January 4, 2012 – A year of portraits – Ricky Kirkwood

01.05.12 Ricky Kirkwood

01.04.12 Ricky Kirkwood

Today while out roaming the countryside on a beautiful winters day I came across Ricky Kirkwood on Kentucky 502 directing traffic for a DOT ditching crew outside of Nebo, Ky. I love the look of this picture starting from his direct look into the camera to the lines on the road leading back to the equipment working in the background.

I shot the picture with the Nikon D700, for page two of the paper, and then with my iPhone 4 with the native camera for this portrait of the day. As for the post processing on this picture: I opened up the portrait in SnapSeed and did some fine tuning in the contrast and sharpness areas, before applying the drama filter to it and de-saturating the colors slightly, due to the green hat and coat being so bright. Most of these type settings are purely subjective when working with a picture and I usually just play with the different effects till I get something I like. A lot of times though I have an idea in my mind of what I want the finished picture I’m shooting to look like, other times I don’t.

For the final Polaroid look for the picture I opened the corrected photo in another app called ShakeitPhoto which applied the frame to the photo along with the slight shadow along the inside edges of the photo. So, everything about today’s photo was done on the iPhone, except the posting of it to my blog here.

 

January 3, 2012 – A year of portraits – Marshae Hopson

01.03.12 Marshae Hopson

Today I met Marshae Hopson at the Madisonville-North Hopkins High School basketball game where she was waiting to watch a family member play. She called me over during halftime of the girls game to ask questions about the Nikon 5000 camera, which she’s considering buying. She loves taking pictures, but not necessarily having her’s taken, kinda like me. However she was gracious enough to allow me to shoot her portrait tonight for my project.

Camera of choice was my Nikon D700, which is my primary camera. Lens was a 50mm f/1.4 at 1/400th at f/2.8 with an ISO of 4, 000. I do love the D700 for shooting in low light, as I really don’t like using flash unless I absolutely have to. This image, as with everything I shoot with this camera, was shot on the RAW setting. I like using RAW as it gives me the most digital information that I can get from the camera, plus there’s a lot of processing I can do in the RAW file that gives me the best results in my opinion.

After bringing the photo into Photoshop CS5, I did some burning in around her to draw more attention to her great face and laugh. As a final step I used the Topaz Adjust filter “Photo Pop” to add a bit more sharpness to the photo.

This portrait just makes me smile!

 

January 2, 2012 – A year of portraits – Susan Cruzan

01.02.12 Susan Cruzan

Susan is one of my morning walking partners and as you can tell she doesn’t like to be cold! This mornings walk at the Madisonville City Park was rather brutal for all of  use, what with the temperature being one of the colder days we’ve had and a pretty stiff wind didn’t help us to stay warm much, but seeing her bundled up like this was a portrait just waiting to happen.

I shot this with my iPhone 4 with the standard camera, but I couldn’t really get it to look the way I wanted it too using the photo processing app on the iPhone though, so I opened it up in Photoshop CS5 to do my editing.

Basically did some dodging, burning and sharpening to come up with the final portrait. I did use the Topaz Adjust Clarity filter to achieve the sharping I wanted. If you’ve not used this plug-in for Photoshop before you should check it out as it has a lot of nice presets that you can also fine tune to your own liking. Of course you can achieve the results yourself via the different controls in Photoshop via layer masking, sharping, levels and things like that, but for me, I don’t like reinventing the wheel so to speak.

Susan is an excellent teacher by trade, among many other talents, and having just finished her Masters and is looking for work. So, if you’re hiring… let me know!

 

 

January 1, 2012 – A year of portraits – Flint Bone

01.01.12 Flint Bone

Today begins a new challenge for me and my photography. I plan on doing a portrait day during 2012 and posting them here on my blog. My plans last year were to keep the blog more active, but things seem to always get in the way and so this year I’ve decided to make it a year long project to keep my blog more active and also get back into the writing end of things.

Not sure what the portraits will be each day, how they’ll be shot or processed or even if the subjects will be human, after all there’s many different types of portraits and I want to leave myself open to what ever comes along each day. My guess is that most of them will be of people, but the possibility exists that something else will slip into the mix.

As many of you know I like tinkering around with different and new things, hence my iPhone 4 and all the different applications that are available for it will be part of my camera bag during this year long endeavor along with my regular camera gear. Also, I may use different techniques in Photoshop and other similar programs to finalize the look I want for each portrait. I’ll try to convey to you the reader what I’ve done to achieve each final picture that I post here. Not only do I want this to be a learning process for myself, but also for you my readers.

My first picture of the year is of good friend Flint Bone and being Sunday it was captured this morning at First Christian Church here in Madisonville, Ky. Flint and I have known each other I guess more years than either of us can recall. He’s the town locksmith and took over the Bone Lock and Safe Business from his dad, Jim Bone, a long time ago.

We’ve both been members of the church I guess since we were kids and the church was located at Main and Broadway here in Madisonville, Ky. Flint currently serves as an elder for our church and is into everything from photography to woodcarving. He’s one of those interesting characters that make my life much more enjoyable by just knowing him.

I used my iPhone 4 camera to make this photograph using the native camera that comes with the phone. I first tried post processing the photo with an application called ShakeitPhoto, which is available on iTunes, but just couldn’t get the look and sharpness that I wanted in the photo. As we all know digital photographs all seem to have a softness to them and for my tasted need a bit of tweaking. Of course the ShakeitPhoto app produces a color photo and what I wanted was a black and white version, but with the old Polaroid look to it.

So, since I couldn’t get quite what I wanted I went back to the original photograph, the program has a setting where the original photo is also saved to your camera roll before it’s processed in ShakeitPhoto, and brought it into another application on the iPhone called Snapseed (also in the iTunes store). Now, this application is similar to many other photo processing programs out there, but it’s probably my favorite one at the moment for the iPhone.

In Snapseed I then used the various presets to sharpen, convert to B&W and do a little dodging and burning in the photo. After I did all that I then opened the photo up in the Shakeitphoto app and processed it for this resulting image.