Office Race

Posted on June 1, 2014 by marey mercy

My first goal towards creating a studio out of my office was to get this big, old, cheap Sears bookcase that takes up half a wall cleaned out and out of the room. I told myself I would get that done this weekend, and on Sunday I finally got up the energy to give it a go. It took longer than I expected, because while cleaning out the bookcase I realized I had to find somewhere to put the stuff I cleaned out of there (the stuff that wasn’t total junk anyway) which led to me having to clean out some other drawers and cabinets to make room for it. I don’t think I realized before today, because I don’t generally pay attention much to my surroundings, just how much useless crap I’ve accumulated over the years and strewn all over the house, as well as stuffed into cabinets and drawers. Every available space here within which junk can be placed is full, and I’d wager that 97% of it is useless. So there’s that.

I ended up throwing out 6 bags’ worth of said junk, along with the bookcase, and let’s just say I achieved two goals today – getting rid of the bookshelf and getting back into a workout routine – because at the end of the day I was tired and quite sore all over. But goal #1 is accomplished, and every time I walk into my office I do a little happy dance to see that open space against the wall, which I’ve already used to move my umbrella stands against instead of having them hovering over my computer desk like they were before. At one point today I got really overwhelmed thinking about all those overstuffed drawers and cabinets and bookshelves and feeling the need to de-clutter the entire house, but I calmed myself down and reminded myself I’d do a better job of it if I stuck to the plan and took each step one at a time. I don’t want to burn out by taking on too much too soon, and forgetting to celebrate each little victory. So, here I am with one more wall of free space, a sore neck, and a sense of accomplishment. Yay me.

Un-insert big ugly bookcase here

My next goal is to get rid of that little cheap black and white love seat that is basically a dog couch – I’m going to take it up to the school for the students to sit on in the learning center next year. Hope they don’t mind sitting on a dog bed for relaxation! I’m hoping to get that done some time this week. I’m not sure I even need a truck to move this thing; it was delivered to my doorstep in a box, so it isn’t exactly heavy, just might be too bulky to fit in my car. We’ll see. And yes, I am sorry to separate Penny from one of her favorite resting places, but my mind is made up and this room will be a photo studio, so we’re all going to have to make sacrifices. Moving on.

I also edited two more photos from Friday’s shoot:

I have no idea why I was making that face, but y’all know I like to find shots where I don’t look anything like the other 5,000+ shots of myself I’ve stared at over the years, and this one fit the bill. It kind of looks like I just spied a tarantula crawling up the wall, but I thought the expression lent an air of mystery and humor (and maybe even drama?) to the portrait, so here’s hoping I was right about that.

This next one was really frustrating – I liked it enough to run it through Photo Ninja and Photoshop, but once I started tweaking it in Snapseed I couldn’t get all that into it. It was boring me, and I felt like something was missing. I liked the focus a lot, though, and way the light played on the hair, so I kept working at it.

Even when I uploaded it to Pixlr and started trying out different effects and overlays, I couldn’t hit on anything that gave it the pizzazz I wanted, and I was about to abandon it entirely when, as a last resort, I decided to try out some borders, thinking I could edit the heavy frame out as I’d learned to do recently and just keep whatever textures the border might impose on the image. And just like that – BAM! It all fell into place.

See what I mean? The difference is subtle, but the visual interest the specks and smudges create give the portrait a grittier feel, as well as adding some warmth and light to the shot. I cropped out the dark black borders so that they weren’t so obtrusive (this was actually done using three different borders layered over each other) and was just left with the touches of texture and color that made me happy. Now I really love this shot!

Got to go in to work today, but we’re on summer hours now so I only have to be there from 9 AM to 1 PM. I’m planning on editing more from this set as well as move more furniture, so another busy week awaits. Happy Monday everyone!

Stripe Jumps

Posted on April 28, 2014 by marey mercy

As I mentioned in my last post, my foul mood over losing out on plane spotting this weekend was partly alleviated by getting dressed up a bit and taking some photos in my little studio. Always good for getting me out of a funk.

