Working with Light

My new friend, Eugene, scheduled a time to meet and work on some lighting techniques based the latest video tutorials produced by veteran photographer, David Sizer. We had a model lined up, but he couldn't make it as agreed. So that greatly limited me and Eugene in what we planned to do. However, us getting together for the first time created an opportunity to get to know one another plan for some future practice dates.



We also spent some time shooting in the State capital building. We first tried setting up a lighting situation in a hideously dark area of the building. But needless to say, it didn't work out very well. So lessons were definitely learned.

Anyway, Eugene has a wedding shoot scheduled near the State capital on Saturday, so that gave him the opportunity to scout around some shooting possibilities. There is a great areas in the building that has an overarching dome and lots of good lighting. We shot at both ISO 640 and 1600 on our Canon cameras. The high ISO really reduced the need for a flash. So that's one thing we learned more in terms of lighting for that building. I often avoid using high ISO in wedding photos because of the noise factor, but I'm beginning to think that for wide shots, the noise is pretty acceptable.



Anyway, I look forward to us getting together again, especially when we can find another model or two to tag along.

Apple's new Mail Stationery

I'm finding Apple's new Mail Stationery a really great tool for emailing my clients. I've done extended review of this feature on my MyMac.com. When I figure out how to customize and create my own Stationery templates, that will make the feature even better. Until then, I'm selectively using the templates that come installed with the program. I also need to see how well the template-based emails are downloading for my clients. Again, thanks to Apple, I'm able to had some affordable features to my business.

Christine and Daniel

Cool New Slide Show Program

Daniel and Christine on the Delta King

DanielChristineLayout.jpg, originally uploaded by Bakari.

This awesome couple, Daniel and Christine, had a blast at their wedding last weekend on the Delta King in Sacramento. It's the second time I've photographed a wedding there and each time it just gets better and better. These are a few favorite photographs from that day because of the lighting and surroundings. Daniel and Christine were in a hurry to get to their guests, but I'm glad they were patient enough for my assistant and I to get these photographs of them.

Joshua and Pheadra: My First Cinderella Wedding

More Layouts with Pixel Pro

Album Creation with Pixel Creator Pro

For a while I've been looking for a good, simple, album creation program. The various ones I looked at were either too complicated or too expensive for what I needed. But about a week ago, I stumbled upon Pixel Creator Pro. I spent several hours yesterday completing my first album with this program.

I've done a few albums using a few other album applications, including Apple’s iPhoto album program and few online programs supplied by album vendors, but so far I like Pixel Creator because it integrates directly with Photoshop, which means I don't have to leave out of an external album program in order to do further enhancements in Photoshop.

Pixel Creator is basically a Photoshop plug-in which uses Photoshop's various tools and actions to help you layout album pages. The plug-in comes numerous well-designed templates (I've only used a handful so far), photo effects, layer styles, and layout formats that can help you create albums much faster than if you're doing the same thing in Photoshop alone.

Personally I think you need to have some prior experience with Photoshop to get the most out of Pixel Creator, but the developers have created a series of really well done tutorials to help you install the program and learn it's basic and advance features. More tutorials will be forthcoming.

To increase my workflow with this program and other similar tasks in Photoshop, I use the excellent SteerMouse driver to activate a couple of most-often used Pixel Creator key shortcuts, and I've also created a few Photoshop actions for quickly saving files or applying particular enhancements to images.

Learning from some of the mistakes I made with this first album using Pixel Creator, I should be able to complete my next album in about half the time, which would be like 3-4 hours.

While the company doesn't provide a demo version of their program, you can view several of the tutorials to give you an idea if the program is right for you.

I look forward to more from Pixel Creator. I think it has a lot of promise.

High Contrast Enhancement

Denne.jpg, originally uploaded by Bakari.

This is a technique, "Trendy High-Contrast Portrait Effect," is based on Scott Kelby's latest book, The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers.

Photoshop Actions Finally Organized

While I don't use Photoshop actions on all my wedding photos, they do come in handy in my workflow when I'm trying to make similar enhancements to different photos. For a long while, my PS actions were very disorganized which caused some wasted time in my workflow—searching for them and not knowing which ones I should use. So I decided to color code my most used actions green, and use violet for useful actions that I might use on lesser occasions.

I'll no doubt be adding more actions as I discover better ones, but in the mean time I'm finding that I can develop quite a few just from using Scott Kelby's excellent Photoshop books.