Peer One Portraits

Posted on November 16, 2014 by marey mercy

Stupid title, but it’s a play on Pier 1, which is where I got all these props. Moving on.

My initial plan was to wear one of my silvery gray wigs in this getup, but it ended up getting tangled in the garland so I put a thick silver headband on my head, on top of my wig cap, and pinned the poinsettias to that instead. Ended up working out great; I forget how much more difficult long wigs make taking self-portraits. They’re a bit hot under the lights, they get in the way constantly (snagged up in the costume or in my eyes while I’m trying to see what I’m doing or set up a shot), plus they tangle a lot when I’m flinging them around. Believe it or not, having 4 poinsettias clipped to my head was actually easier than putting on one wig! And yes, the poinsettias came with clips attached – I’m sure they are meant to clip to Christmas tree limbs or something, but that’s why i snatched them up, because I knew they’d be super-easy to pin to my head. And they were, except on one of them the clip broke off after about 20 minutes – kinda chintzy for a $5 decoration if you asked me, but then again, I’ve always found Pier 1 to be overpriced. Moving on.

I was on my way to the register with some other stuff when I spied this white, sparkly garland shoved into a basket and snagged it instead. It was really fun to work with and created some very cool looks – the downside was that it was terribly itchy (then again, it wasn’t created to be worn by a human, so there you go). I loved the shots I got with these props, so much so that I’ve already edited – including the pics I shared yesterday – ten shots! That’s way more than I usually process from a shoot where I didn’t change costumes all that much. But the garland really added interest to the photos, and I found myself struggling to decide which shots to process.

Remember when I said yesterday how I changed the colors up in every shot? Here I went for an icy blue that’s probably more green than I inteded.

When deciding what shots to edit, I try to find pictures where either my pose or facial expression isn’t so typical, but I do just have one face, after all, and I do tend to make the same faces over and over (which I discussed in a previous post). I think this is where the props can help a lot; to add some visual interest to the photo besides my face. I had very similar expressions going on in all the shots I took with the garland (about 200, in case you wanted to know), but the garland created a lot of interesting shapes and was fairly easy to manipulate. In fact, I totally want to work with it again – it’s very sturdy, and the wires are thick and strong so I can move it into a shape and it will hold it for several poses before it starts to collapse. I could have done a lot more, but as I said, it was terribly itchy and my skin was starting to get irritated, so I had to stop playing around. Plus, there’s only so many shots I need of me in this particular look with the same garland no matter how much I can manipulate it, so I figured I’d stop while I was ahead and leave more to the imagination for a future shoot where I can look completely different.

Another favorite

As far as the technical stuff, to change things up a bit I used my 70-200 telephoto lens that I normally reserve for plane shots in this shoot. There was no real reason for this other than wanting to try something different and see how the photos turned out; it was nice to have more room to work with while I posed since I could keep the tripod pulled quite far back instead of needing to keep it closer with my 50mm or 85mm prime lenses, but I didn’t get the lovely focus and camera blur those lenses would have provided. Still, it did a good job and for the most part the auto-focus was dead-on – easier than either one of the prime lenses, in fact, but I guess that finicky focus is why they create such nice portraits in the first place. Another benefit I’d never considered was that I could stand much farther away from the black backdrop, so there was very little light from the flash reflected in it to alter the solid black effect – another thing I probably should have known by now but never did.

Because I used my Flash Bender on my Speedlite for this shoot, I got a lot of sharp, strong shadows that created some nice black and white shots as well, so there’s quite a few I converted to B&W when processing. I also kept my cheap ring light handy (and managed to knock it over and break it as well, so it’s time to buy another one of those) and for the most part had it set up behind me on a tripod to give my head and shoulders a bit of an outline against the black backdrop; occasionally I also placed it right in front of me to get some catchlights in my eyes. Unfortunately, in some of the tighter close-up shots the ring light tends to create a lot of chromatic aberration that I forgot to edit out (you can see it in the close-up shot from yesterday and the one above), and my eyes came out looking a little pink. I may go back and edit that before uploading to Flickr, but for the blog, pink eyes it is. And by the way, super-easy Photoshop technique for fixing chromatic aberration is located here – a two-minute YouTube tutorial that is simple as pie to do. Has saved my butt on many occasions when working with bright lights and getting all those purple rings around high-contrast areas.

These next few are pretty experimental and I don’t care for them quite as much as the more straightforward shots, but there was so much I wanted to work with here and I started feeling the need to change things up a bit.

When this shot was taken, the Speedlite failed to go off, so the resulting photo was really dark. This happens several times throughout any shoot, and sometimes I try to process one of the pics to see if anything interesting can come of it. Usually nothing does, and I don’t think this one is very successful either. I pulled it into Pixlr to try and generate some added interest, and honestly I can’t remember what all I did to it there, but in the end, I still don’t think I like it very much. But hey, I tried.

