A Scenic World

Sunday was my first shoot with my friend’s adorable son Rohan. I was reminded anew just how difficult it is to photograph children. The cutest expressions last only for a fleeting moment (heaven help you if your camera’s buffer hasn’t caught up in time for you to capture it) and, perhaps more importantly, they are in a state of constant motion, zooming around, zigzagging toward their goal (which changes on a second-by-second basis).

I think my technical inexperience shows most here. I only have the on-board flash for my camera, and I’ve only used it about five times, all with disappointing results. Even if I had a nice flash, I’m not sure I’d use it because I like how natural light looks, but with children, that natural light most often serves to illuminate nothing but a blur of motion.

I guess it’s just a good reminder that the best shots require a good bit of luck, like when my friend hung Rohan upside down - even though the light wasn’t spectacular and he was twisting and giggling, the shot came out perfectly.

It’s times like this when a well-deserved nap helps. Suddenly, I could take my time choosing my lens, setting up my tripod, and - best of all! - composing my shot.

In the end, I just wanted to make sure I did this beautiful child justice.

“If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.” Read Christine Rosen’s article about how MySpace and Facebook have impacted the idea of friendship here.

Full disclosure: I do have a MySpace account (although maybe it’s telling that it just took me three tries to remember the password so I could link to it here), but no Facebook.

There’s quite a bit of irony going on here. For instance, I’m not at all having a restful day, as it seems in the photo - in reality, I’m running around, trying to get ready for a photoshoot I have planned today with the incredibly gorgeous son of my friend (which I’ll post later, I’m sure). Then I chose to title this one “The Restless Mind,” because even when I am sitting, my mind is usually racing. Finally, the song I was listening to at the time (and from where the title comes) is called “Stay My Hand,” by Jump, Little Children. My hand, of course, isn’t pictured.

I got a new haircut a couple of days ago, and I’ve really wanted to do a 365 photo with it, but due to my pathological need to stand in the rain, it really wasn’t happening until today. I figured that just kind of spinning in place with the camera pointed toward me was the way to go - 300 shots later, I’m not convinced that was the best method, but I couldn’t come up with anything else.

This was the best picture. It definitely needed some help though. So first I opened it in Photoshop.

The next step is to run an action I found when looking for a Holga simulator called “Old Toy Camera.” It’s made by flickr’s own Dave Ward and you can get it from his photostream here.

I added my own action that modifies Dave’s, which takes away the “Greyscale” and “Grain” layers (I was shooting at ISO 800, so I didn’t really need any more grain) and changes a few of the layers. Specifically, it changes the blending mode of the “Lighten Center” layer to “Hue,” tweaks the “Hue/Saturation” and “Levels” layers, and adds a “Color Fill” layer on top. The “Color Fill” layer’s blending mode is set to “Color.” (I would add a link to this action if I could figure out where to find it on my computer).

I didn’t like the color I’d originally used in my action for the “Color Fill” layer, so I changed it to something a lot softer by double-clicking on the original green color in the layer. Even though I changed it to a teal color, it doesn’t really make the entire picture teal because of the blending mode used. For these changes, it’s vital to be able to see the photo while you’re adjusting it.

I wanted the picture to be a lot more dramatic and lyrical, so I decided to add a “Color Balance” layer on top of everything else. You just have to go to “Layers,” “New Adjustment Layer,” and “OK.” First I chose “Highlights,” and used to sliders to add a lot more yellow and a bit more red. The for the “Midtones,” I moved the sliders slightly to yellow, toward magenta, and then very far over toward red. I left the shadows alone.

This left me with what I wanted. I right-clicked in the layers menu and chose “Flatten Image” to give me just one layer with the look that I had been going for. And all of this gave me this: