Jonah’s Bitter-Sweet Gifts

It’s crazy how quickly we can change emotions.

The Corndog King Poses

Here are some pics of Simon showing off his posing skills after a victorious defeat of a ruthless corndog.  No mercy, that boy.

Did I mention that he ate it with ketchup?

Christmas Lights at the Mesa Temple

Fog in Gilbert

There was fog in Gilbert early this morning.  It’s rare, but not as rare as snow.  I was supposed to be watching Simon while Christi worked on Christmas gifts, but I had to run out and get some pictures real quick. I could see the drops of mist floating in the air around me as I walked around trying to find the right shots.  Here is a cool one I got of the condensation built up on the rose bushes.

Another one of the condensation leaving streaks on my car window as it beaded up and rolled down.

I couldn’t see halfway to the neighbor’s house out back.

Night Shots and Senior Portraits

I have my last two photo shoots of the year that I’m post processing right now.  The first was a night time family portrait session I did last Thursday night for the Gilbert Family.  What an awesome family.  It was my first experience with doing night time photography with a group and all I have to say is that I need some more flashes.  I had one off camera flash, shooting through an umbrella, synched up with my on camera flash. I also had two 500W work lights behind them backlighting them and the trees.  Here is a sample.

I’ll post more once I get through processing them.  On Saturday, I also did senior portraits for Taylor Tenney, who goes to our church.  Taylor is one of the best guys you’ll ever meet.  He took me to the Mesa Arts Center.  Talk about a lot of cool photography spots.  They are just packed in there.  I’m sure I’ll be using that place again.  There was a fair of some sort going on, but there were still plenty of great spots to shoot.  Here is a sample from Taylor’s session.

I’m anxious to see what I can do with both of these in post processing since I’ve never had a night shoot or senior portraits before.  I’m curious to see what I can do with some of the training I’ve been doing on turning photographs into graphic art.  I also need to be sure I have my camera handy for all the Christmas shots over the next couple of weeks.  I don’t want to miss out like I did at Thanksgiving.

Making My First Christmas Card

We’ve never been big on sending out Christmas cards.  Too busy, too poor, too lazy, too pregnant for a picture…. the list of excuses goes on and on.  Sometimes we’ve done e-letters.  This year my second daughter, Savannah, demanded that we do a more official card.  So, Savannah and Christi got input from Crystal Bowman and put together a Christmas tree of our kids.  I took the pictures and then found a way to generate a Christmas card out of it.  Drum roll please.  Here is our combined attempt at the Davis family Christmas card for this year.

We did OK, right?  I was able to practice a lot of Photoshop on this one.  Here is the process I went through in Photoshop.  After having taken the pictures, I found the white snow scene online to use as the background for the picture because this is the main picture I started with:

Basically, I cut them out of the picture in Photoshop and put them on the background picture I found on the web.  If I was getting paid for this, I imagine I would have to use one of my own stock photos as background or buy some stock photo.  I’ll have to study all the legal mumbo jumbo around using parts of work done by others.  I did some color adjustments, brightened and colored the lights and the star, gave our mud snowman back some eyes and a mouth, did lot’s of fine tuning and blending of the edges, added in the text and filled with white behind it a bit so that it would stand out more.  In the mean time, Caleb didn’t like his pained expression due to Josh’s knee in his back.  So, I took his face out of this picture:

I almost used this as the main picture because I like Simon looking at the tinker toy star.  But, I ended up going with him looking forward.  Jonah didn’t look happy enough either.  So, I took his face from here:

It really was a great sequence of shots with smiles coming and going very quickly.  Finally, I took it back into Lightroom for some additional color treatment and touch up on the star and lights again since they darkened a bit from the preset I used.  Here is the Photoshop picture before the Lightroom adjustments:

And the the final product again:

I love my kids!

Wrapping Up The Andersons

It’s been crazy busy week with two photo shoots (three if you count a short session with the kids) and trying to finish touch ups on the Anderson’s family pictures.  Thanks again to Chris, Monica, and family for letting me take their pictures and learn from this experience.  They were very easy to work with and made it a great time for me while we roamed around my yard.  I’m happy with the results.  When ever I do a session, I have a pit in my stomach worrying that it’s not going to be good enough until I can finally see the final results.  My touch up time is speeding up too.  I only spent about 8-10 hours editing these.  I found myself able to get in an edit rhythm and make quick work of some tasks.  There was still some learning and playing around, but definitely less time overall.  Here are some of my favorites:

Now to work on a night time portrait session I did for the Gilbert family, Taylor Tenney’s senior portraits, and a Christmas picture of the kiddos.

You Can See It In Her Eyes

What do you think?

I’m uncomfortable working too much on pictures of my wife in Photoshop because she is already beautiful and perfect.  But I have to practice somewhere.  In between my photo shoots and edit sessions (starting touch ups on the Anderson family pictures tonight), I’m doing additional photography and Photoshop training when I can.  The latest training I’ve done has been on touching up eyes.  For the picture above I:

- adjusted colors
- removed the old catch light and added a new ones. 
- whitened the whites and removed reds in the whites
- touched up the pupil
- enhanced the color of the iris slightly
- added a sharper contrasting edge around the outside of the iris
- added some more eye lashes
- added eye liner

Definitely not something to do on every picture.  Here is the photo without the eyes touched up.

The next lessons also included touching up lips, teeth, skin, eye brows, etc.  I think the coolest part is adding make up in Photoshop.  Crazy what you can do.

