Jim Larson Photography

My wife and I had a fun time this evening as we attended an outdoor concert of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  A highlight for me was listening to the very talented John McEuen play his many instruments include the guitar, mandolin, dobro, fiddle and my favorite, the banjo.

Here is a shot taken with my Canon S90 camera of the musicians.  I wish I would have had my DSLR with me, but they probably would not have let me into the concert.

Last week we had the opportunity to celebrate a birthday at our house and one of the people invited to the party was Riley who has some magical blue eyes.  I took several shots of her and found this one was to my liking.  I knew that I wanted to end up with a black and white image, but during the process I decided to keep the eyes blue and see how that would look.

Below is the resultant photograph:

This blue eyed image was created with Photoshop using the following steps:

• Open the image
• Duplicate the image into a new layer
• Convert the top layer to black and white
• Create a layer mask on the top image with nothing being masked (white mask)
• Using the paint brush tool set to the color black and the mask being selected as the item being changed, paint out the mask where the iris of the eyes are.  When you do this, the color of the lower image will show through.
• Riley’s eyes are so blue that it almost looked “creepy” so I selected the bottom (colored) layer and desaturated that layer just a bit to lessen the blueness of the eyes.

Pick out an image of your own and try this technique.  You’ll have fun.

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.

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?

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!

It was a great privilege to be asked back again this year to photograph the Tiernan Irish Dancers.  They are a local group of very talented dancers ranging in age from probably 4 years old to the early 20′s.

This year was a bit more difficult from my perspective because the lighting was not quite as bright as last year.  Because of this I got to try out the high ISO settings of my Canon 5D Mkii.  I cranked it up to ISO 5000 which allowed me to keep the shutter speed up above 1/250 of a second.  These dancers are so quick that I really needed to be shooting at 1/500 or faster to stop the motion blur.

I had a second camera set to its highest ISO setting of 1600, but it didn’t work too well during the fast portions of the dance.  There was one exception to that.  The blurred looking image was purely an accident, but is has a very interesting effect.  This shutter speed of this shot was 1/3 of a second.  That is extremely slow, but looks kind of cool in this shot.

You can check out the whole show by going to my portfolio web site by clicking HERE.

Enjoy!

After getting the last post together, I decided to see what else could be done with the photo.  I first converted it to black and white, then added a sepia tone to give it an old image look.  The last thing I did was to crop the image for more intimate view of my uncle.

Try making changes to some already favorite photos that you may have and you’ll find that there are many pictures inside the original photo.

Which do you like better?

While out for a bike ride today I spotted a fisherman having a great time on the river.  I had to stop and take a shot or two since the vibrant colors were showing their stuff.  This fall has been particularly nice for colors and it has lasted longer than usual.

Keep your eyes open for a nice shot and don’t be afraid to stop and take the photo.  It would have been easy for me to pedal on past, but I’m glad that I stopped.

Another thing to note is that I would have normally only my cell phone camera with me on a bike ride, but I took a pocket camera with me in hopes of seeing something good.  I was not disappointed.

Thursday evening brought a lot of activity to downtown Boise at Park Center.  The YMCA sponsors an intermediate length triathlon to give those with not a whole lot of experience an opportunity to compete and to learn more about the sport.  There were several hundred athletes competing tonight despite the rain that was falling.  There were thunder storms forecasted, but fortunately, they never developed.

We had 3 photographers at the event.  One for each of the disciplines; swimming, biking and running.  It was my job to photograph the swimmers as each of them completed the swimming leg.

The photo for today shows the start of one of the swims when everyone was still rather close to each other.  The 320mm telephoto lens kind of compresses the image, giving the illusion that everyone is closer together than they really were.  But, it was still tight with swimmers getting hit and kicked (unintentionally) by their competitors.

If you want to peek at some of the 3,387 photos that were captured, please visit the following web page: IdahoSportsPics.com