Here are the last couple of pictures I took of Sophie the other day, looking quirky with her posing smile. Next time will do some more natural pictures without the poses and the props. Gotta have both though, they are both cute.
Have a nice weekend everyone, I really hope we will get some good weather so we can spend time by the pool
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I have admit that I think it is often easier to take pictures of other children than my own. One reason is that Sophie has been getting sick of my camera and doesn’t want it shoved in her face that much at the moment. Another one is that she has now learned to “pose” with a totally quirky and fake smile (still cute of course). Lastly I kind of “forget” to take real pictures of her, I don’t take the time to get 15 minutes or half an hour to get some nice pictures of her. Because of course I want nice pictures, not just snapshots, which I have plenty of on my Iphone.
Anyway, the other I did take the time, and after some slight bribery (I get pictures, you get ice cream…), I did get some new pics. She even got to play with my “props” which I usually dont let her play with, and that was fun too, I guess. Anyway, enough talk, here are the pictures. Some more coming tomorrow, I just have to finish editing.
Cute, or what? The last picture is her posing-smile by the way.
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I like both, but my “golden” rule (which is of course made to be broken) is that pictures taken at an outdoor shoot with a beautiful green backdrop are normally better in color, studio pictures can be good either way, it really depends on the picture, and of peoples preferences. Ayaa as they say in China, this wasn’t a good answer at all. Ok, let’s put it this way, I normally keep my portraits in color unless I have a reason to convert them to black and white (with street photography it is exactly the other way around). And the reasons are 1) I want to accentuate one element in the picture, like the persons eyes, or 2) I want to “hide” or tone down part of an image, like clothing which is too colorful and/or with too many patterns.
Like this little cute girl with her beautiful Chinese dress. The dress is gorgeous, but in a picture with colors and a backdrop that also takes away attention, the dress takes up too much attention from her cute face, and so in this case I prefer the black and white picture.
And then of course there is the third option, to desaturate the colors, i.e still having the colors but make them less strong. I use that look quite a bit too. Will show that later in a different post.
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I have gotten complaints that I don’t post pictures of Sophie and the sole reason for that is that I haven’t really taken any “real” pictures of her lately (only iPhone snapshots which are not really for this blog), I take so many pictures that I forget to shoot her. Not good, I will do something about that very shortly! She got into a “I-hate-mummy’s-camera”-phase too, and I guess that is another reason I havent taken that many pictures of her, but now, since it has been so long, hopefully she has forgotten about that!
In the meantime I am posting a couple of pictures that I have shown before, the difference being that I have now added some texture to the pictures, to make them look more like “paintings”. I intend to print them on mat paper, or even better on a canvas (don’t know where to do that here…), and replace the ones I already have. Still working on things to hang on my wall, apparently we will have plenty of white wall to hang things in our new home in Abu Dhabi, and I think that there is nothing like your own pictures hanging on your wall to make it feel a little bit like “home”, even if it isn’t.
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…. I am getting into textures now, making more things to potentially hang on my walls. I love doing these things, but they do take a lot of time, I can sit for hours and hours doing this, and I dont really have all that time… But anyway, tonight I sacrifised the TV (always a good thing) making this; a flower picture mixed with a few different textures. Funnily enough I started out looking for a texture which would give me a pastel mint green back drop, but now I am wanting to have something even more light and cool greyish blue. I will sleep on it and see what I think tomorrow.
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Backlit. A great concept, not really too easy to catch here in grey grey China. I hope to catch a lot more backlit pictures in Norway this summer and later in Abu Dhabi (once the heat goes away and it’s possible to shoot outside anyway)…. Either way, here is one taken here in China on one of those rare sunny days with beautiful afternoon sun, where I actually shot directly into the sun! This makes my contribution for Oyeblikk this month.
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I have talked about actions in photshop several times before, but it seems I just keep coming back to the topic. Just shows how much I use it I guess, in fact I use them more and more! When I started out, I used exclusively free actions that I downloaded from the internet, there are plenty good pages out there, like this one. Just google what you are after, and you will find it! You can use actions for everything from retouching skin to sharpening to color popping to nice black and white conversions, making frames, shaping pictures, you name it. Personally I dont use a lot of actions for retouching and editing the picture in itself, as I do most of that in the RAW-editing anyhow. I use actions mainly for two things: making the workflow efficient, i.e. all the things I have to do when finishing up a picture, like sharpening, deciding size, if I want it for print or web, where to save it and what format. For that I always make my own actions, which is also super easy by the way and it saves you SO much time if you have many pictures to edit.
The other thing I use actions for, is making my pictures “pop” by defining and deciding the style/look I want for the picture, that I can rarely get straight out of the camera. (I wish…) I have to admit I don’t use a lot of the freebie actions any more, I have found a few action makers that I like a lot who coincide with my own style, because obviously you don’t want to loose your own expression and style with someone elses actions. And I don’t think you have to, as long as you use them in a conscient way.
Anyway, the picture below is an example of the actions I use. It is one single picture, and the differences are pretty subtle, but if you look closely they change quite a bit anyhow. For this particular picture of this super cute baby I wanted a nice, clean and colorful look showing off those fantastic eyes. My favorite is the big picture below, but since I was on the topic I wanted to show you some examples of other actions/styles as well.
So my point is: Start using actions! You can find them under “window” in Photoshop, AND they can also be used in Photoshop Elements by the way. When you find an action you like, all you have to do is download it and double click on the .atn-file you will get, and the action will load. (I also save the file in a separate photoshop folder, just in case my computer crashes or something… ). Then you go into PS and click on the action you want, and hit “play” and you’re done. It is really that easy! The ones I have used here are from the beautiful Florabella Collection, which are great!
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This is the last post of pictures from Yangshuo, I promise… I took a lot of photos there, even more than I normally do, and there are two reasons for that: the unbelievable beauty of the place, AND the fact that Sophie didn’t go along with us on the trip so I actually had time to shoot as much as I wanted…
Anyway. In the morning I got up before sunrise to look for some of that famous morning light (which wasnt really there because it was completely overcast, but whatever), and I had a walk in this tiny little rural village where people were just starting their day. It was an amazing experience, the people were incredibly friendly, when it started raining all of a sudden I was even invited into a old man’s house and he offered me peanuts and Chinese television. There was a real noticeable difference in the friendlyness of the people compared to Guangzhou, and I trully believe that didn’t all have to do with tourism.
So instead of shooting the sunrise, I had a little session of street photography right there in Yangshuo, if you can call it that… At least they were pictures of their everyday life.
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As I already described we trully enjoyed Yangshuo, despite the fact that the town in itself was pretty ruined by tourism. The reason we liked it so much was the fact that we stayed outside the town center near to a small rural village, out in the countryside next to the Pudong River (which is not the same river that goes through Yangshuo). Mind you, the seclusion was relative even here, but it was still a wonderful place to live and I can highly recommend the hotel stayed in, the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat. We were also amused by watching the Chinese going down the river on the bamboo floats, where they sat in something that looked like recliner chairs and chilled out while the were rafting down the river. I didn’t see a single foreigner doing it I think, but I might be wrong of course. I am sure it would have been fun.
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