Fun in the Rain, Event Photography, Senior Models and more
Blogging again. I like talking about my photos. But I’m not crazy about my blogging software. Otherwise I’d blog a lot more… I have a lot of respect for those that maintain incredible blogs… It is a LOT of work.
That said, here are a few photos from yesterday. I spent about a half hour wandering in my yard with the little camera set in close-up mode. Photographing nature in the rain is almost easier than photographing it on a beautiful sunny day. The light is soft and the colors tend to be richer. I got three favorites, so this will be “Photo Diem Cubed”
This week Dixie and I ventured to West Chester to attend a two day conference on Event and Church Directory Photography. Event photography is and industry term that covers almost any type of photography that happens outside of the studio. It includes pictures of sports leagues, pre-schools, scouts, parties, and about a billion other things. We’ve been doing that stuff for a long time, but it is always nice to pick up tips so that we can do it better
Church directory photography is an area where we are looking to get some experience. I’m sure we can do a better job than the big chains. It’s just a matter of getting into a small to medium church and getting started. If your church hasn’t had a new directory in several years, feel free to contact us!
We also photographed Angela Taldone, a senior model from PV this week. Angela is a great girl and did a great job modeling. We captured her in several outfits. I put a teaser shot up here. We will have more on the senior models in a future post.
That’s all for today… Now let’s see if I can format this blog so that it looks half decent…
Lining up our ducks
In the digital photography world you have to reinvent things on a regular basis. Software is continually changing, styles change, cameras change. Really, if you want to get philosophical about it, everything in our world is continually changing.
I take pictures every day. Mostly because I like creating interesting images, but also because I continually need images to practice on.
This image, taken off of route 447 in East Stroudsburg is actually the reflection in the water of the pond. I turned it upside down because it makes it look like a painting.
An image of the reflection, turned upside down.
(Photo) Life is so RAW
In Facebook I’m doing an exercise called Photo Diem. The idea is to take an interesting photo every day and post it in a Facebook Album. Most of my images for this exercise are shot in “camera raw” mode. We use raw all the time at the studio because it allows extensive high quality adjustments. RAW files have to be converted to a usable format (like jpeg) in a RAW converter like “Adobe Camera Raw.” Even though I’ve been using this method for years, I picked up a book on the subject to see if I was missing anything. Happily, I was! So I learned some new tricks, some new shortcuts, and got some new ideas. You can never learn too much. Besides that, the NEW version of ACR and Photoshop will out in 12 days. The learning in the digital age never ends!
This image was enhanced significantly utilizing Adobe Camera Raw
Can I get personal with you?
The Bender Photography blog is generally about studio photography, portraiture, senior pictures and other stuff that we do at our studio in Stroudsburg. You can read about what is happening here in the blog.
But there’s a personal side to my photography, too. And it happens on a daily basis. For the past six months or so I’ve been posting my personal photos in the albums of my Facebook profile. I’ve posted a couple of the better ones here for you to take a peek at. You can look at all of them by following this link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=178587&id=514423161&l=0d52d4c352
The albums are called “Photo Diem”, which is my term for “A picture a day”. It has been a great little challenge and is very rewarding. As you might imagine, it is difficult to find something new to photograph within the daily grind of life. But it forces me to look at things differently and to slow down a little.
Photo Diem has also found a nice little following of folks
Taken in the dead of night, this experimental photo is a photo diem favorite.
Taken while attending a photo conference in Las Vegas
This felt like the polar express and was created while visiting family in Minnesota
who look for the images every day. They comment and hit the “like” button for their favorites. That’s pretty nice! And it keeps me going! Yay!
I encourage anyone who is interested in photography to take a picture a day. You don’t have to show them to the world, but you will find that after a while you will be looking at things differently. And that can be a good thing!
Retrieve your heritage with photo restoration
This was the resulting image from the negative that our client brought to us
Recently one of our Facebook fans brought us a couple of glass plate negatives to work with. in the old days of photography, actually the days before film, negatives were made of glass. At Bender Photography we don’t do a lot of photo restoration, but I was intrigued with the idea of working with such old images.
At first, we weren’t sure if we could even work with them. They needed to be scanned and entered into our imaging system. But we found that with a little work, we could get a good scan and have a file to work with. The negatives were of decent quality, considering their age. But like much of the stuff from that era there were things that we could fix using photoshop.
We had our experienced photo retouchers work their magic on the two images and we were pleased with the results! It turns out that the images were created in the 1920’s!
Photography, snapshots and family portraits are such an important part of life. For most families, it is their only recorded family history. It was fun working with those old negatives.
Contact Bender Photography for your photography needs. Chances are, we can help you to do what you want to do.
Be sure to “fan” Bender Photography on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stroudsburg-PA/Bender-Photography/61162176001
We look forward to seeing you!