day 5: today was MUCH more fun and relaxing than yesterday (thank goodness). I think the kids have finally re-adjusted to being back at home after our long vacation. What better way to wind down your day than playing in a toy box? *disclaimer* I did NOT put the babies into the box. They climbed in themselves. No babies (or toys, or boxes, or dogs for that matter) were harmed in the making of this photograph.
day 4: today was a VERY long day. and this is a VERY boring picture. but at least I’m posting one. I’m not giving up yet 🙂 and oh, yeah, yay for us we actually managed to get our Christmas decorations taken down in a timely fashion. so at least I didn’t have an entirely pointless day.
day 3: this morning we took Amelia and Paul to a farmer’s market. After watching Food Inc. we’ve been convinced that buying not only organic but also local is an important thing to try to do. We picked up some oranges (seriously people… how do you eat only in season produce?! It seemed like the ONLY thing that was in season was citrus) that the babies LOVED. They ate two of them in about 30 seconds. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a trip to the farmer’s market a weekly outing.
day 2: This afternoon the peanuts (Paul and Amelia) had a playdate with their BFF (ok so maybe they’re not best friends yet but they will be!) Olive and Paul’s biggest fan Isaac. I love this one of Amelia… I think she’s looking up at Isaac. They’re always marveling at the big kids 🙂
day 1 – Yeah, yeah, yeah… this is the third attempt (since the first successful year, might I remind you) to restart photo-rific. But I figure that there’s no better time than at the beginning of a year. I suppose it’s kind of a sad start to the year to post the first entry a day late, but better late than never. I did in fact take this one yesterday… so… without further ado – day 1. This is one of my favorites from a super fun family session I did yesterday for my friend Jackie Wonders. She and her little girl are TOO cute.
One of the easiest ways to improve your photos is to change the angle you’re taking them from. Most peoples’ first reaction to seeing something they want to take a picture of is to just snap away from right where they were whenever they noticed the photo op. It will do you good to take a few seconds (assuming you have a few seconds to spare… if it’s a split second once in a lifetime photo op go ahead and shoot from where you are) and look around to see if there’s a better angle you could be shooting from.
I see a lot of photos of babies shot from about parent height a few feet away from the kids and just pointed down… does this look familiar?
The picture’s not bad. The focus is fine and the exposure is fine as well. It’s just not that great. The angle has caused the baseboard to run straight through the baby’s head. Not good. And it’s kind of boring.
My two favorite options for changing up angles are to either get really high or really low. When you’re shooting adults getting up above them usually means standing on something. Kids on the other hand are easy. All you have to do is get closer and angle your camera down more. This one is from higher up… but it’s still not close enough. The baseboard is still going right through his head.
But if we get EVEN closer and up higher…
Ahh… much better. Way more fun and interesting.
Getting down low is just as good. This shot is pretty much exactly the same as the first but from kid-level. In my experience it’s not enough just to sit on the ground, the real magic happens when you get down on your belly and really exaggerate the angle. I never wear a skirt if I’m out shooting because I know I’m guaranteed to be lying on the ground at some point 🙂
One more shot with the low angle… in this one I shifted the camera down as low as possible to get the bright colors in the foreground. Still in the same location, so much more interesting!
See what a little shift in your point of view can do? 🙂
I get asked a lot what the secrets are to shooting nice portraits outdoors. I’m not going to lie, great outdoor lighting is a little harder to master than great indoor lighting. The sun is a tricky light source and a powerful one at that, so it can be a little overwhelming trying to figure it out. There are a lot of ways to tackle outdoor lighting including reflectors, diffusers and fill flash, but for now let’s just stick with the basics. You, your subject, your camera, and a patch of shade.
If all you’ve got are the items listed above, there are going to be three basic options for shooting. You can either face your subject into the sun, face your subject away from the sun, or put them in the shade. Most people’s gut reaction is to face their subject into the sun. Light is good right? Well not so fast. Remember how I said that the sun was a tricky light source? That’s because it’s extremely bright and it’s coming from overhead, meaning that it casts harsh shadows and on people those shadows tend to fall below the nose and eyes, giving a lovely raccoon look. I tend to find that one of the major culprits of outdoor photos looking amateur and “snapshotty” are the strong shadows below the eyes and nose. Check out this example. Shot at ISO 100, f2.8 and shutter speed 1/2500.
