Fun with Photoshop

I took some pictures of Chris and Christina
's wedding. I must have taken hundreds of shots, but it seemed for every 1 good shot, there were 3 really bad shots.

One of the challanges I ran across

was trying to take their picture while they were in the middle of a reflective car. The metering picked up how bright the car was, and made their faces way too dark. When i metered on their face, the car was way too bright. I thought this would be a great chance for me to learn how to blend shots in Photoshop.

Here is the original shot. Notice how they are posing nicely, but their faces are way too dark. In photoshop, just trying to fix the exposure gave me this......

Now their faces are good, but you lose all detail in the car. In the past I would have lived with this, but now I figured out the Layer Mask feature in Photoshop. I put the two on top of each other, and masked out everything except the car highlights in the dark layer. That gave me this shot which is cool for my first attempt.

Next post I'll have kittens and babies to share.

adventures in cake decorating

I made a cake that looked like an Agricola game board! The frosting is homemade, and all the decorations are marzipan.

Pooja's version of the zoo trip!

So we went to see the new polar bear exhibit. But it was mostly identical to the old polar bear exhibit. Plus, we discovered that it's kind of difficult to take good pictures of a white bear in drab surroundings, especially when you're taking said pictures through plexiglass. So I decided to entertain myself by taking pictures of flowers and random water fountain things, which thankfully were not behind plexiglass. My knowledge of photography is mostly yelling "say CHEESE!" before clicking the camera button, but that doesn't work so well on inanimate objects. So with a little (ok, a lot) of Greg's help, I was able to learn the following techniques. And by "learn", I mean I made him set all the camera setting such that I could just click the button and get the shot I wanted. So, in no particular order, here's Photography 101 by Pooja:


Blurry Background Mode: This mode allows for cool shots with something or someone up close in focus, with everything behind them blurry. Makes for some wedding-y looking pictures.


Runny Water Mode:This mode lets you take pictures where you can actually see water flowing!


Drops of Water Mode:This mode lets you get cool shots where you can see individual drops of water!

Zoo Pictures

Pooja and I went to the Zoo on Sunday so we could see the new Polar Bear exhibit, but mostly so I could practice my photography skills. I really like how you can compose a shot, and snap it instantly with the DSLR. I also found when focusing on an all white subject (like a polar bear), surrounded by dark grass and dirt, I probably need to switch off of the default evaluative metering, and go with spot metering with AF lock. I took about 10 pictures of that bear, and my exposure settings were all over the place.

Pooja took some pictures too. You can tell which ones are her's since most of them are extreme close-ups of flowers. I also taught her how to mess with the shutter speed to make water seem like glass, and also to catch each droplet. She seemed to like that.

I'm putting up on of my fav shots from the day in theory, but not execution. We found this deer just perched really close to us on a rock, starting off to the right, just begging to be captured. The shots seemed to all be really bright off the deer, and really dark off the background. I tried my best in the RAW editor to tweak the settings to balance out the colors. I still think its pretty sharp.

Once I go through the hundred or so pictures, and delete all the crap (95% of it), i'll post some more keepers from the Zoo trip.

Petco Park

Went to the Padres game where they got killed by the Braves. I got to play around with some of the features of the camera like continuos shooting mode, and also got to carry around my new bag. Pooja says it looks like a booster pack, but I like it because it allows quick access to the camera.

I tried to process the RAW images with Photoshop, but I found out the camera is so new that Adobe hasn't released an updated RAW converter yet. So I'm forced to edit with the Digital Photo Professional software that came with the camera. Its not terrible, but I miss the ability to see the picture settings on all of the pictures without having to open an info menu. The settings help me see why some images are better than others. Hopefully they update that soon, but for now this is what I got. I'll put up some of my favorites from the the game.

Camera Picture

Hopefully this is the first and last picture i put up here that is not taken on my new camera. But I couldn't take a picture of the camera with the camera, so I used my camera phone. Did i mention the light in the apartment is terrible? Anyways, here is my tool for the rest of this blog (until I decide I need something better and step up at least).

New Camera and Blog

I realized I spend about 8-10 hours a day sitting at a desk solving technical problems and not using the creative side of my brain. The right side of my brain is starving for activity, and I thought digital photography might just scratch that itch. I see it as art for geeks. You don't have to have an image in your mind that needs to be translated through your hands. Instead, you view something interesting, and you are able to play with a gadget to turn the image into art. We'll see how this hobby goes (hopefully better than surfing as my lightly used 8' board on the balcony can attest to) and if I stick with it. I thought it'd be interesting to post my images to a blog so I could watch as I get better and see what I was thinking at any given time.

So I took the plunge and got a Canon Rebel T2i. Yeah its way more camera than I know what to do with at this point, but I figure I won't outgrow it anytime soon. I did borrow my friend Nicola's Rebel XS at one point a few weeks ago. That taught me the general layout of the keys, and how to mess with the different creative modes such as Av, Tv, and P. I'm a giant dork, so I'm reading the manual that came with the camera from front to back. Hopefully I'll get my first round of real shooting on Wednesday when we go to the Padres game.