Mostly I just liked the way the garland was framing my face here; this is another shot I Pixlr’ed like crazy, but I think it worked better here. I used some of their graduated color filters as well as a space filter to make the costume sparkle; I just discovered that Pixlr’s desktop app can utilize masks so I was able to apply the stars without having to add them to my face, which is cool. I love textures and filtered effects, but for the most part I don’t like them to muck up faces, and it’s nice to be able to erase that out now.

Well, that’s probably all I have from this shoot, although I have one or two more I’m still eyeing. But I pretty much marathon-edited this weekend, partly because I had the time, and partly because it’s been a long time since I just worked with portraits and had forgotten how much fun it is. Busy week coming up at work – the week before any vacation is always stressful, and this one is shaping up to be the same, so I may be MIA until the holiday starts next weekend. Happy Monday everyone!

Prop Shop

Posted on November 16, 2014 by marey mercy

I actually had a free day today, so I stopped by Pier 1 to get some things I could stick on my head, and otherwise use in ways for which they were not intended.

Annnnnd I found some – like this ornament, and the poinsettia leaves I pinned to my wig (you can see this shot with the pink eyes corrected here).

I had two separate looks for this shoot, and I’ll share the pics I’ve processed from the first look in this post. I didn’t edit too many from this section of the set, because it wasn’t my favorite look at first, but after looking at the ones I edited, I may go back and choose some more. I modeled my makeup after some ideas I got through Google searching, and the results were a little strange. I think I look more like a male with makeup on than a female, but whatever. For the second set I went back and put on some black shadow and liner and I looked a bit more normal. Not that looking abnormal is a bad thing:

My favorite from this set so far

As usual, I started off the shoot pretty bored and frustrated, and not feeling like I had anything new to cough up. But I started playing around with the ring light I had set up behind me to try and outline myself against the black background, and I started to get into it a little bit. It’s been a long time since I just played around with some props to see what I could come up with, and after a slow start things really got rolling once I pulled out the sparkly garland – but I’m saving those pics for next post.

A bit of yellowness under the eyes here that I couldn’t get rid of effectively. Oh well.

I messed around with the color a lot in post, because it was bright and all over the place, so no two shots looks the same in that regard – the poinsettias are actually a blueish-silver in reality, but they took on all sorts of tints as the processing proceeded. Also, while shopping around I picked up some Dermablend foundation to see if it would do a better job covering up my sun damage (as well as the cystic acne once again plaguing my chin – edited out of all the photos, of course), and it worked incredibly well. In fact, I went ahead and used the foundation all over for this shoot, and it is definitely effective if you need heavy, full-coverage.; my red and splotchy neck was completely covered, as well as the aforementioned blemish. The only downside was that I found it hard to wash off, even in the shower. I wouldn’t wear this stuff day-to-day, except for maybe on my neck where the damage is the worst. But it’s great for photos.

As I said, these are the only shots from the first look of the shoot I’ve had time to process, but I have a bunch more waiting in the wings for a later post – one I can write when I’m not so tired. It’s late and I need to hit the hay, but I wanted to share at least a little bit from today’s shoot. I dreaded it at first, but it ended up being fun and I got a ton of good shots to work with. More later.

Odds and Dead-Ends

Posted on November 9, 2014 by marey mercy

I have a few more photos from the air show to share, then some stuff I tried to pull off this weekend and failed at, for various reasons. First up, the air show:

Here’s another shot of the B-17; this is about as far away as I prefer to get when shooting planes, and I realize if I’m going to be happier with my shots next year I’ve got to get my hands on a longer zoom lens. Since even used on eBay a longer zoom sells for a thousand bucks at the least, I may say to hell with it next year and just take all my pics of the planes when they’re on the ground.

And now, more Blue Angels:

Those last two are shots of the C-130T Hercules the Angels use as a transport plane; it’s dubbed “Fat Albert.” Again, I couldn’t slow my shutter speed enough to blur the motion of the propellers here, but I tried.

And now, for my weekend fail: Saturday afternoon I decided to try some levitation, but I needed to do it quickly, so I set up, slapped on some makeup, threw on a new costume, and got to work. The results, however, were less than impressive. It took me awhile to figure out what went wrong, but in the end I realized that I need to work on my lighting for such shots. It was too bright, and it flattened me out and made me look like a cartoon. On the plus side, I’m getting better at adding shadows, and I played around with some of the new filters I now have with my Pixlr app since I signed up and became a member. But in the end, Pixlr wasn’t enough to save the shots. An example (and yes, I made it small ,because UGH):

This next one was the best of the bunch, I think:

Not bad, but nothing to write home about either (although I will blog about it, apparently). My bottom foot looks huge, but I liked the movement of the hair (I also thought that having my face covered up would help conceal the flatness my bad lighting created on my facial features). And, I used a different layering technique here than I usually do; although it took twice as long to do, I think the end results look better.