Definitely not my favorite. Now turn the subject around in the EXACT same spot so that the sun is behind and I find this to be a much more appealing shot. Taken at ISO 100, f2.8 shutter speed 1/1000
You’ll notice there are a few of what we call “hotspots” in this photo, areas that are somewhat overexposed when compared to the rest of the image. There are parts of her leg and blanket that are very very bright. But I’ll take those little hotspots over the first image any day. Remember if we had more equipment (diffuser, reflector, etc) we could take care of these problems but we’re just sticking to basics here. You should also know that if the sky had been visible in this shot it would have been “blown out” to white. It gives a sort of high key look that some people hate… I just happen to love it 🙂
The third option when the sun just isn’t doing it for you is the shade. This is by far the safest option and a good fallback. This one was shot in the shade at the same location, ISO 100, f2.8 and shutter speed 1/320
One part of shade shooting that most new photographers overlook is the quality of the shade. You want your subject to be out of the sun, but you also want for there to be natural light still hitting their faces. The best way to do this is to put the subject right at the edge of the shade, as close as possible to the sunlight without actually being in it. The difference in these next two is kind of subtle but to me it makes a big difference. The first is right at the edge of the shade, facing the direction of the sun. Notice they still have a bit of the sunkissed look even while being in the shade. ISO 100, f2.8, shutter speed 1/320
Even moving back a just a few feet will cause you to lose that “glow”. Same spot, just moved further into the shade. This time the shutter speed is 1/200
So there you go. Three different options for shooting in the sun, which you choose is up to you! One final warning note about shade shooting. While a park may seem like a great location for shooting portraits (lots of trees equals lots of shade right?) it’s actually hardly ever ideal. In my experience the shade from trees is almost always splotchy. Those little dots of light peeking through lead to what we call *dappled light* – great if you’re going to be painting a monet. Not so great if you’re shooting portraits. You’ll end up with those aforementioned “hotspots” right on your subject’s faces and nobody wants that.
Have you ever attempted to take a great shot of 4 or more people (especially involving babies or children) and gotten frustrated at how SOMEONE always looks wretched in every single photo? Finally get the kids to smile? Then of course you are going to be blinking or looking the other way. Well I have a dirty little secret I’m going to share with you and it might just save your family photos – it’s called compositing.
Whenever I take a group photo I’m like a crazy person with the shutter button, taking at least 10 frames of every grouping. I do it at every wedding and portrait shoot that I photograph and I even do it with my own family. Why you might ask? Because if Uncle Bob or Grandpa Jim is blinking in that one photo that you would otherwise love… you can just grab his head from another shot and pop it right on there. And no, I’m not joking. It’s really not all that hard either and I’m going to walk you through it right now.
First up I have to say that for this to work out you need do a couple of things with your camera WHILE TAKING THE PHOTOS. Photoshop works wonders but it will be much much easier to pull this off if you take a couple of seconds to prepare in advance.
Step one – Make sure you are shooting these photos in manual mode. “Wait, help!” you cry… “I don’t know how to use manual mode!” Never fear. All you have to do is set your camera to the mode you normally use (say it’s aperture priority) and snap one test photo of your subjects exactly where you want them to be. Then use the menu on your camera to bring up the little preview of the image. There should be an option (on Canons it’s an info button) that allows you to see the settings that image was taken on. Just set your camera to that and you are good to go. The reason for shooting in manual is that if all of your images start out with the same exposure it will be MUCH easier to composite them together. When shooting in any automatic mode your camera may change exposure between frames.
Step two – Make sure you don’t move between frames. If you get closer or further or move side to side it will change your perspective and make the swapped head look “off” and fake. Just try to stay in the same place and ask you subjects to remain in essentially the same place as well. It helps if you shoot these frames in rapid succession.
