Faded Old Photo? Easy!
When I did the tutorial on the image of my father I was reminded of a task he gave me before he died, restore as many of the old family photos that I could.
Being the good son that I am I gladly took the box of old photos and brought it home with great in tensions. I was going to restore the images and make them available online to all aspects of my family. Also being the typical son, the box sat in a closet, untouched, for a long time. Then I did the tutorial and remembered my promise.
I can tell you that my family is much more complicated than I ever thought it was. I was looking at the photos saying to myself in a voice like Jack Palance, “I don’t even know who the hell you are!” I spent hours putting older faces to the younger versions and then trying to match them to the faces I had never seen before.
Selective Color In Photoshop CS4
Although many people liked the James image, almost as many like the image of the older man with the flag in the background. Well that old man, he was my father.
Although he passed away this year at age 84, I look at the image often and I wonder what I could have done better. Of course I am my own critic and I do that with a lot of images. This image though for obvious reasons gets a gander a bit more often.
As my father was very much the ‘Navy Man’ I often wonder what I could do to make that subtle reference pop out more. After all, If you ever met my father and let him talk, and trust me it was hard to stop him from doing that! He would have let you know rather quickly that he was in the Navy.
To make the image pop I decided to add a little selective color.
Follow the link to find out how. Continue reading
The James Effect
By far the most popular image on my site is James – The Mystery Man. I have been asked if it is a drawing, a painting, everything. It is a photograph.
I shot Jim about a year and a half ago and we spent the better part of the day shooting. The image that first loads on the site is an image that was done in the early part of our day. We were in the shadow of a building and this allowed me to control the light completely. I used one SB800 flash unit to light the area behind him and one to light Jim. The light is about waist high and a grid spot used to light only his face.
After the image was captured I used Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to convert the image to what you see on the site today. The technique is a variation of Scott Kelby’s grunge effect. If you are a member of NAPP you can see Scott’s tutorial at www.photoshopuser.com and search on Grunge. I did alter the tutorial a bit and you can see how by clicking the link below.
Equal Marriage Rights and Photography
I am going to step over my normally neutral line here for a few moments and write about a topic very much in the headlines, especially today; Equal Marriage Rights and what it means for photographers (and other small businesses).
Yesterday Maine voters repealed a state law that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed. Whether you are for or against gay’s right to marry, I want to point out how this affects my photography business as well as other small businesses in our economy.
First we need to look at a few numbers.
US Population as of 2009 – 307,855,901 Total Married in the US (not including divorced) – 67,314,661 (22%) Gay Men in the US – 31,678,372 (21%) Gay Women in the US – 34,541,432 (22%) (Data sources: via www.census.gov, www.gallup.com)
Based on the numbers above we can make a few assumptions safely. If the average marriage rate among straight people in the US is 22% then we can assume that roughly the same amount of the gay population will also marry. That means that were gay marriage legal in all 50 US states, 14,479,384 more people would get married. Assuming it takes two people to get married (I don’t know another way) then there would be an additional 7,239,692 weddings per year. This is a minimum as we are not including the divorced in the above statistics.
Click the link to learn more Continue reading