I wish these had turned out better, but not every shoot produces good results. Switching my backdrop to black probably worked against me too, since I haven’t used it in awhile and it creates harsher light than the gray one does. I probably could have just used my Speedlight and abandoned my umbrella stands entirely for this, but I couldn’t tell the light was a problem until the shoot was already over. I actually thought I’d gotten some really good stuff, too, so processing the shots was disappointing. But at least I tried.

Another busy week ahead, so not sure when I’ll have more to share. Hope you’re all wrapping up a nice weekend and getting ready for the week ahead. I know for me, Thanksgiving break can’t get here soon enough. Two weeks to go!

No Plane, No Gain

Posted on November 6, 2014 by marey mercy

I am continuing to scour the three thousand photos I took at Wings Over Houston last weekend for shots that might be unique from what other photographers captured. My Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of photos from the event that have been uploaded to various airshow and aviation websites, and yep, I’m still seeing a lot of “my” photos over and again, including several with the Blue Angels passing over the moon – although none of those look quite like the one I captured. As I see more and more shots from others, I get a better idea of which pictures I’d like to process, like this one:

This was the narrator of the Blue Angels performance; I popped this shot off real quick for no good reason but ended up liking the color and composition of it. Don’t know if I would have liked it as much had he been wearing the traditional blue flight suit, because I love the bright yellow against that rather dull background.

I didn’t so much love this next shot, but I was impressed with the aircraft so I wanted to share at least one:

The propellers on this thing were massive; when at rest they looked almost as big as the fuselage of the plane. They also swivel, so the aircraft can fly either as a plane or a helicopter. It was definitely an impressive thing to watch, but a damned ugly thing to photograph. I was so excited to see it fly but when looking at the photos I couldn’t work up much energy to process any of them; I had to force myself to do this one. Moving on.

I liked the color and composition of this one, but I admit to having been too lazy to look up exactly what planes these are. It’s been tricky for me, processing shots of planes where the subject is so small; I’m used to getting right up on a plane as it lands like I’ve done in the past with commercial jets, but these were much higher in the sky and farther away than the planes I capture at airport observation areas. So even though these felt tiny to me, I found other things to appreciate. Also, I wasn’t able to slow my shutter speed down enough to blur the motion of the propellers; I tried, but my camera was still stopping the blades. If I’d slowed down the shutter any more, though, everything would have been blurry, so I quit trying.

Ah yes, I do know what these warbirds are – a B-17 and a Mustang P-51 (a TF-51D, actually, but I prefer to call it a P-51 because it sounds better). I’m so bummed there were no clouds in the sky as that would have really helped to project a sense of flying here; it almost looks like a shot of planes set against a light blue background, like an ad in a paper or something. I tried to cheat and add some clouds as a layer but it looked awful, so plain boring blue non sky-like background it is.

At times, though, the planes made their own clouds:

Again, such a small subject but at last, some texture to the sky! That’s a A6M2 Zero, by the way, a Japanese WWII fighter plane.

And now, for a few more Blue Angels shots:

This is one of those shots that’s been replicated a thousand times over, but at least mine is nice and crisp. And holy hell, how do those pilots not die doing this sort of thing? Amazing.

Now this one is a little weird:

I actually took the shot while focusing through a chain-link fence, and if you look at it from afar you can see the fence’s diamond pattern against the shot. It’s very big and blurry, but it’s there. Because of that, I edited the hell of it, adding an HDR filter through Photoshop and intensifying the color. It’s a little odd-looking and I’m not sure I like it, but at least it’s something different from the usual.

That’s all I’ve had time this week to edit, but in other news: SANDY’S BACK! She had surgery in mid-August and was not cleared to go back to massaging until October 20th, but I haven’t had time to get to her until this week. I knew I was in for an entertaining session when she told me what sort of surgery it had been: she had part of her colon removed. YEP. And as soon as I was face-down on that table she started telling me all about it. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that once again while my head hung over the massage table my jaw was hitting the floor. I don’t know anyone else who can literally make my mouth hang open in an odd mix of horror and hilarity like Sandy does. After sharing with me the specifics of what came out of her right after surgery (just a hint: the word “jelly” was used), she skipped ahead to her last day in the hospital, when the doctors refused to release her until she passed gas. “And no squeakers,” Sandy elaborated. “They wanted a sonic boom!” Just imagine, she mused, the one thing you spend your whole life trying to avoid doing in front of other people and one day you have to perform it for your doctors to get your ticket home. Oh Sandy, you have been missed.