Step three – You’ve got your images, now it’s time to move to photoshop, photoshop elements, or the editing program of your choice. Yes, there are better ways of doing what I’m about to show you but this is the EASIEST and the one you’re most likely to be able to master with only a rudimentary knowledge or editing programs. I used to do this for fun in high school so how hard can it be right? Open up your program and pick out all your images you’d like to use. For this demo I’m going to only use two images, you could use more if you have more people or want to swap more heads. Here are my starting images, one with nice expressions on the babies and not the adults, and one the other way around.
Step four – One of your images needs to be your “goal image”. This is the one that you like the best (other than that one pesky face that’s blinking or turned away). We’ll come back to this one later but first open up the image that you would like to use the head from. I’m choosing the image with the nice expression on the adults as my “goal image” because I feel like it will be easier to swap out the babies’ heads than it would be to swap out the adults.
Step five – Using the selection or lasso tool you’ll want to pick the head that you want to eventually replace the blinker or ugly face in your “goal photo”. Draw a selection that includes not only the head but a little bit of the area surrounding it as well. It doesn’t in any way have to be perfect, in fact it’s easier if it’s not so this can be a quick and dirty job. Once you have the selection hit copy. Then open up your goal image and paste in the new head. If you followed my instructions on taking the pictures the heads should be similarly sized. Here is my replacement head on the goal image. Notice that when I hit paste it didn’t go to the right spot. Don’t worry we’ll fix that next
Step six – The beauty of photoshop and photoshop elements is that they work with layers and you have the ability to adjust the opacity of layers. This just means making the top layer slightly transparent to be able to see what’s under it. This will help out with placing our head. I generally start by lowering the opacity of the layer with the pasted face to about 50%
Step seven – With the opacity layerd you can now move the new face over the old one, it helps to line up things like the ears and eyes. Here is the new face (still at 50% opacity) lined up over the old one.
Step eight – Once you’re all lined up turn back up the opacity to 100%. You’ll see the new face on the goal image but the edges probably don’t line up perfectly and that’s a-ok. You’ll notice in my example that the neck and shoulders of the baby’s shirt don’t line up perfectly.
Step nine – This is where the magic happens 🙂 Take the eraser tool. In both photoshop and photoshop elements there are options for your eraser tool for the brush’s opacity. It will make your work a lot more believable if you lower the opacity to around 50% meaning that when you erase, it will only erase the image half way. This is important because when you erase at 100% opacity you’ll leave a hard line. If you erase twice at a 50% opacity the line will be much softer and you will hardly notice it at all. I like to use a fairly small brush and work around the edges inward in a few rounds of erasing. For this image I erased right up to the edges of the face and hair. I got rid of all of the parts where the shirt didn’t line up, and you can hardly see where the seam is. Here is the image with the new face.
All done – Once the new face was in place I decided I’d like to swap out the second baby’s face as well. I followed exactly the same steps as for the first face. Once I had all the faces swapped up I did a bit of retouching (that’s a whole different topic we’ll go into another day!) and adjustments to the image and voila – my final composite. So much better than either of the starting images and no one will ever know 😉 unless you tell them that is… but let’s just let it be our little secret!
Now that you know the secret all you need to do is promise me you won’t go photoshop crazy and swap heads on every one of your photos – this is obviously a last resort type fix… totally acceptable on large group shots or group shots with babies but you probably don’t want to hinge your career on the fact that if you screw it up you can always fix it later 😉 best to get it right in camera is always my motto… but if it doesn’t work out… well now you have one more tool in your toolbox!
Amelia & Paul’s super cute towel photo made the top 10 in the cutest multiples contest! Thanks so much to everyone who voted! Now it’s time to vote again (one last time!) Voting ends May 11th so vote quick and tell your friends! We’re lagging behind in the polls 🙂
http://multiplesandmore.blogspot.com/2009/05/cutest-multiples-photo-contest-top-ten.html
Voting is in the left hand sidebar column for those of you who had trouble finding it last time. The peanuts say thanks 🙂
day 76: This one is courtesy of Ben… I was busy videotaping the babies with the screen pointing at them (which they found absolutely fascinating) Once again just kinda felt like going crazy with photoshop… not sure why. I think I’m bored 🙂
Permanent Riot 