I didn’t bother with too much studio makeup, just put on enough to make my features stand out in the photographs as I was in a hurry and also wanted to snap a few pics of a new wig for a blog review over on RLW. Here’s one quick wig snap, since I took them at the same time:

Can you believe that thing was $230? What a mess! Not that I paid that much for it, but still. It’s pretty awful. However, my Photoshop skin-smoothing skills are getting pretty awesome – check out a little B & L:

Before

After

Still me, just a little better. And it didn’t take me all day to do this, and I didn’t have to go view the video tutorials a thousand times to pull it off, so yay for that. And now on to the jumping, which also involved a little photo editing magic:

This one, I think, is the best I’ve edited so far – mostly because I got the technique down by the third photo and didn’t feel like going back and re-editing the first two. I was actually standing on a wicker ottoman here that I covered with a black blanket, but I also took a background shot of the black backdrop and then pasted this photo over that background as a layer, and then erased the stool. I think this photo is the most crisp and clear, and in spite of the fact that I pretty much hate that wig (it’s the new one from the portrait posted above) it moved well and looked good for the photos. Doesn’t make it worth $230, but still.

I edited this one using the same basic technique, but here I used the photo of me on the stool as the background, and made the photo of just the black backdrop the layer I pasted over it – I don’t think this worked quite as well:

It’s not bad, and it could be that the movement of the first photo is what makes it more effective, as it really looks like I’m doing some sort of weird squat-jump in that one while here it’s more obvious I was standing on something that got edited out. But working this way, rather than trying to cut myself out of one photo and paste myself onto the backdrop shot, eliminated at least some of the issues I was having before with shadows, and I didn’t have to totally re-create them this time. Also, this black backdrop creates one hell of a vignetting problem when editing and I’m not sure why that is; I feel fairly certain no one else cares about the little color rings that form around the edges but me, but it bugs me to no end and always has. Not sure what to do about it, although for jumping pic #1 I did figure out to go into Pixlr and use one of their “smoke” borders to conceal it a bit.

Also, that dress, which I’ve had for a couple of years now, is amazing for jumping and movement photography! It’s been hanging in my costume closet all this time, and although I’ve used it twice already, it’s been a long time since I’ve put it on, and I hadn’t thought of using it again until recently – my parents have rented a beach house for this coming weekend, and I am going down there Saturday, so I’ve been thinking about bringing this dress to use for some shots on the beach (either myself wearing it or someone else). When I decided at the last minute to take some movement photos, I guess that’s why it sprung to mind, and I’m glad it did, because it reminded me how great this thing moves. And to think I bought it at some fairly cheap clothing store while wandering around aimlessly, waiting for my nail appointment to begin – I bet it was $40 max if it was a dime. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it has one of those awful skirt linings that only comes to mid-thigh, making the rest of the full-length skirt transparent (God how I LOATHE this whole maxi-skirt-lined-only-to-the-thigh trend and want it to DIE already) which is really distracting in photos. So, I had to put on full-length black tights to conceal the lining a little, otherwise my legs would have shown through the skirt. Last one for now:

My issue with this one is that the lighting and focus were off, and the subject doesn’t look as well-lit and defined as the other two. But that dress! It created such an amazing shape, I just had to process it. I actually went ahead and created a Pixler version too, and I’m not sure which one I like better. Perhaps you could view them both and then let me know:

I was trying to detract from the fact that my face isn’t in good focus and came out kind of flat; but I’ve lost the attention-getting color aspect of the material, so I don’t know if this one is better or not. I’m now leaning towards the color one. Let me know what you think in the comments below!

More to come from this set, did some for-real jumping and may process one or two more levitation ones. And no, I haven’t forgotten about the aviation history museum photos, although at this point when I finally do upload them they’ll be anti-climactic.

Happy Monday everyone!

