January 22, 2011

Photography Props | Grand Rapids Baby Photographer

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


I'm super excited because I just ordered the cutest photography prop and I can't wait to use it in my next shoot!  It's a lion hat...check out Briar Rose Crafty Things on Etsy!



I can't wait to receive it!  Thanks Christina for sending it over.  I'm looking forward to using lots of your awesome hand made items in the future.  :)

K.N.D {Sneak Peek} | Grand Rapids Infant Photographer

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 

I just posted the sneak peek of my photo shoot with K.N.D. to facebook but here is a sampling of some of my favorite shots from the session.  This baby was so expressive and had so many great faces to capture!  I had a blast!


He and his gorgeous mom are pictured top right.  K.N.D had such long eyelashes, gorgeous blue eyes, and a super cute smile so I tried to capture those details top left and middle.  His daddy is a musician and a music teacher so I couldn't resist the shot on the bottom of the collage.  Enjoy!

January 19, 2011

This week I learned...

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


This week I learned about masking in Photoshop and I experimented by merging two photos into one.  I took this picture of my husbands tea...
which showed the steam rising off of it.  And then I took this picture of the beautiful tea bag he used to make this tea...but I lost the steam!

And I didn't realize it until I got the images on the computer.  So I decided to learn to merge the two and I watched some tutorials on masking (I can't remember where they were or I would post them for you) and did some color correcting and the final result was this:
 

January 18, 2011

Heading Home

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 

Sadly, our vacation is coming to a close.  Here is a little recap of the relaxation we enjoyed on our mini-vacay.

 Top left: It snowed last night and it was gorgeous!  I didn't have my tripod so I did my best to capture the glowing street lights downtown without one.  We enjoyed a lovely dinner out with family just before that photo was taken.

Top right and middle left: Sasha. She's beautiful. I have nothing more to say than I love that puppy. In the words of my brother, she's a noble beast.

Middle right: enjoying some tea (Jason's) and coffee (not pictured) on a snowy day is one of the best feelings.  We drank our tea and coffee and read magazines in a bookstore for a few hours yesterday and it was wonderful.

Bottom: My two loves. My hubby and my baby puppy.  I couldn't ask for more.
 
We also enjoyed a lot of delicious food this weekend also.  Two of my favorites are above (sorry for the bad quality, these were taken with my cell phone): fried ice cream from Red Mesa Grill and pot stickers and lettuce wraps from Red Ginger. Yum yum!!

January 17, 2011

Photo Sphere

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


I'm having a lot of fun reading other photographers' blogs.  I stumbled upon this post from Ashley Sisk and just had to try out her tutorial.  Here's how it works. You start with a photograph of a landscape. I didn't really have a landscape so I chose an outdoor scene of some trees at my parents house that I love.
Then, according to her tutorial you need to crop the image so that the width of the photo is twice the height.  It should look something like this:
 Next, I followed her instructions to distort the photo into a square (make sure you don't constrain the proportions).
This is all seeming very strange so far, I know, but just bear with me.  It gets really cool in the end.  So once you have your distorted square image, you need to rotate it 180 degrees (so it's upside down).  After that, you go to Filter--> Distort--> Polar Coordinates (make sure it's set to 100%) and you'll end up with something like this:
Then you'll just need to do some playing in photoshop to come up with a nice final result. I used the patch tool and the clone stamp to get rid of the divide line, rotated the image until I liked the orientation, and did a lit bit of color editing and this is my final result.  I think it's beautiful.  It reminds me of an ornament made of flowers.
Let's see you try it.  Give it a shot and leave a comment back with a permalink to your post.  Happy editing and thanks Ashley for the inspiration.

January 16, 2011

Vacation

UPDATE: This site is no longer in use.  If you've landed here, please head on over to www.elephantshoephotos.com to check out my new site.  See you after the jump! Thanks! 


I finally finished editing photos from my shoot with A.J.S.  (on the night before we leave for vacation) and I wanted to show you my favorites.  Post a comment and let me know what you think.


We're going to Traverse City for a mini vacation and you know I'll be bringing my camera so look for some posts with my favorite winter scenes from up north coming soon!

-Emma-
________________________________________________________________________
*EDIT*

I submitted the bottom photo in the storyboard to iheartfaces for their Winter Wonderland photo challenge. Wish me luck.