 1/160.

Final result (kinda breaking my photo-a-day rule:

and

and


I got a lot of good photos, the rest will probably be somewhere on my photography website (www.erinwyattphotography.smugmug.com)

one week in the blog world, down : )

and check out:
www.littlemonstersphotography.com

Day 4

I really love GLEE on Fox. So in honor...


Just a basic setup. Strobe shooting across the photo into a reflector. one strobe on the background. Edited faces with Portraiture.

and....there are more photos on my Flickr page...(see left side of screen)

Day 2

Let's see. At the last minute I decided to try this....I've attempted it before but never got the exposure how I wanted it. So here it is....2 travelite strobes--1 camera right shooting across the photo, 1 camera left, shooting at the subject. I put the camera on a tripod, set the shutter speed to 10 seconds and the aperture at f16. (100ISO). I turned off all the lights in the room and the model lights on the strobes, hit the camera's shutter button, and triggered the strobes by hand (using the test button) at 2 second intervals. ta-daaa.

bonus photo: a bigger view:

Day 1

Not a very good first photo, but it was 1130 at night and I wanted to try some kind of motion with a flash under slow shutter speed. I also wanted to use a white background, but I couldn't change it by myself.

Specs: 100ISO, two travelite strobes camera left and right (shooting thru umbrellas); 1/6 at f18.