A Successful Snap Happy Saturday!

I'd say Saturday was a great success! I want to thank everyone again for coming out and being a part of this day. I was able to take so many lovely pictures and I'm in the process of editing the majority of them right now. The weather was great, a little windy and chilly, but the lighting was killer. I want to share some of my favorites from the day so far and I'm sure there will be many more.

Spring is Springing with A Snap Happy Saturday

And that makes me a very happy person. That means this little lady can take her camera out and start taking more beautiful pictures outside. I think Xander is getting tired of being my model and my 925 sq foot apartment doesn't offer me much in the way of interesting subject matter.

So now I'm enlisting you, yes you, to be my interesting subject matter. I have all kinds of ideas flowing through my mind and I'd love to be able to execute some of those. But, I need models. So what can you do for me? Volunteer to be in my pictures! It's completely free of charge, I promise it won't hurt, and I'll even edit 20 of the images I take of you and put them on a CD for you to have.

I'm going to take a Saturday and just go Snap Happy all day long. The sessions will be about 30 minutes each and I'll have 6 time slots to sign up for. I will provide props and such and we'll be located at a beautiful location. This could be a great opportunity for those pictures you want to hang up on your wall in your home, or save for greeting cards for holidays. If you are interested please leave a comment or contact me on facebook. I'll update soon on when this event will take place.

Here's some of my work to get an idea of what we can do together!

 

 

 

 

Fix it Friday or Rather Try Again Tuesday

Because I've been slacking behind the camera lately I decided to take some time to work on my editing skills. I really have issues correcting skin tone and tend to default to black and white conversions to fix that. Over at I Heart Faces they do this lovely thing called Fix It Fridays. They upload pictures and then release them to the public to edit them at will. I thought this would be a great way to work on my post processing, especially my issues with skin tone. Some of them are more clean post processing which is what I'm trying to work on right now, and some of them have a little something extra to them.

As a reminder, I did not take any of these pictures. They were submitted by I Heart Faces. I just did the editing.

I'll post the before and afters so you can see what kind of work I did! Leave comments with suggestions if you'd like!
1. Unedited

1) Edited

2) Unedited

2) Edited

3) Unedited

3) Edited

4) Unedited

4) Edited

5) Unedited

 

5) Edited

 

6) Unedited

6) Edited

The Death of Compy

My poor computer bit the dust. I came home from a nice Sushi date with Josh to my laptop covered in water. The culprit? Xander. That cat has a love of batting anything and everything off of a table. It's like that game you play with babies where you hand them something and then they drop it and you repeat the process and they think it is so funny.

Well guess what Xander, it's not funny. Your obsession with batting things across the table has cost me my lovely laptop. Since my computer was my source of all my photography happiness and being able to share those things with you, I've been kind of down in the dumps about it all. I haven't been very inspired to take pictures because I can't put them anywhere and edit them at home. It's a major bummer.

I'm currently using an old iMac from 1837 and he's nicked named Ole Moses. It's nice to at least have something but he doesn't compare to Compy.

I have no new and exciting pictures to share with you today. Sad times, I know. I'm really going to be working on Portfolio Building in the next couple weeks, especially since the weather is gradually getting nicer. I really need to work on my post processing with skin tones and such, but I really want to spend this time behind the camera working on composition, exposure and focus. I'm part of a photography online forum and I'm learning so much each day by seeing other people's pictures and the constructive criticism that's given from day to day. I really wish I had the capability of sharing more online with them, but given the current computer situation, it's been kind of difficult to do so.

My plan is to take any extra money I might make in the next few months and put it towards a new iMac. Like this beauty here:

My current project (non-photography) that I'm working on is to create a design logo for the Bonnaroo music festival this summer in Tennessee. My friend Amber and I really want to go, but to cut back costs I'm entering this contest to see if I can win us a pair of tickets. Here are my ideas so far, still making a choice. Feel free to chime in if you like one over the other.

Photo Challenge Round 1: Cityscape/Landscape Photography

Naturally, when most people get a camera in their hands their inclination is to go and photograph people. People are interesting and versatile subjects. They have expressions that change constantly, no two people look exactly the same, people create movement, and people can convey emotion.

Many aspects of photography can be very intimidating but for me it was landscape photography. Growing up I can remember that my example of landscape photography was Ansel Adams. His images were very strong and poignant, perfectly exposed, beautiful light resting on the edges of mountain tops, lakes and rivers with that glisten across the top and well composed with good contrast. Sounds like perfection just describing it, right?

When I was presented with the landscape/cityscape assignment last semester I was nervous because my past experience with this arena was seeing an appealing sunset on a road trip and trying to snap a picture from the back seat of the car. This resulted in, well = FAIL. Either the sun overpowered the image and it was washed out and overexposed, everything was blurry because of the fast movement, the general scene was completely out of focus, or you had the glare coming of the car window.

For my past assignment I armed myself with a few things to achieve great success and I'd like to share my limited "wealth" of knowledge and advice with you.

1) Gather inspiration. This is always key no matter what you subject is. Don't be limited by the average lake in front of a tree line, although generally beautiful, discover new places. Run down, dilapidated buildings can take on a surprising beauty of their own. Drive around, look at blogs, do a google image search. Here's a great link to view some of the best cityscape shots out there.