Wigpics

Posted on April 19, 2014 by marey mercy

I snagged a new wig on clearance last week and finally got a chance to write up a review for it on my friend’s wig blog. Since I wanted to give a detailed review of the thing, I took a ton of photos, so I’ll share a few of them here. If you want to see details about the wig you can check out the blog post over at Real Life Wigs, as I won’t be sharing close-ups of the lace front or anything like that here. But I will share a thing or two about how I took the shots, so let’s get to it.

I used my 50mm portrait lens for all these shots, and I also used my ExpoDisc to customize my white balance to the light being used. This worked out great, as the shots didn’t need too much editing and refining when I pulled them off the camera, not as far as white balance or exposure anyway.

Very different lighting for the indoor shots, but the ExpoDisc worked its magic again, and I think they came out great. I also used the new skin softening techniques I learned last weekend, and while overall I like the effect, I think I need to refine the process a bit so the shots don’t look so weird when I magnify them to their full size. I know no one else in the world gives a damn about how a digital photo looks when blown up to 100 times normal, but I do, and when zooming in on these they look weird. I did all the softening and then I sharpened and clarified, which has always been my workflow, but I may have to change that and make the softening the last thing I do. That might help.

When shooting outside, I actually used my Speedlite with a softbox attached as a fill flash. This is not something I’ve ever done, preferring to keep the outside light totally natural, but since I took the indoor shots first and already had everything attached to the camera I decided to leave it that way and see what happened. I really like the results. I generally prefer not to attach the Speedlite if I don’t have to, since it makes the camera heavy, but the fill flash I got out of it eliminated a lot pesky shadows from my face and was worth it in the end.

I don’t have much to say here except, it’s a damn pretty wig. Found it on clearance for seventy-five bucks too. Look how natural that hairline is! And I did a pretty nice job on my makeup here too, considering I started with what I’d had on all day while I ran errands and just slapped more of it on. I even managed to make my lips look good today. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, people.

Close-up shot I took outside to show blog readers the color. And I always forget how cute those spare glasses are until I put them on for a wig picture. I don’t like to wear my usual glasses with wigs because I have to stretch out the ear pieces a little bit to go over the ear tabs, and it loosens the glasses eventually. I don’t see as well with these as I do with my cat-shaped ones, so I tend not to wear them very often.

Saturday I am heading out to my parents’ side of town to attend a fundraiser for an aviation museum with my dad. Gonna load up the camera and take some airplane pics, so lots more to come!

Porch Song

Posted on March 20, 2014 by marey mercy

Since yesterday’s post was all shots of Candace, today I’ll share some photos of Tamara, the other model from Monday’s shoot. But first I want to share one of Candace I forgot to share yesterday:

There was the slightest bit of color in those trees, so Candace tried her best to trudge through the weeds and stand in front of them; this angle was the only one I could get to and manage to get any of the purple buds in the shot. It’s weird, but I kind of like it. Moving on now to Tamara:

There’s the big-ass hair wreath I got for a steal off Etsy; it matched this old ball gown nicely. The sleeves on this dress absolutely make it; they are long and light and flowy and take wonderful photos, so I blew the fan on her and told her to just wave her arms around while I took some shots.

I did less processing to this second shot, although I still did some – I kept the color more true to the original though, and didn’t use any filters. I rarely smile in my own shots as I tend not to look natural when smiling for a camera, so I’m always glad to get a nice shot of someone with a lovely smile – and this one came out great.

I also loved this next one, but it came out a bit yellow in spite of my ExpoDisc, and try as I might I couldn’t correct it without something else going wrong, color-wise:

Notice this one was taken on the fabulous front porch I was so excited to use. Another thing you’ll probably notice is that I barely took any shots using it. There are a few reasons for that: first of all, when I got to the space the woman working there informed me that they actually don’t allow any outside shooting due to liability issues. I guess my disappointment was evident, because she ended up agreeing to let me shoot on the porch as long as I didn’t tell anyone (which of course I just did, oops), but quite honestly after shooting inside for two hours I was pretty burned out and not all that excited about using the porch – I’m sure the fact that I knew we weren’t supposed to shoot out there probably affected my attitude as well, as I am generally a rule-follower and wasn’t anxious to go take pictures somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. The other reason was that the night before the shoot a slight cool front blew in, and it was a little cold outside, so Tamara wasn’t all that game for hanging out on the porch anyway. In the end, this is one of the few shots I took out there that I liked, but I really loved it, in spite of the yellowness.