Air Apparent

Posted on November 3, 2014 by marey mercy

This past Saturday was the Wings Over Houston airshow, and for the second time I went with my father. Last year, the military were not involved with the show because of the government sequester, and it being my first trip I had no idea how much that impacted the crowd – but this year, the event was twice as crowded as last. And, there were loads more planes than last year, including the Blue Angels. It was a great show, and well worth the early rise time (I got up at 5 AM to be at my dad’s house by 7) and the hour-long line we had to stand in when the show was over and we went to catch a shuttle back to the park-and-ride. Now for the fun part: I took THREE THOUSAND PICTURES. How am I ever going to sort through them all?!

The Blue Angels

The sorting has already begun, actually, because the first thing I discovered Sunday morning after processing that shot above, was that everybody with a camera at the event took the exact same pictures as me. Once I realized it, it made perfect sense, but I admit there was a moment of disappointment in comprehending that of course we all took the same pictures, since we were all watching the same show. Allow me to share the example with you that enlightened me:

Hey! No fair!

I’d searched Wikipedia to read up a bit on the Blue Angels, and yep, there it was – my photo! Only, it was taken two years ago. The only difference is that the smoke trailing from one of the planes in the Wikipedia shot is gray whereas all of mine are white – other than that, it’s exactly the same. Once I got over my disappointment at realizing it was highly likely the majority of my awesome three thousand shots were not that awesome at all, but were actually pretty damn common, it at least provided me with a starting point for culling through them. I decided to try and find more unique shots that perhaps not as many people bothered to capture, like this one:

An F-100F Super Sabre flying into a cloud of smoke during a demonstration

I’m not sure that particular shot works all that well. but certainly the dark smoky background is different than the usual. Unfortunately I didn’t quite get the back end of the plane into the frame, but that’s not always a necessity.

By the time the Angels came out to fly (they’re always the grand finale, and rightfully so) the moon was visible in the late-afternoon sky – it was a welcome appearance, since the sky this day was cloudless, and for aviation photographers clouds add so much interest to a shot, as well as giving the pictures a better effect of being airborne. I’m sure many picture-snappers got shots of the Blue Angels flying over the moon, but mine has actually gotten 5 retweets and 10 favorites on Twitter, 3 of which were from Blue Angels pilots themselves, so I’m happy. Hey, don’t laugh – 5 retweets on a photo is more than I’ve ever gotten, so I’ll take it!

Aside from the sky being cloudless, it was a gorgeous but COLD day, at least for Houston (in the mid-forties all morning, and very breezy). I was wearing Ugg boots and my long Free People sweater, but I still had to go purchase a big fugly Wings Over Houston hoodie to keep from chattering my teeth off until mid-afternoon; I was quite the sight in my oh-so-fashionable outfit, including kicky scarf, and a big gray sweatshirt stuffed over all of it, but it’s not the Wings Over Houston Air and Fashion Show, so whatever. Plus, the morning chill gave way to an afternoon that was incredibly pleasant, especially when standing in the aforementioned shuttle bus line for an hour. And if you still felt cold, there was always this to warm you up:

The Shockwave Jet Truck

Yes, that’s a jet engine strapped to the cab of a semi, so yes, at some point in someone’s life this was actually considered a good enough idea to make it happen. It’s at the show every year, and while watching it reach speeds of up to 375 miles per hour doesn’t do anything for me, seeing it taxi past the crowd with flames leaping everywhere is pretty awesome. Makes for a nice picture too.

More Blue Angels shenanigans – yep, that’s actually two planes, one right side up and one upside down. Actually, I think this is how baby airplanes are made.

A funny story: at one point during the show, a group of four people came up right in front of us, carrying two poles attached to banners. They had on orange reflective vests that said “Oracle Team Polehandler” on the back, and to us they looked like they were at some point going to parade around with the banners advertising whatever Oracle sells. They sat down on the tarmac in front of us, and I was totally amused by the one female in the group who kept turning to face the crowd and take selfie after selfie (with the tarmac as a backdrop) on her iPhone. She seemed completely unaware of the fact that we could all see her sitting there smiling at her phone camera, and I admit to thinking her a bit oblivious – especially since a pretty amazing stunt flyer was putting on one hell of a show at the time. You would think the fact that the pilot’s stunt plane had the huge word ORACLE painted on it might have clued me in to something, but nope. Then her whole group got up, picked up their poles (in accordance with the title on their orange jackets) and marched themselves with precision over to the active runway, where they proceeded to stretch the thick ribbons that were attached to each pole across it and hold each end. Not soon after that, the completely obnoxious announcer (not the announcer for the whole show; ORACLE apparently had their own) told the crowd that the pilot was now going to perform his infamous “triple ribbon cut,” wherein he flies between each of three sets of poles, cutting each set of ribbons stretched across the runway with his plane – using the left wing for the first ribbon, the right wing for the second, and cutting the third ribbon with the fin of his plane while it’s inverted. WHUT?!

