New Skills

I love improving my skills at Photoshop. Some people may think that messing with an image is cheating, but I love seeing the changes I can make with an ordinary snapshot.
Take the following shots for example. These are from a recent engagement session.

Before:



After:



Before:



After:



So a couple of weeks ago I spent the day at a Photoshop seminar that was super fun for me. The instructor was Ben Willmore. Who is an extremely talented and interesting instructor to listen to. His techniques often get the same results I'm getting, but he goes about them another way, so it's nice to have another technique to apply and play with.
The part of the seminar I was most looking forward to was learning High Dynamic Range Imaging. If you click on Ben's name above it will take you to one of his websites where he has several HDR images. The program he used was Photomatix. I've downloaded a trial version and think I will be purchasing the full version next week. So my samples here today have their watermark on the image.

Here are two of my tries on HDR imaging. The first is my work station, the second is a fire my husband had going one day. Both were made with 3 bracketed images, one dark, one medium and one light(I set my camera to bracket shooting at 2 stops and shot on Aperture Priority). With the right settings in Photomatix an image can be made to look very similar to an illustration.



Something interesting to note is that the DVD case that can be seen in the upper right hand window was actually far back in the armoir, but because of the bracketing it can be seen very easily as if it were forward near the window.



My friend Gina will be in town this next week and we plan to play for a while with some new techniques I'm working on with lighting, so I hope to have some more images to play with!

Maple Syruping

If you get the chance, next January I suggest checking out The Audubon Center of the North Woods Maple Syrup Brunch. It's only one day a year (maple sap only runs for about one month), usually the first weekend in April if the weather has been good for syruping (warm days and cold nights). It's a really fun day and very well worth the drive to Sandstone Minnesota and the $15/adult, $10/child. This is our third year attending and our kids LOVE it!
We begin our day with them by sitting down to a pancake breakfast with 100% maple syrup made there at the Audubon center. It is so yummy! Then they have a program for you, where you get to walk with them through the whole maple syruping process from tapping trees, to gathering sap, boiling the sap down, taste testing, and history of maple syruping. It's very educational. And did I mention fun?