Right at the end of the shoot, Tamara pulled a prop chair onto the set and just started posing in it very spontaneously, which I liked but unfortunately most of the shots are a mess because I was just sitting on the floor and feeling tired and sloppy so the framing is all wonky. This one came out great, but in looking over it now, I think I may have overprocessed it:

I thought there was something interesting about this shot, her expression is stern in a very vintage way, but the pose is so relaxed; I really liked the contrast. Also proud of the fact that her boots were actually black, but I managed to tint them dark blue without it being obvious. Oh, and throughout the shoot she was complaining about her being too flat, so I actually fluffed it up using some Photoshop trickery. Here’s the pre-Pixlr’ed version, though, which I’m starting to think I like better:

In looking the two over now, I think the Pixlr version has too much going on. What do you think?

Pictures Accomplished

Posted on March 17, 2014 by marey mercy

Monday was the day of the big shoot, and although I was nervous in the beginning, things went OK overall. The studio was a lot smaller than I expected, and by the time we’d gotten about halfway through I was getting sloppy – for example, I noticed after the fact that when I switched to my 85mm lens for portraits, I forgot to change the camera settings so most of them were out of focus, stuff like that – but since we took over 600 photos, I was able to salvage plenty even when I screwed something up.

My right arm is killing me, because I’ve been editing obsessively since I got home around 5 PM and it’s 11:15 now, so I’m going to keep this post brief and just share the first little sampling from the shoot. I’m most likely going to be working with these photos for awhile, so as I get into more specific sections of the shoot in days to come I can talk about issues I encountered throughout the day. For now, let’s just look at the ones I processed initially (some of these I chose first because my friends really liked them, others because I did).

I think I mentioned previously that I had a vintage vision going on for the shoot, so I processed this one in a manner that gave it that feel. The poses were a little awkward here, because it was at the start of the shoot and it always takes awhile to get in the groove, but I thought the stiff formality of it rather worked in this shot. Of course, there’s the wreaths I spoke about in a previous post, and the costumes are all mine as well – you probably recognize some of them from other photos!

My friend Candace (on the right) has no shortage of crazy concepts, and she is game for anything – the posing here was her idea. It was a very crisp, clear shot originally, but to give it a ghostly quality (and to make it make some kind of sense) I added a little movement blur, and some subtle fog at the bottom, as well as some texture.

Tamara is very into yoga, so once Candace mentioned it might be fun to try out a few yoga poses in nightgowns (Tamara’s dress is actually an old ball gown of my mother-in-law’s) she started to loosen up a little too – literally as well as figuratively. I love this next move she executed (I can’t remember the name of the yoga pose) but I’m a little concerned it looks like she’s doing something obscene…? I swear she isn’t!

The yoga photos are pretty small, because the truth is this studio really wasn’t big enough for full body shots – I actually have more width to work with in my little office! So I had to crop the hell out of them, which is a shame, because it makes them noisier and reduces size so much. Working with a paper background was nice as that’s not something I’ve done before, and it eliminates all the wrinkle and crease issues I have with my muslin, but there just wasn’t very much of it. Literally right out of the frame to both sides of Tamara in the shot above, the paper ended and we were just looking at studio. It’s really a place for portraits only, but oh well. We made do (and for added fun, it was clear the woman working in the office there was not used to photographers using her space for this sort of thing – I think it’s a family portrait type place only, being in the part of town it is – so she kept peeking around the corner to see what the hell was going on, in a nice way, but still I got the feeling we were freaking her out just a little bit).

