Not much going on this week, so I thought I would post a few fun photos I got at the rehearsal for Casey and Linsey’s wedding last week! Enjoy!

While at the rehearsal dinner, I let a couple young friends of mine play with my camera. I did make them wear the strap around their necks, but looking back, I wonder at my bravery in letting 2 kids under 10 play with my camera.  But when I got my camera back, I found a whole bunch of hilarious pictures! Here they are!




Maybe I should let kids play with my camera more often. Or not. But these pictures are pretty great.

Well, I’ve decided it’s high time to come up with some promotional materials for myself! Step 1 is business cards.  I designed this card below.

Everyone who saw it really liked it, and I liked it too. Then my brother said something that gave me an unfortunate revelation: “Are you going to be able to read your phone number?” The company that prints my stuff has you create your products at such a high resolution that this was literally the size I was designing in. I shrank it to business card size and saw this!

Too small! I was a little disappointed, but realized that a business card has to be functional! Here is my redesign in full size and actual size. I don’t like it quite as much, but you can read it now.


Let me know what you think!

Saturday was Casey and Linsey’s Wedding! I was so happy for them, and everything went just about as perfectly as it could have! I was a groomsman, so I wasn’t able to be their main photographer, but I still took a few shots. The honor of the photography went to Artco Photography by Joi. I have met Joi before, she is amazing! I had a great time watching her, and I learned a lot from her.

I am also excited as I just stepped up to Photoshop CS3, and now have some incredible new actions available to me. Rather than stamping my logo in the middle of the picture as I have been doing, I am trying a framing action with my logo on the frame. Let me know what you think of it!

Here are a few shots I took on Saturday.

Linsey, dazed and confused from the greatness of the wedding day, wanders into an industrial area. Casey rushed to save her! 

This is a funny one. I left all of the formals to Joi, I didn’t want to get in her way. I took this shot because the way Joi moved her hand made me think of a conductor at a classical concert. I took this shot to represent that. Most people that see it say, “Can’t you crop her out?” And I’m like, “That’s the whole point of the shot!”

Bridesmaid Rhiana with Casey’s little sister!

So my friends Casey and Linsey are getting married on Saturday! It’s coming up fast, and they are starting to feel the stress of having to get everything done! Linsey wanted to make an announcement for family members that weren’t able to come to the wedding, so she planned to get together with me last Saturday to get it done. Friday, Casey and I hung out and Casey decided we should design a hideous joke announcement and then play it up that Linsey didn’t need to come over any more because the announcement was all done. We attempted to make it as hideous as possible! We had Linsey believing it was done, of course, until she saw it!

She called us back laughing pretty hard!  Strangely enough, she actually had me print out a 4 x 6 of this to put on her fridge. Go figure!

On a side note, when Linsey came over to show me how she wanted her announcement to look, and we looked through the RAW camera files, we came across this shot! Just goes to show, I need to be more careful in what I am deciding not to edit. Once I finished this up for her, it was one of her favorite shots!

I’ll have pictures of Casey and Linsey’s wedding hopefully Sunday or Monday night! Check back!

OK, every time I think that I am starting to really learn the art of Photoshop and post-editing, I learn something new from one of the pros I follow that blows my mind! I’ve had Photoshop for a while now, but wonder how much I’ve really cracked into this software! Today I learned about layer masks and how to use them effectively, as well as various actions in Photoshop that can really make your colors pop off the screen. If you’re a seasoned pro in the ways of Photoshop, this might seem a little amateurish, but we were all here once, right?

One of my frustrations in trying to make certain colors pop in Photoshop is that it almost always had annoying side effects to other elements in the picture.  Make the sky bluer, and you also made the person’s eyes look unnatural and that blue car popped out too.  You could cut out the sky and make a new layer, but that was a ton of work and generally not worth it.  Try to bring out the red in those flowers the bride is holding, and anything orange started bleeding! But with layer masks, I can make changes to colors, and then choose specific parts of the picture that receive those enhancements...without having to cut them out manually! The gradient tool also makes more sense to me now, and I can gradually have an effect begin in a certain place and get more intense at the edge!

I decided to use a photo from my vacation to Honduras as my test picture to test out my new knowledge of layer masks. The first shot is directly out of my camera.  The second is perfectly what I envisioned when I imagined this shot at the time it was taken.  I was able to give the sky a richer blue and was able to make the people in the chair more silhouetted like I originally meant. And instead of it taking the hour I thought it would, and thus not being worth the edit, it took me less than 2 minutes! I am excited to see how this affects my processing work from now on!