lightmeter for the studio

Sooo I finally got a light meter for the studio.
Before I was using the cameras histogram to determine if I had the right level... but man... I was off a little bit on that one and had the levels too low.

Good thing to get a late birthday present like this :-) (thank you sweetie).

Here is a few photos from tonite


Hmmm let's see how this works...


Dad.... I keep telling you!!! F 8


See I told you... much better


WOW!!!! bright light

taking the truck out

Well if you are taking the truck out for a ride... might as well do it good :-)

Bloggy giveaway winner

The winner of the bloggy giveaway is... (drum roll please)

Lisa Marie
from
lisa's chaos

I had to use a random number calculator to pick a winner since there is no way that I could pick just one winner out of everyone that replied.
The thing is that sooo many of the people that commented have very good ideas and reasons soo I really want to do all of them.
However as some of you may know time is of the essence and there isn't always to much left over.

I am working on an idea about setting up an etsy or other account to do collages for people and keep it at a level where everyone should be able to participate. Good idea? I would love to have your input on that :-)

Well I guess I am getting soft so just for the fun of it I picked a runner up... (another drum roll please...)


The runner up is...

Michelle
from
Midwest Parents

I will be in contact with the winner and runner up via email. Thank you all very much for your very kind comments and interest. And of course if you want some tips and tricks on photoshop check back every now and then as I will keep posting the tutorials as I get them done.

--Peter

Giveaway: Personalized Photo Collage

UPDATE: THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO ALL WHO ENTERED! I'LL BE CONTACTING THE WINNER WITHIN THE NEXT DAY.





My wife is having fun with this giveaway, so I thought I would join in!

Anyone that knows me knows that I love taking pictures of our daughter and then manipulating them in Photoshop. Here are some examples of some of the work I have done:










So I am giving one lucky winner (chosen randomly) a custom-made collage using up to five pictures of your choice. It could be pictures of you, your kids, your pets. Anything!

To enter, just leave me a comment telling me what pictures you would like to have made into a collage, along with some sort of contact information (email address or link to your blog).

This contest is open until Friday morning and a winner will be chosen after that. Good Luck!

And don't forget to come back and visit me. I regularly post tutorials on Photoshop and other topics related to photography.

Photo workflow

At some level I would like to think that it's not just me that have been facing the issues with maintaining publication of family photos to share with family and friends.

If you have been there you probably know the issue where you get several photos during a month and either have to do incremental uploads to some web publishing sites during the month or at the end of the month go through the process of selecting photos, scaling them for web publication and uploading.

I use Adobe lightroom for processing photos and managing my "library" of family photos. For that purpose it's great. Lots of visibility and easy to find your photos. However I was still facing the scaling, exporting (from lightroom), selection of files and then finally upload and sending out emails.

Recently I found a new extension for Lightroom. It's the Lightroom export sdk which basically is a software development kit for lightrooms export. It's ok if you don't do software development and wouldn't know where to start with it.

Included in the sdk which you can download from Adobe labs is a sample for ftp export and flickr export.

I experimented with the flickr export which included setting up a flickr account and kindly asking for permission to use their API. You can setup all the flickr stuff using flickr services in the explore menu (when using the flickr plugin it's sort of easy since you are helped through the process).

Now my process for uploading family photos is as easy as selecting the photos in lightroom and select export. Of course in the export dialog I have to select flickr as the destination but it is so much easier than it has ever been before :-)