True to the weird ideas she comes up with in shoots, Candace also chooses crazy shots to want processed, which is amusing to me because as you can tell, she is photogenic as hell (she has skin that gives meaning to the phrase “peaches and cream”) and she cannot take a bad photo, but she always wants copies of the ones where she’s half-blurry, or falling out of a tree or something (just kidding, no one fell out of any trees during this shoot). Anyway, she chose this one as a favorite, which I popped off without any real thought or focus while we were standing in the back alley after the shoot talking about what we were going to do next. Notice she is wearing that fabulous faux-fur vest I got at Nordstrom a while back; the owner of the studio also rents out props, and told me I should rent out that vest to people for photos because it’s so fabulous. Remember who convinced me to buy it in the first place? Yep. Candace.

Obviously I Pixlr-ed the hell out of this one, because why not? Candace likes ’em crazy. If you look closely, you can see that I superimposed the photo of them facing each other into the trees. And yep, there’s the fur vest!

Soooo much more to come. Remember, over 600 shots people. In my mind, I will focus on a different section of the shoot in each post (yoga poses, jumping, levitation, portraits) but most likely that will not happen, and I’ll just work on a few each day then upload those results. Get used to these two faces though, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of them for awhile!

Ice as Nice

Posted on March 4, 2014 by marey mercy

We had another unexpected day off Tuesday – an ice storm blew through the city early in the morning, and although the temps didn’t get low enough in our area to ice up the roads, it did knock out power at the school, so the administration decided to cancel. I was already up and halfway ready to go when I got the call, so I decided I’d try out the makeup my friends want me to do for their shoot and see if I could pull it off, and I figured if I was going to go that far I might as well take some pictures.

This is the look my friends/models want for their shoot

I don’t know what magic fairy dust was sprinkled over me on this occasion, but I must have done everything just right without realizing it, because the makeup and the portraits I shot came out amazing. I’m not saying that because they’re portraits of me, of course, but because the makeup really popped on camera, the lighting was dead-on, and to be honest, there just wasn’t a bad shot in the bunch. Well, of the portraits anyway.And although I didn’t pull off the exact look of the makeup in the photo above, I got the idea down.

A few things I did different with the makeup that helped me out here: the last time I was at the MAC counter stocking up, the salesperson gave me samples of a new color-correcting BB cream they’d just introduced. I hadn’t tried it yet, but decided on this day to slap some on underneath my foundation – I have the yellow tint to cut the red in my skin. I have other color correctors on-hand that I normally use (just for photos; I find it’s too much under my daily makeup because my skin is dry and can’t handle too many layers of stuff without looking cakey and accentuating my pores) but I think this one worked better to create a nice neutral base to my skin. Or maybe it had nothing to do with it and I just lucked out with the lighting, but my makeup was really on point here. Another thing I learned is I can use MAC’s Studio Fix powder foundation on my neck and decollete and it works quite well to cover up my sun damage and hyper-pigmentation. Again, I wouldn’t do this for day-to-day because I’d end up with makeup all over my clothes, but it worked incredibly well for photos, which is when the sun damage shows up the most anyway – I’m really happy with how much of my discoloration the powder foundation was able to conceal. I also think working against the black background helps the studio lighting pop better, because the light is being absorbed behind me rather than bounced back at the camera. It makes for crisper photos overall.

I had loads of Madame Alexander dolls when I was a kid.

I have a lot more portraits I’d like to edit, but I had other things to do and didn’t want to spend all day at the computer processing shots, so I’ll have to share those later. For example, I realized late in the afternoon that I needed to go vote, so I grabbed Doug and we headed out to our local elementary school, getting there right as class let out for the day and fighting through traffic the whole way as a result. We were both so flustered when we got inside, that we rather forgot we were there to vote in the primaries, and pitched a bit of a fit with the poll worker for asking us if we were Republican or Democrat before we remembered why we were there. I’m sure we appeared just super intelligent, not to mention being the only Democrats they’d probably encountered all day. Anyway, go Wendy Davis.

