Spotty

Hey! I thought I'd whip up a photoshop tutorial for ya'lls. The worse type of lighting to photograph people in, right up there with full sun, is dappled light.

If you expose for where the light breaks through the trees you'll get underexposed areas



If you expose for the areas that are shadowed you'll get blowouts.



So what do you do?
1) lift the shadows with fill flash
2) bounce light from a reflector
3) photoshop it!

Normally for one of my sessions I'll avoid this type of lighting or use option #2. Its best to get things right in camera after all...However when I'm out camping and taking snaps the last thing I want to do is carry around cumbersome equipment. I despise on camera flash to option #1 is out of the question, and I'm not about to bust out with my speedlite while we are sitting around the camp fire. So lets get photoshopping!

Open your picture (duh). Here I used the one with some underexposure. When you get blowouts like the image above you lose data in those areas...they become big white blobs and when you send you image to your lab or home printer nothing will print there. On your channels palette while holding [ctrl] click on RGB. All of the bright areas of the picture will be selected.



Hit ctrl+shift+i to inverse this selection (also found under select>inverse). Now all the dark areas are selected. Make a new layer using this selection (ctrl+j) and set it to screen.



Adjust the opacity of this layer as necessary and then carry on with your normal photo processing (if you do any).

Here is my final image:

Its about time!

Going potty is tough

I went to check on the boys the other night before I went to bed. They have a tendency of getting up and playing or walking around the room and then passing out in various spots. This is what I was greeted with the other night:



I forgot that Job dragged his potty chair in there. He took off his diaper, peed, dumped the bucket of pee into the base of the chair, sat back down, fell sleep, and peed again (this time all over the place). Fun!

On a side note, see how messy their room is? I need to find a way to lock their closet. They empty out their dresser every nap and bed time.

Thanks Susie...

...for the referral!

cookin'

The forecast called for 105* weather today. Tomorrow is supposed to be worse at 106* and 108* Wednesday. Needless to say we will be spending a lot of time indoors. We did make a quick trip to the park this morning before it got too bad.

I was playing with some funky processing on these.



I thought it was interesting that I caught two nearly identical pictures.

Burned

The day started well enough. I awoke to "pee potty!" being called from the boys room. After a sucessful sit it was time for some breakfast. Thats when things turned. I dumped sticky freshoffthestove oatmeal down my arm. Ouch! Jerah wanted to see a killer whale so we headed off to marine world. And although I remembered to apply sunscreen to the boys; I neglected my back that was clothed in a top that was cut too low...double ouch! We came home and Aaron started dinner, spattering his arm in hot oil. We should have taken these events as a warning but alas did not. We went out to light off fireworks and decided to let the boys try their hand at sparklers. We schooled them on where to hold it and where not to touch. They did really well until Jerah was taking his burnt out stick to the bucket of water and decided to touch the end before I could stop him. After that he wanted nothing to do with sparklers and even the big fireworks in the sky were proclaimed too hot. In the end we still had a lot of fun, the house didn't burn down, and we had another sucessful "pee potty" before bed.