Portrait Challenge

OK- This was hard. The challenge as presented to us: http://digital-photography-school.com/10-shots-10-portraits-1-focal-length-take-this-photography-challenge

My result: I admit, I took more than one shot of my subjects. I did delete many photos. Using my new fixed focal length (prime) 50 mm lens was not an easy task for me, after getting very comfortable with my zoom lens. But I did complete it and the result is that I have learned more about a new lens that I wouldn't have learned without completing the challenge.

Sweetness!

I just had to post this image of my daughter and friend working on a GarageBand piece after school. Kids and computers...two of my favorite things!

A Trip to Troester's Farm

I posted my photos from our first Photography Club outing at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmorrow/sets/72157622352712423/. Although extremely windy, the Sunday evening Holt County prairies provided great imagery and inspiration. I'd like to choose my favorite image to post here, but I struggle with choosing one favorite. I think it is interesting that with a whole group of us photographing the same location, how different our shots really are! Here are three images that I will post to remember this photo event by.

Sunrise Photo Shoot at the Farm

Unedited, untouched favorites from this morning's sunrise photo shoot at the farm.






And one more slightly edited (cropped, color boost) photo with a very patient subject! However, I still think my ISO was set too high to compensate for the early morning low light and no tripod.

All in all, however, the 800+ images that I captured made the 6:30 a.m. wake-up time at the farm entirely worth it! Enjoyed a 4.5 mile run and several cups of coffee immediately following. Why can't every day be like this?

Composition Challenge: BACKGROUND

Although Mrs. Gotschall spoke about "de-cluttering" the background, I wanted to post examples of using your background to tell a story.


I just like this photo and how you can see Drew's dad, Grandpa, and boat in the background. To me, including this information in the background helps the viewer imagine what is going on in the subject's mind.

The "longing" in her eyes is explained by her cousins on the tube in the background.


Had I just focused on the ducks, without including any background information, you may have
a completely different story in your mind when viewing this photo of Washington, D.C. Likewise, focusing on JUST the Lincoln Memorial without the ducks in the foreground, wouldn't have been as interesting of a photo either, in my opinion.

Finally, I made this photo this morning in my front yard. I could have captured the sunflower alone, but paying attention the background and including our house number gives the image a sense of place and tells a more personal story to me.

Composition Challenge: STRONG CENTER OF INTEREST

Of course having a strong point of interest is important for any composition. I decided to post a photo of mine from the spring to illustrate how you can use color to create that point of interest as well.

Composition Challenge: LINES

I used the lines of the barbed wire fence as well as the horizon line to add interest to this silhouette of a cow in the pasture.

Composition Challenge: FILL THE FRAME

Here I "filled the frame" with Mya's face, not wanting to capture any of the surrounding scene. I also used some selective coloring to bring out the bib and the bee.


For the image below, photography credit goes to my daughter, Claire. She definitely did a great job of filling the frame, rule of thirds, and also using a wide open aperture for a shallow depth of field, thereby eliminating background distractions.

Composition Challenge: RULE OF THIRDS

With people (portrait) photos especially, placing your subject's eyes on the intersection points of the "Rule of Thirds" grid adds pleasing visual imagery to your photo. Here are a just a few examples to illustrate this basic photo principle.

Composition Challenge: Angle/Perspective

Just changing your perspective or your camera angle can go such a long way in improving your image "interesting-ness." These are a few examples I choose where just changing the angle in which I compose the shot makes a big difference in the end result.


Drew playing the guitar in the living room could have been a dull image had I framed him in the shot. Instead, I got the camera down on the ground level and looked back over the guitar strings for my perspective.


This shot taken at Muir Woods in San Francisco shows how small the giant redwoods can make you feel... just by taking the photo at an upwards angle.


Claire was trying to capture dewdrops on the grass in our front yard when she got down on the ground and captured this shot. What I like about seeing the house in the background is that the camera angle gives the viewer a sense of seeing the world through an infant or an insect's eyes. Here changing the angle/perspective tell a story through a different point of view.

Composition Challenge: ACTION

Mrs. Gotschall challenged us to show applications of the following elements of composition through our photos this week. I've chosen a few of my favorites to illustrate some of the mentioned elements:

• Action

This is a carousel at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. To capture the action I experimented with different shutter speeds shooting in Shutter Priority mode and bracing my camera on a nearby fence to act as a tripod. The slower the shutter speed, the more "blurry" the action, obviously. This one that I chose as my favorite was captured at a shutter speed of 1 sec. (f/22),
but you can see the progression as this one was a shutter speed of .4 sec (f/13)


and this one would be what the carousel looks like without capturing the motion-- shutter speed 1/60 sec. (f/4).

Composition Challenge: FRAMING: My model Mya

After my sister Anne spotted this open window frame in an old building at the Morrow's farm, I quickly snapped nearly 50 different photos of Mya peeking through. Although extremely difficult to choose my favorites, these are definitely towards the top of the list. Both illustrate the composition principle of "framing." In the color image, I used Aperture adjustments to enhance the vibrancy, exposure, and edge sharpen. I pulled up my Highlights and Shadows sliders as well as Mya was somewhat hidden in the shadows. I straightened a tad to get the lines straighter, and cropped to focus more on Mya and less on the window space.

In the second (top) image, I ran the "Black and White Beauty" and "Quick Edge Burn" actions in Photoshop before exporting out of Aperture to publish.

Mya's 1st BeeDay

Mya seemed like the perfect model to try out Photoshop actions "Lovely and Ethereal" introduced to me by Katie Gotschall and downloaded off of "The Pioneer Woman" Photography Blog at http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography.

After capturing Mya's facial expression that I wanted, I imported my RAW image into Aperture and turned down the saturation of nearly all the color channels, other than the pink and reds. I then turned up the vibrancy a bit and sent the image to Photoshop. This is where I ran the "Lovely and Ethereal" and "Quick Edge Burn" actions, saved the image, and went back into Aperture to export.