Back to shooting. I was less successful with my experimental shots, but that makes sense since they’re, you know, experiments. I had a vision of shooting myself standing up with my hands over my face, looking windblown, and then having several images of myself dancing about behind me, all blurry and ghost-like. The shot of me standing still was easy enough, and then I slowed the shutter speed way down so I could dance around and get some blurry movement pictures with the idea that I would create a composite shot to put them all together, but the end result didn’t quite work:

It’s not bad, but I didn’t take any blurry shots that were posed in a manner where I could place them fully off to my left, like I managed to get one placed to my right, so it’s not symmetrical. Everything was positioned with me leaning out to the left in such a manner that to get the image placed fully to that side, my arms and/or legs would have been completely cut out of the frame (side note: in almost all my movement shots, I lean my body to the left and almost never the right. I don’t know why). I’m not sure I’m even articulating this well, but suffice it to say that I had to stick the second blurry image almost directly behind me instead of having it be off to my side as I envisioned. Also, I was using the camera in portrait mode, and using landscape would have given me much more room to fit the blurry images in, but I didn’t think of that at the time.

I also thought I’d try some levitation/composite shots, so I got a trusty kitchen chair, threw a black fleece blanket over it, and went to work.

I bought the blue gown off eBay for twelve bucks, by the way. I thought it was an usual color for this type of nightgown, since they’re normally more pastel, and I liked how the white lace contrasted with the bright color.

I played around with a feature in Paint Shop Pro called ‘drop shadow’ that required me to select just what I wanted to have a shadow in the photo (in this case, my body) and then it created the drop shadow on a separate layer. I then messed a bit with different settings and opacity levels for it to try and make it more convincing, but quite honestly I didn’t spend too terribly long doing this. I was a little tired of editing at this point, and I’m discovering that all this photoediting of composite shots and leviation poses and adding shadows and stitching different photos together blah blah blah kinda bores me. Probably because I don’t really know how to do it all that well, so I get frustrated and bored with it pretty quickly. So, I think the shadow here could have been better – softer, probably – but it isn’t bad. So there it is.

More from this set later. I know I won’t have another day off tomorrow, because true to Texas, although it was 31 degrees here last night, it’ll be back up to 70 by tomorrow – so it’s time for me to wrap it up and get to bed. Crazy weather! More later!

Evolution of a photograph – makeup test shot

Posted on December 18, 2013 by marey mercy

I’ve mentioned this here before, but I always take test shots as I am applying my makeup to be sure it’s going to appear as I want it once I start shooting. Sometimes I luck out and get an interesting photo out of those shots; in fact, I often discover that some of my expressions in those one-off shots are more interesting than my posed ones, and I regret that the makeup and outfit wasn’t complete when I took it. Sometimes I can still get a decent shot out them though, like this one:

Edited, of course

Anyway, I discovered one such shot Wednesday evening and played around with it a bit, so I thought I’d share its evolution. This is as close to an original as I have, but it was not shot in black and white originally:

Same headband as in the first photo – it’s the one always I use when applying makeup for shoots

Obviously my makeup was not complete here, nor was it well-blended, as I discovered after taking the photo. But the extreme highlighting and contouring did make for an interesting look in its own right. However, one of my regretful side-effects of getting older is the sun damage that is starting to show itself on my skin, my neck in particular. I admit it is getting more and more difficult to disguise it in shots without it being obvious, and at some point I’m just going to have to embrace it or quit taking photos of myself (which isn’t likely). I doubt anyone notices, but it does bother me (more in photos than in day to day life, when it isn’t as noticeable but is slowly getting more so). The sides of my neck as well as my decollete are both getting red and splotchy; I used to try to cover it with makeup but just ended up with a red, splotchy neck AND a foundation-stained shirt, so I don’t bother anymore. But in this photo, the hyperpigmentation showing on my neck, as well as the crappy pajama t-shirt, were really bugging me, so I decided to try something new instead of just my usual softening and lightening:

Problem solved

With my nominal Photoshop skills, I used the patch tool to blend the background into my skin and hair; I also blended out some of the harsher contouring around my hairline and softened the skin to conceal the fairly sloppy powder-blending job I’d done right before taking the shot (I also got rid of the headband I was wearing).Then I pulled the photo into Snapseed to sharpen and define it:

