The challenge of having a first grader is finishing homework at a decent hour. It’s not that he has volumes of it each day, it’s just that he often doesn’t quite get it all done during school time. So what is probably 20 min of homework extends to 1-2hours! There is always something to get distracted by. This time it was dad with his camera! I took this of R tonight as he was working on it… I liked the hi key aspect to this portrait

ISO 1000 ƒ/3.2 T 1/40 with a flash bounced off the wall to the left.

Heres the saved JPG from the RAW file:

Here are the edits from Aperture:

I then went into Perfect Photo Studio-Effects and applied a Simplify Man filter and an Anime filter set at about 40%. Then back to Aperture for a final crop

I liked the over exposed aspects of this image, shows off the deep brown color of his eyes.

This morning I ordered a proof of my Father-in-Laws memoir, Thank You, America. Orphaned at a very early age in war torn South Korea. Forced to flee his village as an early teen because of the advancing North. With a little bit of luck and lots of perseverance he found his way to America to become a doctor. This is his story.

I decided to use Amazon’s CreateSpace for the project. CreateSpace’s tools are very easy to work with. They have downloadable templates that you can use with Word or InDesign to format your pages correctly. Then you can either upload a pdf file or a Word doc and their servers do their magic. They have automatic checkers that check to make sure things are with their printers limits. And before you can order a proof a human will check your file to the printers specs.

The easiest part was the CreateSpace process. The hard part was getting to the final edits. This project was a team effort. My Father-in-Law wrote the original manuscript by hand. His secretary typed those pages out. My brother-in-law(from the other side of the family) edited those drafts. I then had a friend Reese Spykerman(DesignbyReese who graciously carved some time to help) lay the pages out in the 6X9 format and create the cover and back graphics. I am grateful for everyone that has helped get this project to this point. We live in a amazing time where this type of content can be created so in such a cost effective manner. If anyone is interested in his story watch this space for info on how to order. I’m also working on Kindle and Apple iBook versions coming soon. I’m definitely not an expert in Self Publishing but it’s fun to have made it through book 1.

I was going it quite a few directions tonight. Found a miniature angel under a lamp that was lit nice by the table lamp. Then my kids decided to tuck all their stuffed animals into bed on the sofa. After they were finished they sat still for a few seconds to capture a portrait. I’m a little bummed that my aperture was stuck on 2.8 because I was messing around with shooting wide open with a flash bounced off the ceiling. I would have rather been closer to ƒ/8 so that my daughters eyes would have been in focus. I liked the capture anyways and decided to play around with the tools to see what I could come up with.

ISO 1000 ƒ/2.8 T 1/80 with flash set on 1/128 manual and bounced off the ceiling.

Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:

It’s a bit orange and obviously needed more flash to reach J’s face… So into Aperture for initial edits:

I decided to move on the OnOneSoftware’s Photo Suite 6 to see what the effects would do:

I then used a couple of other tools from Nik Software to try and sharpen up J’s eyes a bit more and then used Dfine2.0 to reduce the overall noise of the image. Obviously a lot more work than necessary had I gotten the exposure and flash settings right before I started!

My wife had a baby shower this morning for a friend of ours, which of course left a few items to photograph! She had a couple of these hydrangea’s in glass jars in a few places. I liked this comp, but I think I’m might have over sharpened the leaves. I considered re-processing it, but I was torn, cause I kind of liked it this way.

White Hydrangea

ISO 1000 ƒ/5 T 1/50

Here’s the saved JPG from the RAW file:

The petals were kind of lost in the white background, so into Aperture we go:

Very glad that Aperture remembers all the edits in memory so that I can review what I did. Sometimes I know what I want to do based on the histogram, other times I just start to dabble.

Woke up this morning to rain clouds and wind gusts unto 50mph! When I got in my car to head out I opened the cover on the sunroof and found these cool water drops on the window. If you look at the larger sizes you’ll notice the reflection of my neighbors palm tree in the drops. I was tempted to covert this to B&W, but decided against it as I kind of liked the hint of color from the palms.

ISO 1000 ƒ/8 T 1/320 and initially about 2 stops underexposed

Here’s the saved jpg from the RAW file:

It’s a bit drab and dreary and I didn’t check the histogram in the camera and the LCD on the ancient Canon 5d is horrible. It’s so bad I really don’t use it much, mainly just to check composition and then use the histogram to verify exposures.

So here’s the initial edits in Aperture:

This was pretty good and what I was looking for but decided to play around in Perfect Photo Studio from OnOnesoftware.com

I added a bit of Glow to the drops.

My son got out of school today at noon, so off to the field to kick the ball around. This is one of R’s buddies that joined us for the fun! I liked the framing of this capture and the intensity of a 6 year old.

ISO 1000 ƒ/5.6 T 1/250

Here’s the saved jpg from the RAW file:

I don’t usually crop a whole lot preferring to keep the resolution as high as possible, and then there are times like today that it only enhances the image to get rid of the extra room. Here are the edits in Aperture:

Which led to this image:

I then dropped the file into Snapseed from Nik Software for the final processing using the Drama Dark filter for the final image.

Yep, an onion for today post.

ISO 1000 ƒ/5.6 t 1/60

Black and White conversion done with Snapseed for Mac by Nik Software

Found this Red Tulip by the kitchen sink tonight. I think by tomorrow they will be gone. Not usually a fan of flash flares, but I liked this one. I placed an off camera strobe to the right and below the flower. Set on Manual at 1/64 with a paper towel over the top as a diffuser!

ISO 1000 ƒ/16 t1/100

So here’s the original saved jpg from the RAW file:

It’s not too bad, but a bit washed out i think. So a few edits in Aperture:

And then into OnOneSoftware’s Photo Suite 6 for some special effects. I’ve really enjoyed dabbling with textures of late. For this one I used some rice paper:

I then saved it back to Aperture where I slightly dodged the center of the flower and removed the black dots on the petals.

Edit: I just downloaded Snapseed, http://www.snapseed.com/Mac App Store; and reprocessed this file to this:


Which one do you like better?

So today’s challenge was a box of crayons. My son just recently organized this box in its color rows. So I asked him for a description of his ordering system.

Blue is in the top left corner.
Green is to the bottom left corner.
Pinks are in the bottom middle.
Purples in the top middle.
Orange/Yellow are in the top right corner and Brown/Black are in the bottom right corner.

ISO 1000 ƒ/2.8 T 1/40

I did some levels and exposure adjustment in Aperture and added some sharpening and a texture filter with Perfect Photo Studio, sorry no time today for screenshots.