Way back in November, 2011 I had written a tutorial for PetaPixel that walked through how I created the image of my daughter bouncing out of her crib:

I realized that the tutorial only existed over on PetaPixel, and that I should probably just put a copy of it here for anyone interested. So here it is.

In my previous post on postprocessing my Open Source portrait, I had shown a couple of contact sheets that I had generated to help me narrow down which images I liked. That contact sheet looked like this:

Contact sheets are a great holdover from the days of film, when you wanted a big overview of all the shots on a strip of film. After developing the film, you could just lay a sheet of photo paper under the enlarger, lay your strips of film on top, put a glass plate over the whole thing to hold them down, and then expose with white light for a small amount of time.

In my previous post for the Open Source Portrait (Postprocessing), I had mentioned during the skin retouching in GIMP section that there was a method that I had used in the past for helping to make skin imperfections visible for healing.

It is a similar method described by Calvin Hollywood (again), that he calls “Check Layers”. He explains what they are and how he uses them in the video below:

In my previous post I walked through the concept and shoot of my portrait of Mairi. At this point all I’ve got are a bunch of RAW (and jpg) files of the shoot. I know that I forgot to mention it in the last post, but for goodness sake if you can shoot RAW - do it. (It saved my butt with this image, as you’ll see below).

Also, you’ll be able to download my RAW file, and JPG output from RawTherapee below.

As promised, I thought it might be fun/helpful to walk through a portrait shooting session from start to finish using only Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS). This is my personal workflow, and hopefully I can do the subject some justice.

This article (possibly updated) is now available on pixls.us:
PIXLS.US: Freaky Details

German photographer/digital artist/photoshop trainer Calvin Hollywood has a rather unique style to his photography. It’s a sort of edgy, gritty, hyper-realistic result, almost a blend between illustration and photography.

As part of one of his courses, he talks about a technique for accentuating details in an image that he calls “Freaky Details”.

Here is the original video I saw him describing this technique in from Scott Kelby’s blog, Photoshop Insider during a guest appearance:

I had recently taken some photos of my friend Mairi, and wanted to share them. Lately I’ve been using Google+ more and more (they just make it too easy to use), and photographers seem to be one of the larger groups of users.

So I decided to see what my images would look like on Google+ as compared to Flickr (my mainstay), or even 500px. I’ve been a Flickr user for years (I think the $25USD/year for a Pro account is a pretty good deal for what it offers), and it’s been my reference for a while.

So, let’s take a look!

I finally got a chance recently to quickly photograph my friend Mairi.

She’s a beautiful woman who happens to be a keen-eyed photographer as well. The best part, though, is that she has modeled in the past, which made her the perfect person to shoot with! Seriously. The value of having someone who knows what to do in front of the camera is amazing.

So here we are at the end (not really, but too much more and we’ll be just beating a dead horse).

My intention at this point is to document some sort of workflow that might prove useful to others (and myself - you’d be surprised at how much I learn writing these posts…). So I’ll touch on the final topic I wanted to talk about, blending different bits from various layers and working through a couple of examples.

The rest of the tutorials in this series are here:

• B&W Conversion - Part 1 (Desaturate)
• B&W Conversion - Part 2 (Channel Mixer)
• B&W Conversion - Part 3 (Decompose)
• B&W Conversion - Part 4 (Pseudogrey, c2g, Blending)

I recently got a new camera to update my aging (gracefully!) Olympus E-P1. Deciding to stay with the µ⁴⁄_3^rds (or µ43^rds, or micro four-thirds - I just wanted to play with some HTML entity codes), I found a really tasty new Olympus OM-D E-M5 waiting for me for Christmas! In deciding which kit lens to go ahead and get with it, the Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12-50mm F3.5-6.3 EZ was a no brainer. Water-resistant (to match the camera), and a neat macro function!