To blend in some of the rougher edges where I’d blended the background in, I also added a texture to the background, keeping it very faint so as not to overwhelm the nice clean lines of the face (I did this in Paint Shop Pro, since I don’t yet know how to do it Photoshop). This was nice enough as is, but it was tempting me to give it a little Pixlr treatment to make it extra-special, so off we went:

I also liked how my cheekbones started to look like mutton-chop sideburns somewhere during all of this

I added a vintage effect to add contrast, a space overlay for a ghostly feel, a tie-dye overlay for a little color, and an ink border for depth and visual interest. I still like the plain old black and white version too – but this one is probably going to get my top vote, ultimately.

I may look through my test shots and find a few more to work over this way. Blending the background into the subject in a portrait is something new for me, and I had fun giving it a go. As always, problem-solving when editing leads to new and creative processes and solutions. At least, that’s how it works for me.

Here’s a collage of the work in progess:

More takes and thanks

Posted on December 4, 2013 by marey mercy

I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who comments here, and whose blogs inspire me when I read them. I’ve come to look forward to running things by you all and getting your feedback, particularly about my career, and I really value what you have to say. Thank you!

That said, how about a few more photos from Sunday’s shoot? Oh and guess what – we get Monday off again, because the school made the State championships in football and it was determined (by whom, I do not know) that the weather was going to be too bad here Saturday to play. So the game was re-scheduled to Monday, and yes, the entire school gets the day off so they can attend. Hey, it’s football, and this is Texas. Anyway. I’m sure most of you are reading about yet another day I get off for no good reason and wondering why in the hell I would consider going back into the public schools to work my butt off again, but what can I say. I miss teaching, and there has to be more than life than keeping a boring, unsatisfying job because it’s easy, right? I know. I’m still crazy.

This next photo was me playing around with my Speedlites again, then running it through Pixlr:

And up next is a re-do – I really didn’t like the tone of this photo from the last post, so I re-edited it and came up with the new one, on the right:

Much less green on the right!

And another one I Pixlr-ed. I am so thrilled with how much great movement I got out of this cheap-o Halloween costume!

Since I have another 3-day weekend coming, I may try to put up my new white backdrop (supposedly wrinkle-free, we’ll see about that) and shoot some more. I already have such a backlog of photos I’ve yet to upload to Flickr it’s ridiculous, but I just can’t help myself!

Nothing like me

Posted on August 10, 2013 by marey mercy

I always look for photos that look nothing like me and try to work with those. Probably because I have so damn many photos of myself, I get bored, but whatever. Had a pretty lazy day today and have not too much to say about it, so I’ll show you this one photo I had fun goofing around with tonight. It was so easy to mess with this shot just a bit and turn it into something completely different, so I went with it. I’m not thrilled with the middle one, except for the fact that I look like Bernadette Peters on acid.

Outtake Awkwardness – Curly Wig Edition

Posted on July 7, 2013 by marey mercy

In working my way through the tons of photos I want to process from this shoot, I kept the idea of looking for good photo fails in the back of mind so I could share them here. I mentioned in the last outtake post that when searching through old sets for awkward shots I was disappointed by how boring most of my bloopers were, but this time I got a few doozies. So…yay me for doing a bang-up job looking ridiculous, I guess.

I’m also experimenting with uploading smaller photos than I have previously. I never re-size my shots before uploading, which is a bad idea I know, but I am lazy. At least for the blog I need to get better about that. And I’m also thinking it would be smart to watermark them, but I have to get past the fact that I hate watermarks. I’m perpetually conflicted between the part of me that wants to be smart about the internet and the part of me that wants to Keep Calm and Upload On. Anyway, on to the outtakes!

I hear the perverted soccer mom look is really in this year

My first thought on seeing this next shot was that I looked like I had a penis. Then, while I was editing it (because yes, I even edit my bloopers) I realized I look like Michael Jackson. And those two things together in one self-portrait are really disturbing.

#1 – Betchya didn’t know I had such a nice package; #2 – Um, I’m Bad? Maybe?