Oh yes he did – see the ribbons?

That teeny tiny person in the white shirt and black pants is the female in question, and after realizing she’d volunteered to stand on a runway and hold a pole while a plane hurtled towards her upside-down to cut some ribbons in half, I conceded her participation was totally worthy of multiple selfies (in fact, I want to find out how she got the gig so I can do it next year). And speaking of the obnoxious announcer, he must have said the pilot’s name a zillion times while describing his various death-defying stunts: SEAN D. TUCKER. He said his name so much, it reminded me of late-night infomercials that use repetition to make a product stick in the viewer’s brain. He also mentioned several times what EXCELLENT PHYSICAL CONDITION the pilot SEAN D. TUCKER was in to be able to endure the G forces while he performed his stunts, and I found myself wondering aloud if this was a performance or a personal ad. Either that, or perhaps the announcer had a serious crush on him. Either way, I decided to roll with it, and since SEAN D. TUCKER was in such EXCELLENT PHYSICAL CONDITION and so obviously proud of it, when he taxied by us after his demo was over I yelled out to him: Take off your shirt, SEAN D. TUCKER!!! OK, maybe I didn’t shout it, but I did mock-shout it to my dad and his friends so we could all get a good chuckle. Still, I think it’s possible SEAN D. TUCKER heard me:

Bask in the gloriousness that is SEAN D. TUCKER!! Actually, he is rather handsome.

My Canon 7D and my used eBay 70-200 lens did me proud, but I admit to suffering lens envy at some of the humongous ones the photogs in the media box were sporting. And while the Blue Angels were performing, a military photographer out on the tarmac stopped right in front of us to pop off some shots, and I drooled at how fast his continuous shooting was compared to mine. But in the end, I got some nice sharp shots with my little “cheap” setup. I still want to get my hands on the new 7D, but I’m wondering if a better zoom lens might be a smarter investment (they cost as much, if not more, than the new 7D camera body). I definitely saw the limitations of the lens today, and would have loved to get a bit more zoom as well as some image stabilization, so we’ll see which way I decide to go. If I move up to a lens that’s much bigger than the one I have, however, I’ll no longer be able to shoot without at least a monopod, which leads to a whole new set of limitations. Plus it might be ridiculous to have a $1600 lens strapped to a old-model 7D anyway. Moving on.

These are just the first shots I’ve had time to edit, and I’m not sure how I’m going to more forward with it all. I hate to bore the crap out of everyone with shot after shot of air show photos, but in the end, if it’s where I’m at and what I’m into, why would I do anything else with my time? So love my plane photos or leave them, people. Because they’re gonna be around for awhile!

Booking It

Posted on October 31, 2014 by marey mercy

It looks like my posts are not showing up in WordPress Reader lately, and I don’t know why, so who knows if anyone will even see this. Oh well.

A friend of mine has published a book of poetry using one of my photos! I love the way it looks and she is a wonderful poet, so if you can spare a few bucks please support her by buying a copy here.

Today is obviously Halloween, and one of the advantages of being at a private school is that we get to obnoxiously celebrate whatever holidays we want. Every year the school holds a costume contest for the teachers, so everyone dresses up elaborately. I am not going for anything elaborate, because I already get up way too early in the morning just to put on my regular face, (5:15 AM) and I’m not willing to get up any earlier for costume makeup application. Plus, I have to teach all day in whatever I wear so I want to be comfortable – so I just went with a hippie and invested in a really nice long blonde wig and some round glasses. Funny thing is, only the wig and round glasses were actually purchased specifically for the costume – the rest is my own clothes! My Birkenstocks, wide-leg jeans, and poncho are all already in regular rotation, so basically I’m going to school dressed like myself on a Saturday, just with a wig and different frames.

Weird shot of my wig and glasses for Halloween

The air show is Saturday, so I’ll be getting up at an ungodly hour to drive out to my father’s house and carpool on over there with him. Taking the “real” camera along this time, so here’s hoping I get a ton of good pictures. The weather is supposed to be perfection with the cool front that’s moving in today, which will certainly help, so I hope to have loads to edit and process in the coming week. It’s been awhile since I’ve had anything new to work with, so wish me luck!

Fact or Wig-Tion?

Posted on October 7, 2014 by marey mercy

I’ve tried to post this a couple of times now, but something keeps going wrong. I hope it actually works this time. When working on this post Monday afternoon I accidentally hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save draft’ so it went live for about fifteen seconds, and some of you got an email about it only to find nothing new when you came to the blog. But now when I publish it, it’s not showing up at all. Weird.

