I'm on a mission

Recently I was watching "The Grid" which is a webcast provided by Kelby TV.com.  It's basically a talk show about anything Photoshop and or Photography related.  One of the topics they talked about yesterday, was cell phone cameras.  Stuff like, whether or not they were useful, what do you do with the pictures, and why are they so popular.  Since the show is mostly photographers, this is not the average response.  They said that cell phone camera were useful for scouting a location and stuff like that when they don't have a camera with them.  They said they rarely did anything with the pictures and they also said they were probably popular because you can share them quickly.  Many of the comments the show got during it's live broadcast said they would use it if the didn't have their DSLR camera with them.  Then it hit me that I'm blessed with a redonkulous DLSR camera that many aspiring photographers don't have.  So I'm going on a mission to bring my camera everywhere with me to take the most advantage of it.  Granted I've already taken over 30,000 photos on it but I want to use it more.  So that's my mission.  Hopefully this blog will be filled with many more pictures in the time to come.  But in the meantime, here's a picture while you wait.

Anitmation

Hey look I sorta-kinda learned how to animate in Photoshop! I not too good at it yet but it's a lot of fun here's my first project.

 I know it's not super impressive but it's a start.  The only really tedious part is making every single frame, it takes a long time to get each frame made because of placement, color, and size might need to be changed.  But other than that the tools themselves are so easy to use in Photoshop cs5's animation panel. here's a step by step.
1. open blank document
2. put on first shape
3. make new layer
4. copy that shape onto new layer
5. make adjustments
6. repeat until you have as any frames as you want.
7. under the windows panel in Photoshop, find animation
8. click it (<---Very important step)
9. at the top right of the little animation bar there should be something that looks like and arrow pointing down  with some lines next to it
10. click that
11. choose make frames from layers
12. watch the magic
13. save the magic by going to save for web and devices
14. make sure it saves as a GIF
15. post to your blog and link so I can see (optional)
 so super simple, but tedious if you have to make a long movie.

Simplicity

Have you ever looked at a bunch of tubes of paints?  like really looked, I was just recently painting a picture and decided to take a picture of my paints.  It was just a quick shot I'll admit I didn't take much care.  But when I uploaded it to my computer I was shocked, it actually looked decent... and not only decent but good.  So I did some selective coloring to give it more impact.  Then I got a little crazy... I changed the color of the selective color with the hue saturation adjustment in Photoshop.  And this is what I got.

Then I changed the hue to a cobalt blue

Then I tried red

I like the simplicity of the black and white with selective coloring, I might print these out to go on my wall.
Simple shot, simple editing, simple result.  So here are two quotes about simplicity.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  ~Leonardo DaVinci


Anything simple always interests me.  ~David Hockney

This Time of Year

Hhhhh...  Around this time every year I crave the beach, or any vacation in general, but mostly the beach.  I haven't been in about five years and I really miss it.  A few days ago, we bought some stuffed clam shells, which were very yummy.  What does this have to do with the beach?  Well being as desperate as I am to go to the beach I took five of the clam shells washed them out (aka ate them) and took pictures of them to help curb my beach craving. So here in one picture that i thought was quite pretty and beachy.  I post processed it to give it a dreamier feel.

Another thing about this time of year is Valentines Day.  Personally I think Valentines Day is overrated, unless you have a boyfriend or husband who is willing to spend money on you.  However it does provide a lot of photo ideas because it has a basic color scheme: red, pink, purple.  A general feeling: love, happiness.  and a general shape or symbol: hearts.  Looking for these things is really easy around this time of year, and if you look for things of these colors, shapes, and feelings, taking photos becomes really easy.  So here is a picture I took of a box that covered with newspaper and painted... (you can't really tell it's a box in the picture though)

TA-DA!! well hope you enjoyed this post.

P.S if you want you can link to your blog so I can see some of your Valentine-y photos.

The photo

Okay so in my first post i said I'd tell you how I edited that photo in the first post.  Now before I start I want you to know that I am not an expert on photography or Photoshop (i just like it a lot.)
So here's what i did:
1. I took the picture at night in a dark room
2. I lit it with the light from my Ipod
3. Using a remote shutter release (to avoid camera shake)
4. Then I took the picture and as the picture was being taken I moved my Ipod up and down to evenly light to vase
5. I then loaded it to my computer and in "camera raw" i changed to white balance setting to fix some of that blueish color you get from lighting things with an ipod
And that's it it's super easy and depending on what the shutter speed on the camera is and how bright your Ipod is you can get some nifty results.
here is my before picture

















and the edited one



Camera Settings
Aperture: 4.5
ISO: 200
Shutter Speed: 3 seconds

Camera Raw Editing numbers
White balance temperature: 13500
White balance tint: +5
Exposure: +2.20
everything else, can vary depending on the photo

Have fun and i'd love to see some of your results!