I got an iPad for my birthday! My lovely friends and family all pitched in to get me one! I'm at my favorite cafe, Small Point, testing out what it's like to use the Squarepace app to post.
So far along I don't think it's the best for my type of blogging since it's all photo based but for traditional blogging, I definitely think its great.
This is one of those before and afters where not much had to be done to the before. The before shot looks good but after looking at it for awhile I wanted to warm up the photo, especially around the hair and skin, pump up the colors of the scarves, and darken the area around the girls to draw the focus just on them. All this was achieved just by using curves and layer masks, a little dodge and burn, and gradients.
Awhile back I got an email from Easy Canvas Prints asking if I'd be interested in reviewing their canvases. I agreed because I never had a canvas print of my work before and quite honestly, I always thought of canvas prints to be a little old fashioned. But then I thought they totally don't have to be with the right photo. I wondered what photo to choose and then my abandoned beetle photo popped in my mind. It's one of my favorite photos I've ever taken and it was my first photo ever get explored on Flickr. Once it was picked out, I set about ordering it. The process was so easy!
They have this great preview section so you can get an idea how large your print is and its size in relation to furniture in your room. Also, the uploader has an image quality checker to let you know if the file you uploaded with be good enough for printing. You can then pick out the border you are interested in. I picked a black border because in my opinion, I think that looks best.
Once my package came in the mail I was so excited to open it. It is so cute! I love how the print came out. The colors are true to the original photograph which was my number one concern. I think orering a canvas print is a great alternative to matting and framing a photo. They would make gorgeous gifts and I'm thinking about ordering some of my texturized photos to give them an even more vintage effect by having them printed on canvas. Easy Canvas Prints definitely lives up to it's name.
Yesterday my new DSLR, the Sony Alpha a580, came in the mail. It was a complete impulse buy but I needed a new camera. I love that this one shoots HD video! The downside is there is no auto focus while recording video so I will have to get used to manually focusing while recording. For most of these test videos I used the Sony Zeiss 24-70mm 2.8 lens. It's a beast of a lens because it's so heavy so trying to hold the camera steady while manually focusing was difficult. Thankfully my 50mm and my 28mm are tiny so it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
After cleaning out my closet yesterday I found a few vintage cameras to add to my collection. My mother probably gave them to me years ago. She has tons of cameras from throughout the years since her days at RISD. I'm still trying to convince her to give me some more.
1) Kodak Pony 828
2) Kpachorpck -3 16mm film
3) Kodak Duaflex II
4) Kodak Instamatic 414
5) Dejur Eldurado III
6) Kodak Instamatic X-45
7) Argus Seventy Five
8) Yashica Electro 35
9) Canon AE-1 (the only camera out of this collection I actually use)
Yesterday I was looking for a stack of filters I had lying around to see if I had any colored filters. As I was trying some of them out, I picked up the whole stack and put them on the lens. The result was a soft, film like effect. It looks similar to what one would get with shooting with a Lomo camera.
Info: 28mm lens // 14 random filters stacked // ISO 400 // external flash between 1/2 and 1/4 power
The filters
Just like Lomo cameras, the result can be somewhat unpredicatble. It was hard for the camera to focus since I was shooting in a fairly dark bar.
Sometimes no matter what setting I put the flash on, the photos came out either way too bright or too dark. It was hard finding that happy medium.
Since I used my 28mm lens it gave a heavy vignette reminiscent of old film cameras.
This is a really cool effect and I can't wait to try it out on a photo shoot with a model. It's a super quick and easy way of getting the vintage look for a photos without doing a million different things in photoshop.
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