Color Treatments

Thanks again to the Anderson family for letting me practice with their family portraits.  I’m trying a slightly different work flow.  I had been posting low resolution proofs online for viewing.  This time, I gave the Anderson of DVD of the full resolution of the photos with minor color correction and cropping.  This should allow them to better decide which pictures they’d like me to touch up further since you miss some things in the low res versions.  I did forget to give her examples of different color treatments that I have though.  So, here is this post on that. 

Chris/Monica,  These are just some of the color schemes that I have.  Let me know if there is something else you’ve seen or that you know of and I’ll see if I can find it or do it myself.  These are fairly easy to apply.  So, I can apply color treatments across any of the photos you want on top of the other edits.

Note: For those interested in the color treatments, these are all Lightroom presets either from the standard set that comes with Lightroom or that I pull off of lightroomkillertips.com.

The Standard – This is what is on the DVD I gave you with some background touchup (#30)

Twilight (Lite)

Hawaii Five-O (Strong)

Fairytale

Cold Tone

Cream Tone

Lightroom’s Standard Black and White

Antique Gray Scale

The portrait that you liked of the Cook family with the sun behind them was actually done with “Hawaii Five-O (Medium)”.  Too bad we didn’t have enough sun out for the backlighting you wanted.  But here is an example with the color treatment on the ones we tried with the overcast sky in the background.

The Standard – This is what is on the DVD I gave you with some touchup (#142)

Hawaii Five-O (Medium).

Hawaii Five-O (Strong)

I like this last one.  Hopefully, this gives you some ideas.  This is all practice for me, and appreciate your family’s time and help.  So, let me know if there are any questions or anything else I can do to help.  It’s all fun for me.  Thanks again!

Recital, Photo Shoot, and Party

A busy day yesterday, we had Savannah and Rebecca’s piano recital, a photo shoot with the Anderson family, and the ward Christmas party.  The photo shoot went well, but I could have done better with the recital and Christmas party.  Someday, I’ll get over the feeling that I’m flying a commercial airliner when I don’t even have a pilot’s license.  I bring my camera to events thinking of all the great photos I’m going to get and then feel to sheepish to stand up and move around to find the best shots.  Someday….

Rebecca and Savannah did great at their recital.  They’ve come so far in piano.  I was going over the costs of piano lessons with Christi yesterday and questioned whether or not it’s worth it.  I didn’t have piano lessons and I turned out fantastic!  But, I don’t play the piano well either.  :)  I know Christi will say that she knew it (because I often play the devil’s advocate in these situations), but hearing good piano playing does make it worth it.  It makes me want to learn too. 

Becca opted for video.  So, I only got pictures of Savannah playing.  Here is the ONE angle I got from my seat.  Don’t you wish I would have moved around?

The Anderson’s photo shoot went well.  It was a different experience with no little kids.  I could tell them to smile, take the shot, and not have to take any more of that pose in case I had to swap heads.  But I did it anyways, because that’s the way I’ve operated so far.  Note for next time:  Don’t need as many pictures if the picture will turn out the same as the previous.  I’m still going through them, but here is a glimpse of where we did the shoot (our yard).  Christi and Simon were out helping scout spots to set up.

Our peach trees have some great yellow and red leaves right now. 

My photos from the Christmas party aren’t even worth posting since I DIDN”T GET OUT OF MY SEAT!

I remember listening to a motivational speaker during some All-Star Games in high school.  There were probably four of five hundred high school seniors in the auditorium.  The speaker had a brand new brief case and asked if anyone wanted it.  Immediately, a kid jumped up out of his seat and ran up and took it from him.  The speaker gave it to him.  The lesson was that when great opportunities come along you can either sit there and watch it go by, or you can act reap the rewards.  I foresee a New Year ‘s resolution (starting a month early) to get out of my seat more.

Stockings

On top of the ornaments and nightly Christmas story readings, Christi has made stockings for each of us.  They are just the right size except that every year we seem to think we need more than what will fit in there.  I remember using my own socks as a kid.  We have nine children in my family and Santa usually just dropped off all the candy in one of those large silver mixing bowls.  I’m sure he just didn’t have time to put candy into each stocking… or was worried about what had been in my socks.  Memories can be so great!  That’s why I’m glad my wife takes the time to build good memories with our kids.

Playing around with Lightroom’s print layout tools.

Last Year we had Lindsey staying with us at Christmas time.  Since she didn’t have a stocking she got this one.  Minus the Josh.

I’m sorry to say that it did not get completely filled either.  With Lindsey up in Washington now, we should send it to her full of sunshine from Sunnyville (The name our kids gave our homestead – I should post the song some time).

Christmas Traditions

On top of reading a Christmas story to the kids every night, my awesome wife has brought along a couple of other Christmas traditions to our family.  Every year she frets over getting just the right ornament for each child to open on Christmas Eve.  She looks for something that represent something significant for that child from the last year.  We also get one for us.  Typically we try to find one on a trip.  Here are few examples.

The first year that Caleb went on a hunt

Savannah’s first Christmas ornament

Becca’s ornament the year we got Lucy

The year Josh was in Chess Club

Jonah’s ornament of tools – the sentiment was in how helpful he was at that age

Trips Christi and I took

You get the idea.  We used to have less meaningful decorations, but with six kids and nearly fifteen years of marriage under our belts the less meaningful decorations stayed in the box this year.  It’s about time to get a second tree…