Senior Portraits: Gabby & Keaton

The past few weeks, I have been working on some senior portraits for some people. First off, I did some portraits for a friend around September, however, he came back to me and wanted some more prints, so I worked with him and his mom to get those ordered and processed adequately. It ended up taking quite a bit of time, getting all of the images processed to the right size, etc.

I also had another student come to me for senior portraits. Gabby wanted some new ones, because her other studio was too expensive to get graduation announcement photos, so she wanted different ones for those. So she had me take some for her. We went to Hayden Lake and got some great ones down by the water. We decided that since so many people go downtown for portraits, that we would try some other areas.

Out of the 7 final edits, the first two (above) are my favorites, but there are some others shown below.

The photography portion consisted of my 50D, and my 50mm f/1.8 (favorite lens). I brought along my flash, as the lighting really wasn’t prime, so I supplemented it with the flash. I think that with the flash, the lighting turned out great in the end.

In post processing, the editing consisted of importing to Photoshop (CS5 FTW), processing from RAW, and minimal editing. She complained that her old ones seemed over-edited, so I was sure to avoid that.

Finally, I have below the contact sheets with the images from the shoot.

In other news, I have downloaded a trial version of Photoshop CS5, and I used it for editing my photos for the last few weeks. Unfortunately, I have grown to like it too much, and will be sad to give it up. I don’t see myself upgrading from CS4 anytime soon, but it was fun to try out the newest version. Although there isn’t too much that I would use constantly, there are little differences around, such as the MiniBridge, which is actually quite useful. Another feature, that I haven’t used yet, but really want to, is the HDR Pro. I have seen videos, and really want to compare it to Photomatix.

Another thing that happened was that Sadii decided to give me her Wacom tablet, a Graphire4. I used this for the past week and have grown to love it quite a lot. There is something about writing with a pen, vs a mouse or trackpad that is fun. It also has a mouse that comes with it, so maybe I’ll start using a mouse more often.