I searched all my posts for something on relaxing, and came up with 9 posts out of almost 400. So much for reposting something! Vince is relaxing today playing poker, his favorite boy hobby besides cars. I’m blogging. It’s beautiful out, and I’m blogging.
Last night for an hour I video chatted with Leanne Cole, a blogging friend/photographer. I highly recommend a private tutoring session with Leanne. Practice without instruction means I make the same mistakes over and over.
Before I even started the call I had to prepare.
- Donated to Leanne’s site because she lives by her photography, and gives a lot of free advice – determined by me as to the worth of the advice I expected to receive. I think a professional minimum should be at least $50 an hour, but that is pretty cheap. I can’t get someone to look at my refrigerator for $50. She never told me what to donate!
- Emailed Leanne my goals for the call.
- Picked my BEST pictures, resized them to 600 X 400 pixels so I could email 16 of them in one email.
- Picked some troublesome problems that recur in photos that I wish could look like Leanne’s pictures.
Here’s how to get ready for a video tutoring session.
- Wear a baseball cap all day because you didn’t wash your hair.
- Don’t video chat before 9:00 p.m. after your make-up has relaxed a bit.
- Get your pet (s) out of hiding. They love to appear on the call. Leanne wore her cat around her neck! Vince wore Puppy Girl in his lap.
Here’s one photo we talked about.
Leanne’s advice:
- Better if light is the same on the face. Flecks of sunlight on someone’s face – poor
- Watch feet in the background.
- Bright sun is a killer in photos. Your eyes go to the brightest part of an image.
- Shoot at same eye level as kids.
Possible solutions – some of which I need to practice. Leanne actually did these things to the photo so I coud see how to do them and what a difference it made.
- Crop the picture, but only if you can do it without ending up with a square picture.
- Select the light parts-highlights and darken them, and the shadows and lighten them. There are several ways to do this, and she used “raw photo”. Pronounced in American as “roll” photo. I was racking my brain to figure out what a roll photo was. This is the first time we had heard each other. That was really fun! 🙂
Cropping went well. I used the magic wand to delete the feet in PS 6, and you can see what I got. I went to Bridge, figured out how to open “roll”, and did a little adjusting, but I wasn’t pleased with it. Then I tried to save it, and move on, The save button blinks, and nothing is happening (as in it is still doing it). Since I’m relaxing today, I’ll publish this post instead of getting frustrated in Bridge and PS6, Adobe products that I love – GRRR.
Take home advice for the night – think before you shoot. Composition, composition, composition!
Marsha Ingrao - Always Write 
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