SAY "HI" TO MY FRIEND

As you now probably know I am always on the lookout for a picture to take. Last night while waiting on a person to come and open a barn where my daughter is planning on holding her wedding reception I decided to wander around and see what might be there. I soon saw one of the insects that are very dear to my heart because they are such good ones. This little Praying Mantis was sitting on one of the doors and so I quickly ran and got my camera and put on a close-up lens filter of a value of +4 and then started taking pictures of it. It was a fairly young one and did not really trust me but I still managed to get it to pose for a few shots before I went to join my wife and daughter in the barn.

I GOT STUCK ON THIS ONE.

I had so much fun yesterday that I decided to try it with another image today. My new beautiful niece was fun to photograph and so I decided to see if I had an image that would work for her as well. I don't know if either of these brides will like the picture but when you find something that is fun to do it is always a good idea to try it again and sometimes even several times until it becomes easy to remember. 

I had already done some photoshop work with this particular image but decided to try it again with this new background so that I could put across the idea that sometimes one image will work with multiple backgrounds. Saving a .psd file with all of the layers makes it easy to try several backgrounds as well since all I did on this one, as I did yesterday, was to make two layers of the first image and then drop the image of the clouds in between them and mask out the portion of the top image that I don't want showing in the final picture.

SO the real message here as I have said before is to never limit your imagination and just have fun.

How to photograph what she feels

OK, so how do you photograph how the bride really feels on her wedding day? Well I haven't quite figured that out yet but today I had some fun trying to portray it through a little photoshop fun. I'll try to show you the basics of what I did, yet the real knowledge of how to do it comes through practice and experimentation (mostly experimentation).

I was lucky in the fact that the wind was blowing at her outdoor reception at a pretty good clip(which isn't really a good thing most of the time) so we shot some images with the wind having fun with her veil and dress. I then took the image and with a mask extracted her from the background. (You can't see it here but after the extraction I still had a lot of the windows etc. showing through the veil. A problem I hadn't really thought about.)

Then I was lucky again in the fact that as I drove the 14 miles home from church I was watching some beautiful fluffy clouds as they constantly changed shapes while oving across the sky. That gave me an idea so when I got home and had a couple hours to relax (which doesn't happen very often) , I set my camera up on a tripod and every 8 seconds took a picture of the same section of the sky and landscape. I plan on making it into a movie clip that I may put on the blog later. For today though one of the images served the purpose of giving me a Cloud 9 for the bride to be floating through the sky with on her wedding day.

I then put the two images together and of course cropped the cloud shot way down and then resized it to fit the image of the bride. I had to change the direction of the cloud so the light would appear to be coming from the same direction. Then I had to lower the opacity of the veil so I could basically remove the obvious outlines of the house showing through.

I then added a faded white border to the image to give it an extra special feel of serenity.

And finally removed the color just to have some more fun. 

Now maybe she wasn't really feeling like she was on cloud 9 or even floating with it but that wasn't how I interpreted what her actions were portraying. I think most brides really do float through the day and thus the one thing that brings it all back are the photographs. (Even if they are created in photoshop.)