Jim Larson Photography

The detail of a wedding ceremony is truly amazing.  Let’s see, invitations to send, fancy clothes buy, renting the church, decorating the church, baking the cake…and the list goes on and on.  Today, my final shot in the “Retouching Wedding Photographs” series is all about the detail of the flowers.

This was the simplest one of the series to retouch as outlined below:

• Increase the exposure ever so slightly
• Add some vignetting to soften up the image and make it look a little “dreamy”

Weddings are a bit dreamy as you will notice when you watch the bride and groom look into each other’s eyes.  Looking back on my wedding day, I remember that feeling too.

Congratulations to Amanda and Will and I wish you the best as you start your married life together.

Cliff Moutner, stated to be “One of the top ten wedding photographers in the world” by American Photo Magazine is a photographer who has impacted my photographic life even though we’ve never met.  I find a lot of similarities in our thought processes from what I’ve read and heard from him over the past few months.  He is very good at walking into any situation and making the best of what is available from a lighting and architectural perspective.

The wedding I captured last week with my cameras had some very interesting lighting which made me think out of the box just a bit so that I could make the best of what I had been given.  It was at a small church and the bride was getting the final touches in one of the sunday school rooms that was designed for what I’m guessing were first and second grade kids.  I gathered that by my shins bumping into the bright green tabletops in the room.  I wanted to get some good photos of the bride’s shoes and thought I would give the green table a try, knowing that I’d need to do something with it after the fact.  Here is what I came up with as shown in the before and after image.

Here are the steps to take it from beginning to end:

• The shoes were photographed from a backlit perspective with natural light coming in through the window.
• I let the camera pick the exposure which left plenty of detail on the dark side of the shoes, but totally blew out a portion of the tabletop.
• In Adobe Lightroom, I first converted the image to black and white since I knew I didn’t want the green in the photo.  I contemplated changing the green tint to blue, but I liked the black and white so much that I stopped there.
• This was followed by brightening up the areas in the image that had the original green tint to make the tabletop a bit more uniform in brightness.  That also lightened up the bottom of the shoes that originally had the green reflection.
• I then brought out the blacks a bit more for added contrast.

That was about it as far as tweaking the image.  Next time you are in a difficult lighting situation, make the best of what you have.  You could end up with something cool.

Over the next few days I will show examples of how to take some photographs and make them even better.  Well, at least in my opinion they look better than the originals out of the camera.  Plus, my wife says so too, so that says something.  :-)

This last week I got to capture the wedding photos for a very nice couple.  In about 4 hours time, we had the wedding and an awesome reception at the bride’s parents house.  The back yard had white Christmas light in the hedges surrounding the yard.  This made for an awesome backdrop to the photos.

The image below is of the bride, showing the image as it came out of the camera and what I ended up presenting to the family.  Here are a few things that I did to make it look to my liking:

• Increased the overall exposure
• Modified the color balance so that white was white
• Increased the intensity some of the leaves in the background
• Added some vignetting to darken the corners just a bit to help bring the focus to the subject
• Did some minor touchup work on the brides face to make any blemishes a bit less conspicuous
• Did a minor push up on the bottom of the brides chin to make it more acceptable to her

Next time you have a photo that is nice, but not great, try some retouching ideas and see what you end up with.  Be sure you modify a copy of the original in case you go too far with your retouching.

The photo below is one frame from a video I took of a very large American flag in Boise.  It has been a very popular download on the iStockPhotos site.  It was captured with the Canon 5D MkII digital SLR.

Click on the image of the flag to watch the video.

Today I was blessed to be able to shoot wedding photos for a very handsome couple, Chris & Alyssa.  It is great fun to be part of capturing the moment when the two pledge themselves to each other as husband and wife. A goal of mine is to be able to give the couple a visual representation of their special event that they will cherish for years to come.

The venue was a very nicely renovated church in a suburb of St. Louis, MO. One nice thing about the church that I don’t often see very often is enough natural light to shoot in.  I still had to crank up the ISO to 1600 to give me a decent shutter speed, but both the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 7D are excellent at this setting. Adobe’s Lightroom 3 was great at minimizing any remaining noise.

Below are a few photos to highlight their wedding, starting off with Alyssa and her gals:

The beautiful bride, Alyssa:

The calm and cool husband, Chris:

The rings:

These guys had so much fun together.  As you can tell by the dancing, pointing, sunglasses, etc., they were not too serious at this point of the day.

Decorations:

Reception dinner:

Thank you Chris and Alyssa for giving me the privilege of being your photographer on your very special day.

Today I was taking photos of all the runners at the local YMCA hosted “Camel’s Back Duathlon.” Most everyone had already finished and I was waiting for the next person to come across the line with no one in site. For the past 30 minutes I had been looking for a good candidate for a small modeling job. Most runner shots were captured head to toe and you could definitely tell what they were doing. I wanted to see if I could tell a story without showing the big picture, so I asked a woman waiting for her friends to finish the race to help me with an experiment. I had her stand just under the finish line banner with her head at just the right angle. Then I snapped a nice closeup of her face and her very reflective glasses.

Do you like the different way of telling this athlete’s story?

Quite often I ride my bike through a small country community north of Boise called Hidden Springs. Each time I ride though the area I pass by some cattails that are about 5 feet off of the paved road. When I’m riding, the birds that are busy looking for food seem to ignore me and I can get rather close to them.

After my ride on Sunday afternoon I decided to take a bigger lens and camera back to that very spot with hopes of getting some very nice bird shots.  After parking the car, I got out the camera, placed it on my monopod and approached the birds.  Since I was not just driving by, all the birds became rather nervous and really didn’t want to hang around much.

Patience was the key to this photo outing and I was able to capture a couple of nice shots, one of a Red Wing Blackbird and the other… well, I’ll wait for my dad to comment as to the species.

Both photos were taken with the Canon 7D and Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens. The lens aperture was wide open at f2.8 giving a nicely blurred background.

I had a great time yesterday photographing our friends new puppy.  His name is Zappa and he was one of the most well behaved puppies I’ve seen. Zappa is an interesting mix of a Rat Terrier and a Chihuahua. Here is one of my favorite images from the photo session.

To see the rest of Zappa’s photos, click HERE to be redirected to my gallery site.

Enjoy!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This evening I had the opportunity for a senior portrait shoot.  The weather was great with a perfect temperature.  The sun was shining brightly through about as clear a sky as you could imagine.  I really prefer to have a slightly hazy sky as it turns the sky into a giant “softbox” wrapping the subject in soft sunlight.  That wasn’t to be today, as the sun was quite harsh, making it difficult to capture a perfect shot.

In many of my shots I used a flash to fill in the shadows.  In others, I had an assistant hold a large white reflector to fill in the shadows.  The shot pictured here was straight on sunlight with no added light, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  It took a little bit of  tweaking in the Adobe Lightroom software to get the exposure just right and to add a bit of darkening to the edges to bring your attention to the subject.

One of the aspects my photography business is shooting portraits.  My wife owns a music studio and a lot of students and parents coming through on a weekly basis.  This gives me an opportunity to show some of my work to potential customers.  As soon as I get this one printed, it will be up on the wall not only as advertising for me, but for this particular shot, as an inspiration to the music students.

The image was captured by placing the model on a white seamless paper background and a white, somewhat shiny floor.  After the image was copied to the computer, it was edited to take out any slight shading on the white background and to add a light brown gradient.  This was all done in Photoshop in about 10 minutes.

Now it is off to the printer for a nice 16×20 print!