Sunday afternoon I wanted to play around in some new wigs I’ve bought recently and haven’t had time to try on, so I decided to set up my camera and combine wig-time with photography (taking photos of yourself in new wigs is also a great way to get perspective on how they really look on you). I took about 150 shots overall, and once again did this quickly to make it work with the time I had available; I didn’t put on any drag makeup or anything, just freshened up my normal day-to-day face, and wore a simple tee-shirt as my costume. I took some straight-up pics to show the wigs for a review I may do later, but then with each wig I also did some arty-farty hair-flinging to try and come up with some interesting shots for my portfolio, such as it is. I just had my Speedlite on top of my camera and opened up the blinds for some natural light (rather than taking the time to set up my umbrellas), but I got a handful of cool shots to play around with for the week, so I am happy.

Here’s the process for the one I made my 365 for the day. Original:

It was a cool shot right out of the camera, but of course I had to mess with it a bit. I used my RadLab editor in Photoshop to brighten things up as well as add color, change the tone a bit, and create more contrast:

Oh and I also changed my shirt color, too

Then I used Snapseed’s sharpening and structure tools for better clarity. This is tricky with all those hairs flying about – over-sharpen the picture and it will look a hot mess, but I think I did OK.

Lastly, I used my desktop Pixlr app to cool down the color a bit more and add some slight texture to the background. Overall, not a bad Day 67:

Here’s one more I managed to edit the next day – this is one of those wigs that looks great in photos, but not so much in real life. I’d never wear this one out of the house because the lace is way too dark (it’s made by an ethnic line, and those lines in general use much darker lace for their customers) and it’s just way too big for me – way too much hair. Exhibit A:

I look like The Lost Judd in this

But the color is fabulous for photos as are the pretty waves, and, at $45, it’s a bargain anyway, so why not:

Side note: As I mentioned in my previous post, I tend to shoot in vertical or portrait mode as opposed to landscape, and another drawback to that aside from the fact that the camera is usually off-kilter is that when posing for self-portraits, I often don’t know exactly where to stand to get my entire body into the middle of the frame. So, I usually end up taking several shots of a pose, each time moving over a millimeter or two in the hopes that in at least one of them I’m fully in the shot. This is actually why so many of my portraits aren’t centered: I often like the facial expression or focus best on a shot that is off-center and use it anyway. In the case of this shot, I did not intend to be cut in half, but with the fall of the waves here I really thought it worked nicely. So yay for happy accidents.

I of course removed some of my facial lines and smoothed my skin slightly in PS, then used what has rapidly become my new favorite tool, my RadLab photo editing plug-in. I love to brighten and add contrast and color using this tool, and on occasion I’ll even go into the color filters to change things up a bit, like I did here:

I was a little nervous about giving my skin such a yellowish-green hue, but I really liked the effect overall and especially how it made the red hair pop, so I went for it. And yes, I did shave a few years off the old mug, so deal with it. After getting to this step, there wasn’t much more to do, but I did use Snapseed to sharpen as well selectively make the red hair a little brighter and more vibrant. Then I used my RadLab Dirty Pictures plug-in to add a slight texture to the background, and voila! The finished product:

Honestly, this is a ‘favorite shot’ for me – I really love how this turned out.

Sometimes my changes are so slight, like adding that background, that I wonder if they really matter. But that was a lot of blank wall just sitting there, and although I tried to add more interesting and noticeable light leaks and bokeh effects, everything else seemed overdone, and I still wanted to add something. So subtle texture it was. I like how it makes the photo feel a little 3-D, like you could almost reach out and touch that red hair. I really can, of course, but that’s because it’s sitting in a bag in my bathroom cabinet.

That’s all for now, but hoping to have time to edit some more from this set later this week as well as review some wigs. We’ll see what all I manage to accomplish.

Levitation Break

Posted on October 5, 2014 by marey mercy

Overall it hasn’t been a great week, but I’m not going to talk about that right now. I’d rather randomly share this ad I saw in my Facebook feed a few days ago, because it cracked me up:

Why yes, the first thing one thinks when looking at this photo is WOW, NICE EYES

I actually see this sort of thing quite often around the internet when looking for tips on taking portrait photography or getting the right lighting for studio shots. Many of the tips are written by male photographers, and their example photographs are often scantily clad women. My favorite, and dammit I wish I could find it again, was a video on YouTube that featured a sloppily-dressed, fairly dumpy looking middle-aged guy firing away with his camera at a very young woman in a bikini to show how he set up his portrait lighting. It was kinda gross, but amusing as hell at the same time, in a dude, we all know you’re paying her to wear that bikini in front of you sort of way. Half the time while trying to get tips on studio shoots I end up feeling like a big old creeper because of the half-naked women I have to view over and over just to learn. But moving on.