2) Think about perspective. I live in St. Louis. One of the most popular places people flock to for pictures is the Arch. There are thousands of images of the Arch head on with the Old Courthouse underneath. What other ways could I photograph the Arch?

Here's one that obviously has the arch in the background but I wanted my main focus to be on the Old Courthouse and I wanted to try to photograph it from a corner angle instead of straight on.

Take even a simple building or set of buildings. You could stand directly across the street from them and photograph them head on OR you could stand at the corner on the same side of the buildings, get lower down to the ground and now that mundane set of buildings can become architectural art. You may be limited by your lens on your camera but move around, try different focal lengths and see what could potentially be something different.

 

3) Think about textures. Buildings and landscapes can create natural textures that can really enhance an image depending on the way in which you take the picture. If there's a field in front of you and the wind is blowing, set your shutter speed higher in order to freeze the movement of the plants or grain in front of you. This can create a nice texture resembling a piece of flowing fabric and can be more appealing to the eye rather than just some grain standing straight up. Look at the architecture in buildings like broken down barns or old city buildings and envision it not as a building but more as fluid shapes that may have some kind of repeating pattern.

I'll use this picture as an example because I really liked the way the light highlighted the texture in the grass and the fluffiness of the clouds. Use light to your advantage. Look for how it highlights and accents what is in front of you.

 

4) Go armed with a tripod. I have yet to capture what I'm about to talk about but I'll find a picture to show an example. Moving water can really be appealing to the eye and a great way to achieve capturing movement is by bringing along a tripod. Set up your camera on your tripod and set your shutter speed to at least 1/8th of a second and go down from there. Each lowering of your shutterspeed will dramatically affect the look of the water in your shot so play around with different shutter speeds to see which one works best for the movement you are trying to capture.

 

Credit to Dave FitzSimmons.

Another benefit of having your tripod is capturing the sunset. Say you want to capture a series of images of the sun going down over a particular location. If you set up the camera on a tripod you can be sure that you will get the same exact image each time the only difference will be the position of the sun in the sky. Plus as it gets darker and you continue to adjust your settings to accommodate for the lighting available, you'll want to avoid camera shake and the tripod can solve that problem for you.

5) Speaking of sunsets, what's the best way to capture those beautiful vivid colors in the sky?

We will use one of my pictures from that assignment as an example. This has had some post processing but really only to burn some of the sky to enhance the texture in the clouds.

The colors in the sky are nice and bright and vivid and not too muted and the best way to achieve this with the silhouetted landscape is to meter your camera off of the brightest point in the sky, adjust your ISO, Shutter speed and f/stop off of this point in the sky and then recompose your camera to get what you want in the frame.

Here's a great and easy to understand article with more information on photographing beautiful sunsets.

Here's a couple more examples of some landscape/cityscape photography that I've done and if there's anything I didn't cover or something you have a question about, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom. I'm by no means a professional, but I will do my best to help!

 

 

Oooh. One more tip I forgot to include that my dad suggested when we went out to shoot that day was when you frame an image with clouds, don't always settle for shooting it horizontally. Think about turning your camera vertically and that way you can really capture the direction/movement of the clouds. Great tip dad!

 

Happy Snapping- Audrey

Snowpocalypse 2011

Mmmm red wine.

Trust me I might just post a lot of pictures this time because I'm a wee bit drunk. It's the red wine. We're about to get the "storm of the century" here and while everyone else ran out to get bread, milk and eggs (the eggs for making baked eggs) I made sure to get red wine. It's vital if you might potentially get shut in the house for days upon end. I;m going to laugh if this ends up being no big deal.

Anyway, before Snowpocalypse 2011 hit, I had a chance to get a few good opportunities to take some pictures.

First my gorgeous friends Robert and Erica asked me to photograph them so they could put some updated pictures into a photo album. Why of course! Even if I sucked majorly that day at taking pictures they probably still would have turned out great because Robert and Erica are such a gorgeous couple.

We had some challenges.
1) It was really cold outside with some snow on the ground.
2) Apparently if you want to take pictures inside of the Grand Hall at Union Station you cannot use a tripod and generally they charge a fee to do photographs. This posed a problem because even though Grand Hall is amazingly beautiful it doesn't have the best lighting. So trying to take pictures without a tripod is very tricky.
3) You can't take pictures in the "mall" part of Union Station at all. I decided we should go there because I know that natural light is abundant at Union Station, even on an overcast day like we had on that Sunday. We got yelled at a few times and then they threatened to have us kicked out so we were able to sneak in a few shots but that's about it.

Here's some of the best of the day. Robert and Erica, you rocked it!

 

Then this past weekend was the beginning of the annual Orchid Show at the Missouri Botanical Garden's. I went last year and this year ended up there on accident after trying to take some pictures to enter into the Pioneer Woman's recent photography assignment. I think my pictures turned out great but sadly, none of them were chosen for her contest. Maybe next time. Take a look at them anyway, I'm pretty proud of them.

 

It's nice to look at tastes of spring with the impending winter doom on the way. I even managed to walk out of the Climatron with a few mosquito bites.

Oh summer, how I miss you.

See you on the other side of the snowstorm.