Jim Larson Photography

Flowers in a Glass

Jim — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:13:13 +0000

I was recently hired to shoot a 50th anniversary celebration for a very nice couple. It was amazing to see how many friends a couple of 70 year old people could have. Not only that, these people knew how to have a great time with one another. I could only hope that I’m as limber and spunky when I am their age. :-)

The following is a photo of one of the table decorations. It was taken with a fairly wide aperture (f3.2) on the lens which gave a very nice blurred background. Some of the shapes in the background gave some interesting lines in the image as well, mimicking the curved shape of the glass. I also added some dark vignetting to help draw the eyes to the main subject.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Jim — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 05:24:58 +0000

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.

Blue Eyes

Jim — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:02:58 +0000

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.

Retouching Wedding Photographs #3 – Flowers

Jim — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:19:15 +0000

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.

Retouching Wedding Photographs #2 – Shoes

Jim — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:34:53 +0000

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.

Retouching Wedding Photographs #1 – The Bride

Jim — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:05:54 +0000

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.

Happy Birthday, America

Jim — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:30:09 +0000

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.

Chris & Alyssa’s Wedding

Jim — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:09:02 +0000

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.

Reflection Tells the Story

Jim — Sun, 30 May 2010 05:00:39 +0000

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?

For the Birds

Jim — Mon, 24 May 2010 05:10:43 +0000

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.