Here’s a shot I managed to pull off Saturday wherein I, of course, am not scantily clad, but I am in a studio. I ran errands all morning, then felt like trying out this clear plastic stool I bought recently because I thought it might help with levitation shots by being easy to edit out. It was, but the shot was still hard to edit and I spent several hours on it for various reasons. For one, I always forget what process works best for these shots because currently I am doing them so infrequently, so I never remember what I did last time that worked. For another, I forgot about the rule of wearing contrasting colors to the backdrop so I can easier edit myself out of the shot and into the background one, so the process of selecting the subject was tricky and took a good deal of time. But this picture is proof that even if I have very little time to shoot photos right now, it still can be done. I am in my regular clothes, and have on no stage makeup or fake hair – just me and a backdrop and a plastic chair. I also went along with my new strategy of going in with a plan – I knew exactly the shot I wanted, set up and posed for it, and once I had it, I quit shooting. This set? Was 32 shots – that’s it. As opposed to my usual 350. So it’s good to know I can work this way and pull it off.

Now let’s see the whole thing in action:

That duster is fabulous and from Free People, of course. I own two because I snagged a huge hole in the first one and went and bought another. The one I’m wearing in this shot is actually the one with the hole, because I figured I’d be tossing it around a bit so might as well wear the damaged one.

Here I am, layered over a second shot of a blank background and highly filtered and edited in Photoshop. My hair in particular was a bitch here, because I realized halfway through the editing process that I’d clipped out all the little flyaway hairs the first time and it left it looking flat and fake, so I had to go back to the original, select all these little flyaways, and layer them into the composite shot. Took some time and might not have seemed like a big deal to other people, but it made huge difference to me because it gave my hair back the movement it lacked with all the flyaways cropped out. And, I am getting better at adding shadows, I think – the ones you see here were added in Photoshop by me. Final shot:

I used my Pixlr desktop app for the final finessing, since I can edit TIFF files with it now. I used a “smoke” overlay to add some depth to the background, a barely visible little star overlay, and a couple of very faint borders for added pop. Unfortunately, something I did somewhere along the way with all my editing made my teeth turn kinda gray, but what can you do. It’s always something. In this case, the something is gray teeth. Still a cool shot and not a bad levitation, so I’ll take it.

Sidenote: Because I shoot in vertical or portrait orientation so often, my studio self-portraits are almost always crooked. And by almost always I mean always. I start out with the camera pretty straight, but the more I shoot and chimp my shots the more off-kilter it gets. Then I often forget to straighten it when I edit, so when you look at the floor line in my shots it’s often crooked. Hopefully most people don’t notice it, but if you go back and look at my levitation and jump shots over on Flickr, I guarantee you almost all of them involve a slightly slanted floor. Moving on.

Not much else to report at this time; I wanted to take a few more levitation photos with these cool new Minnetonka moccasin boots I bought, but I got sidetracked by it taking me 45 minutes to lace the stupid things (not even kidding) and then couldn’t get my feet into them, so that ruined my mood. Time to go return the shoes and get ready for another week. Happy weekend everyone!

Distant Disappointments

Posted on September 28, 2014 by marey mercy

That picture is symbolic of Saturday’s big jaunt out to the observation park at IAH, and of my mood in general. But more about my mood later. Let’s talk photography.

Those fairly blurry antenna-things in the distance mark the direction all those amazing planes fly in as they approach Runway 27, coming in as low as 100 feet over viewers’ heads. That is, when they approach Runway 27 to land, which they were definitely not doing this Saturday when my father and I drove roughly 55 miles out there to spot planes. Because everyone raves about all the action at the observation park, and because Runway 27 is considered one of the busiest runways at IAH, I never seriously considered the fact that it wouldn’t be used at all when we finally ventured out. But that’s exactly what happened.

Our view of the control tower, where I can only imagine everyone inside was looking out windows in the opposite direction, since there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING approaching from ours.

Mind you, this was after agreeing to meet my father at a Pappasito’s for lunch on FM 1960 without realizing there were, in fact, TWO Pappasito’s restaurants on FM 1960, which is such a massive road that those two restaurants are about 40 miles apart. Guess who drove to the wrong one. Yep. So, our 11:00 AM lunch turned into a 12:00 PM lunch, with my poor dad sitting in a booth for an hour waiting for me to arrive (thank g-d he’s the most patient man on the planet and didn’t mind). It was nice to have lunch with him and spend some time, but I’d be lying if I said we weren’t both hugely disappointed not to see anything at the park. We saw loads of planes departing in the distance, some of which would turn and pass overhead, but they were already so high that one was indistinguishable from another, and all I could get was the underbelly of most of the planes. Add to this that the sky was cloudy and gray and taking photos of planes flying directly overhead does not make for a prime lighting situation, and you’ve got a ton of incredibly boring, disappointing photos on your hands.

He’s smiling because he’s yet to realize we’ve been had.

