Still alive

I'm still alive.  Not so much into this anymore.

Kitty Stand-Off

Funny photo of my cat protecting her turf from the neighbor's cat outside.

Your Name in Pictures

There are lots of places where you can order a picture collage of your name made out of pictures of objects that look like letters, but I decided it would be more fun to do it myself. As a quick project, I photographed a bunch of items around the house that looked like the letters "R-O-S-A-T-I." In Lightroom, I edited my first photo with a B&W preset that I liked, applied a small post-crop vignette, and cropped the photo 1:1. I synced these settings to the other photos of of the other "letters" in my name so they all has the same general look and feel. After some quick adjustments to the crops, I was ready for printing. In the print module, I laid out the page to landscape and the letters in a single row with 6 columns with the contact sheet set as my layout style. Just add or remove columns for the number of letters in your name. Play around with the size of your cells to get the proper spacing between cells. The trick here was getting the letters to appear in the correct order. In the filmstrip at the bottom of the Print module, you have to click on the picture itself (not the border of the picture) in order to drag the photo the correct place in order. Of course, you can always print each photo individually and frame them across a custom mat. Above is my final result. It is not great, but was a fun exercise to get the creative juices flowing.

Long time away

It has been a long time since I have posted to this site. A lot of things have been going on since my last post and I never really felt like posting because nobody actually reads this anyway. It seems like this is really just my own personal diary that is public but remains anonymous through obscurity. Anyway, I digress.

In the past year I have been furthering my photography interests. I joined a local photo club and regularly meet with a number of very talented local photographers. I really enjoy their advice and generosity in sharing their insight into the world of photography. I especially enjoy learning about new gear first hand. There is no substitute for actually picking up and using a new lens or lighting setup. There is a wealth of gear and tricks and techniques that I can learn about and try without buying something on the internet and getting it home only to find out it doesn't really work for me.

I recently had some success participating in the first annual Suffolk Photo Walk. I had two photographs from the walk chosen by voters to be exhibited at the art gallery at the Suffolk Center for the Performing Arts. I had a really great time making and sharing these photos and I will post them here for future posterity. Until next time....

-Greg

Quick Fix for Smoother Skin

A quick tip for smoothing skin on portraits. Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, if you move the clarity slider to the left, your image will become less sharp, and as a result, skin will appear smooth. This is great for portraits where you want to smooth out small wrinkles and imperfections on the skin. To return sharpness to certail facial features, such as the eyes, you can use the retouch brush. Slide the clarity slider of the retouch brush to the right the same amount as you slid the master clarity slider to the left, and you will negate the effects of the clarity adjustment in the areas you paint over.

Photo of the Week

Sorry I have not posted in so long, but nobody reads this anyway. Please e-mail me if you actually read this. Anyway, this photo comes from Sleepy Hole Park in Suffolk, Va. It was shot in early November when the autumn leaves were in their prime. It was a shot I had in my mind since early summer, so I brought all of the gear. The problem with this shot was that it was taken during midday, so it was impossible to properly expose the entire scene with one shot. Either the sky or the trees would not have the proper exposure. Therefore, I took several bracketed shots at different exposures to capture all of light in the scene. I imported the Camera Raw files into Adobe Lightroom, converting the files to DNG (Adobe's nonspecific standard for digital raw files). The DNG files have 16-bit color depth, so I could retain the maximum amount of data in the highlights and shadows. I did some initial tweaking of the files in lightroom before opening them in Photoshop CS3 for further editing. I merged the two best shots of the trees and the sky using the script in Photoshop CS3 called "Load Files into Stack." I arranged the layers so that the shot of the properly exposed sky was on the bottom. I applied a layer mask to the layer with the properly exposed trees, and painted out the areas containing the overexposed sky, revealing the properly exposed clouds and sky from the layer beneath. A few more adjustments to the levels and curves, with a little unsharp mask, and the photo was ready. I flattened the layers and converted the image to 8-bit in order to save it out to jpeg for posting to the web. If you like this photo, you can purchase a print from my gallery at www.gregrosatiphoto.com

For some more really good tips, check out the "This Week in Photography" blog and podcast at twipphoto.com

Photo of the Week

This is an image of a Powhatan ceremonial statue from Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. The detail of the face shows several layers of paint in various states of cracking and decay. I remember these statues from when I was a child visiting Jamestown in the early 1980's, so these have been around for a while. Notice how the older layers of paint appear to have a more reddish hue? I wonder if they covered up the red paint to be more politically correct. The image was shot with a Canon EOS XSi with the kit 18-55 zoom lens at 55 mm, f/5.6, 1/60", ISO 250. The point of focus is the eye closest to the camera. As with all portraits, the eye is the most important part of the face to keep sharp. The background lighting was overexposed, so I adjusted the curves to darken the highlights. I also added a slight vignette to darken the edges and add an old feel to the photo.