Creative Editing Part 1: Impressionism

 Inspired by a photo of my dear friends in a replica "Monet's Garden" at the Garfield Park Conservatory, I set out to learn how to create an impressionist image.  For this first tutorial, I used the directions on Graphics.com, with a few tweaks of my own.

Original image:

Impressionism #1: (straight from tutorial)

 

 

#2 (Experimenting)

#3 (More artistic)

#4 (enhanced #3, increased brush strokes)

Which is your favorite?

Happy couple

in my spiral ring notebook: White people

in my spiral ring notebook: White people: [...] I've seen rain turn into snow then back to rain, and I've seen making love turn into fucking then back to making love, and ...

Read it.

Engagement!

Finally!  Time to take photos!  Almost done with Grad school... Can't wait to buy some lenses and such.


Congratulations to my friends Kacy & Tom on their engagement!  So happy to catch this on film.

Low Light Couples Portraits

If you know me, you probably know how much I hate shooting in low light...

In low light situations you have a few choices.

1) Change your ISO - ISO is the sensitivity of your image sensor. Basically, by choosing a higher ISO (400, let's say), you can use a faster flash at the cost of having an image with more noise.

2) Use a tripod - a tripod let's you use a slower shutter speed with less blurring - of course, I forgot mine.

3) Use a flash. Generally speaking, the flash attached to the camera is overbright, direct, and ruins any other lighting effects that you were going for in your pictures. You can compensate for the flash's brightness with your light compensation meter, or in photoshop. However, you cannot change the direct lighting effect.

4) Post editing. I prefer to adjust the "brightness" "contrast" and "highlights & shadows" in photoshop as opposed to the overall "levels" because it preserves the true colors of the image (and generally just looks better)

For these photographs, I used a combination of these techniques, mostly experimenting to see what compromises I'm willing to make in order to shoot in low light.

SO I wouldn't say these are by any means my best, but they are beautifully artistic in their own way. Plus the models were of course, AMAZING! :)

Self Portraits

Haven't done these in a while.

Bronner's Christmas Wonderland

Bronner's Christmas Wonderland is a retail store in Frankenmuth, Michigan that is the "World's Largest Christmas Store."

Faces of Balthasar

"I don't want to be racist but... is this a "token" situation, or is it a thing like from the scripture?"

Was one of the three wise men, Balthasar, really a black man like some artwork depicts?

Ann Naffziger Answers:

"According to legend in Western Christianity, there were three “wise men,” their names were Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar, and they were of various ethnic/racial origin. However, Matthew’s account of the magi’s visit (which is the only reference in the Bible to these famed visitors) tells us none of these details.

Because Matthew tells us that the magi brought Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, popular imagination has pictured three gift-bearers, although Matthew didn’t say how many there were. In fact, in the East, tradition has generally pictured 12 magi. It was later tradition, not Matthew, who named the magi. A document dated to about 500 A.D. lists the names of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar, a tradition that has been maintained in Western Christianity. Other Eastern Christian churches have ascribed others names to these figures. Finally, Matthew’s gospel doesn’t specify where the magi originated from, except to say that they came “from the East.” The East could have been Babylonia or Persia, although later legends imagined them originating from destinations as varied as India and China. Ultimately, we simply don’t know how many magi there were, what their names were, or what color of skin they had."

David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr answer:

"In the early 15th century, beginning also in Germany, artists began depicting one of the three Magi bearing gifts for the baby Jesus as a dignified and splendidly dressed black monarch. He presents myrrh to the Christ Child, representing the hoped-for conversion of the whole of black Africa by the Christian religion."