This first one was the absolute best of the bunch, and if you’ve seen my other airplane shots you know how unimpressive this one is, to me if not to you anyway. I could barely make out the registration number on this one. And don’t be fooled by that sky either; this was the rare plane that came around behind us a bit, where the sky had patches of blue. Most of them zoomed right overhead where there was nothing but gray cloud cover.

That, my friends, is as close as I got all day, and of course I was zeroed in on that thing to maximum capacity to get that close. Mostly I got dark little silhouettes against a gray background, but using my Flightradar24 app and the metadata on my photos, I was later able to identify some of the planes I shot, even though they are indistinguishable from one other in the photos. Aside from loads of United planes (since IAH is their home base), I shot one Delta, two US Airways, two American Airlines, one Frontier Jet, and one SkyWest. I’m not too bummed about missing good shots of Delta or American Airlines planes, since I can get photos of those at HOU and already have some, but I’m seriously bummed you can barely see the photos I took of the Frontier Jet and can’t see details of the SkyWest at all.

Barely worth sharing, but there it is. And those clouds in the sky are fake; I Photoshopped them in just so the background wouldn’t be completely gray.

I just don’t know if it’s worth it to try and go out there again; after this experience and the length of the drive it’s certainly going to take a lot to get me to try when I can be at HOU in half the drive and won’t be out an entire day if I can’t get any decent shots of planes. The best I could do with what I shot today was seriously edit the hell out of them to make them worth looking at. Not at all what I wanted to be doing this evening, since my goal for planespotting is to take very sharp, clear, realistic photos of planes in motion, but since that wasn’t possible, well, I made some “plane art” with the crap I had to work with.

Kind of looks like a painting you’d see at a “starving artist’s sale.”

This is how the majority of my shots turned out – black silhouette shot directly overhead. The only thing that made this one interesting was the red lens flare, which was NOT Photoshopped.

I’m still so bummed about Saturday because I was really hoping a good planespotting photo haul would re-invigorate my energy for photography. I feel a little kicked down by the photography gods not to get the enthusiasm injection I really needed, but enthusiasm is something I’m sorely lacking across the board lately and I don’t think I can blame it all on bad pictures. I’ve been glum and lacking in energy for awhile now, and feel dissatisfied most of the time; it’s an overarching blue mood I’ve dealt with before but haven’t had to contend with for some time, although in looking back I see it’s been building for quite awhile, a couple of years in fact. I’m struggling more than I usually do to get myself turned around, and am wondering if it might be chemical or hormonal. Whatever it is, it’s unpleasant, and I’ve made some appointments to get medical input and possible assistance. I’d like to wake up in the morning with enthusiasm again, or at least not with a sense of boredom and dread (and please don’t tell me I need exercise and better nutrition, because I am aware of all that already and have been down all these roads before, so I already know how those components fit into the picture). I suppose the only reason I’m sharing this here today is due to my disappointment with a trip that was supposed to help lighten my mood and ended up doing the opposite, and chances are I’ll delete this last paragraph at some point due to embarrassment or irritation. But for now, it is what it is. Moving on.

Oh, and in case you were wondering (I know I was), those Port-O-Potties were surprisingly clean. At least that’s something!

Plane Plans

Posted on September 24, 2014 by marey mercy

I am so excited, because we’ve had a nice little cool front this week that should last through the weekend, and as long as rain doesn’t roll in Saturday (which it might) my father and I are heading out to the observation area at IAH to do some plane spotting. Now, I know that in no way are you interested in watching 13+ minutes of plane footage from this location, but I liked this video the best of the ones I found on YouTube – I think it really gives you a sense of the observation park and how close the planes are when they fly overhead. So, I’m including the video anyway and you can watch of it what you want.

Lots could go wrong with this plan, but then again, that’s true of aviation in general; weather dictates what happens more than anything, so if the winds aren’t blowing in the right direction the runway where this observation spot is located might not get used all that much. It’s doubtful, since this runway is one of the busiest at the airport, but it’s happened to me before at Hobby, so we’ll see. Tons of Continental planes here since IAH is a home base, but during the afternoon hours loads of international flights and interesting planes landing and taking off, too. So here’s hoping it works out and we get to go.

I probably won’t post much more until after the trip, because I’m having a bad week with my arm (and Sandy the massage therapist had some surgery and can’t work until after October 20th) and I want it to be in some sort of shape to hold up my zoom lens and 7D. Saving my strength, and I’ll probably take my monopod or tripod along to help out, too. For added fun, here’s another video of footage from IAH, there are some really HUGE planes in this one, 777s and the like:

Oh ,and one other note: Stitch Fix not only contacted me to apologize for sending me a lame shipment, they also gave me my $20 stylist’s fee back for the month. AND, they sent me another shipment which I am due to get this Saturday. So I’ll be able to photograph that sometime too, but it might be awhile since this weekend is going be pretty busy as it is.

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