Serenity

Fall Shadows...

poster framing...

I recently went through some of the older photos of Zoe when she was much, much smaller.
Those were the days of the sad little 3 mega pixel camera that I had to get by with.

I had no idea at the time what I was missing out on. But now that I have the Nikon D40 in my possession, I have seen the light flash!

Looking at this old collection of memories that are so dear to my heart, I was saddened by their terrible shape. Alot of noise. poor lighting and extremely grainy.

So I just went with it!

for this photo, I first converted it to black and white to mask play off the graininess in the picture.
I played with the exposure to make it a bit darker, adjusted lights and shadows and
lasso'd the outer edge with a soft black shading, to give it a vignette look.

wrapped a thin white canvas then a large black canvas and typed text in white over the black field.
the steps on this one are much like the ones for the Capturing a Moment post.

Congratulations, Sarah!

I used a random number generator to select a winner for the print giveaway and the random force of the internet chose Sarah!

Congrats, Sarah. Email me at (my first name)@yahoo.com to let me know which print you would like. I will have it professionally poster printed and sent on it's merry way to you.

Thank you, to everyone who entered! These little giveaways are such fun! In fact, I will be having another one as soon as I launch my etsy store. So keep checking back!
(I think you'll find the prize to be a real hoot!) ;)

capturing a moment...

Finding a great shot within a not-so-great shot is simpler than you think.
Just keep your eye on the subject or the moment. Whatever happens to be getting in the way of the shot can easily be remedied.

Take this shot for example.

First of all, we have to crop out the half of a half-naked mommy on the right side of the photo. The daddy apparently thought it would be funny to capture mommy in this vulnerable state while pretending to just take a picture of the babies.
we also have all the crap in the background that is quite frankly not ascetically pleasing.

so let's start by cropping the photo.

But due to the angle of the shot, we have to crop it at an angle.

Now, the colors here are neutral and looking a bit blah.

So let's convert it to black and white.

At this point, I put a Sepia photo filter on it. Some shots just look better with a warmer filter.

then I adjusted the exposure a bit, just to give it some final tweaks.

Now, as great as this shot looks, I wanted to frame it in black so it needed a bit of shading around the edges just to add a little depth.
For this, I used the Marque tool to draw just inside the outer edges of the photo.

Now refine your edges. I went with very low contrast to avoid harsh lines and Expanded 35+.
I also turned the featheredness and smoothness up high for a soft-focus look.

You then, Select-Inverse and Edit-Fill with black.

Finally, deselect.

Now for the poster frame.


I created a narrow white canvas first. (20 pixels)

Then I created a larger black canvas. (200 pixels)

I thought this shot would be great with some text so I selected the text tool, chose white and centered it in the black field.

Comparing the two shots, you can see that this whole process is totally worth it in the end.
What looked to be a wasted shot, turned out to be a golden opportunity to capture the sweet moment of my babies sleeping.

A big "thank you" to my hubbie for taking the original picture!