Day 7 - Portrait of a Hearty Mother

I've always loved this shot. It spot on shows just how this person is. I've never known quite what to do with it in post-ed though. It never occurred to me to try B&W, yet it proved the best choice - the building behind the subject is a bit too dominant, and this way it does not steal the attention away from her. It's much better this way.

So this concludes my week of square cropped black and white portraits. I was worried I wouldn't make it - not all pictures do well as square crops - but I managed to find seven of them. It's been an interesting challenge.

I don't know it the challenge will continue one more week yet, we'll see. But I'll keep the possibility in mind and have a think on what theme to go for.

Cheers

/MrsHjort

Day 6 - Portrait of a Playful Man

Many of you will recognize this person, and the kitty too I think. This is Mr and Freya :)

I shot this for a contest about three years ago but I ended up going with a different picture since this one didn't quite strike my fancy at the time. The shadow on the right bugged me and the lens I used made a shadow in the lower right corner. This was before my external flash... Now that I've added a vignette to the shot those thing do not bother me as much anymore though...

I'm glad this finally got to see the light of day. It's one of those rare pictures where Mr doesn't look uncomfortable. Maybe because he is holding Freya haha, she on the other hand, looks a bit like she'd rather stand on her own four paws. They make a cute pair nevertheless :D

/MrsHjort

Day 5 - Portrait of a Cunning Boy

Here's an other candid portrait. If I remember correctly, I shot it just after getting my Sigma macro lens. It eases the process of taking candid portraits a lot because, using it, you don't have to be as close to your "victims" haha. It makes it much easier to catch family members unawares. Man, now it sounds like I'm a creep haha! I love those little moments you get though. They're so genuine, and I love the mood they create, like this one, pure curiosity :).

As some of you know I lost my photography spark this winter (the lack of colors outside depresses me), and I haven't really my camera to that any social events lately. I'm gonna have to start doing that again. Having found so many old nuggets in my shoebox made me realize how fun it can be.

Cheers

/MrsHjort

Day 4 - Portrait of a Gifted Teen

I love doing candid portraits whenever I can manage. With a big DSLR camera and an external flash it is hard to stay unnoticed haha. But occasionally someone is distracted or have drifter away in thought enough for me to catch them off guard.

I sometimes wish I could be invisible... the cloak in Harry Potter comes to mind. Man would I love one of those! Imagine what great candid portraits I would get! Especially of those loved ones who are uncomfortable in front of a camera...

Mr is one of those people. If I had a nickle for every "uncomfortable picture" I have of him I would have enough money to buy a brand new camera haha. It does not keep me from trying though. Sooner or later I manage to get him :)

/MrsHjort

Day 3 - Portrait of a Thoughtful Friend

Since the portraits are a series, I am aiming to make them look similar to each other. This means that I end up doing more or less the same things to them in post-ed. It's a bit mundane, but a good exercise, and it's still fun. Especially since I work with portrait of people that are dear to me. Editing them makes me smile.

I've always loved the portraits I got from this particular photo-shoot, but since the colorful sky was so beautiful I've never even thought of doing them in B&W before. The background looks great this way too though, don't you think?

Cheers

/MrsHjort

Day 2 - Portrait of a Sweet Girl

This is shaping up to be much more fun than I initially thought. I've never really enjoyed processing B&W before, but now I do! For this shot I started out from the Full Dynamic Smooth setting in the Nic Collection and tweaked it from there. I love how flexible things are with all those sliders, it's simply wonderful and it makes processing so much easier!

When I had gotten the contrasts the way I wanted them I added a slight burn effect along the edges and a discrete lens fallout. That gave me the B&W effect I wanted, but I ended up with some unwanted grain. After a bit of blurring and noise fixing I was back on track. Finally, I enhanced the eyes a bit. Not terribly much though, this sweet girl has amazing eyes, but a little dodging and burning brought them out even more (dodge the whites and reflections and burn around the outer edges of the iris using a soft brush). Done!

I may be bias, because I love this girl, but I think it ended up just beautiful, don't you?

/MrsHjort

Day 1 - Portrait of a Strong Woman

I didn't think I'd make it an other week, but I decided I'd at least give it a shot. So, this week I'll be focusing on portraits - something I don't do very often, as I'm not that comfortable with doing them. And, to make things even more unusual, I will be going with black and white portraits - I love colors, and for that reason I've never stepped into the realm of B&W if I didn't have to for some reason. Hopefully I'll learn to get more comfortable with it as I go haha. I'm still sticking to the Nic collection though, which is (thankfully) easing the process of editing B&W a lot! Finally, I will aim to do square crops - I don't do that very often either.

So here's to making it a really unusual week, hopefully it will be fun :D

Cheers

/MrsHjort

Day 7 - Summer Lilac

This final one is very surreal, but I didn't want to go with a natural look at all for this one, but rather a graphic poster-ish kind of thing. The bold colors almost makes it look like a negative, but it's not ;)

Thus ends my one week long post-ed challenge. It's been a fun ride, more relaxing that the usual 30-day challenges and more playful - since I got to play around with colors and light using new tools. A very welcome task after the long boring brown winter we've had, ugh! I've missed color so much! Thank you Kim for coming up with the idea and for running this for us.

Finally, congrats to all who played! It's been such a pleasure to see what you've all come up with each day. It's truly an inspiration! Also, thank you for all your thoughtful comments! It's so much fun to hear what you have to say and it's always helpful to see my work though your perspective. You all rock!

Thank you!

/MrsHjort

Day 6 - Peony

This is one of those shots that I've been saving for what seems like forever, but never found a use for. One of the reasons is that it's cliche, and therefore I wouldn't want to use it in the regular contests at Dagger Bay (or the like). And, when a cliche contest eventually arrived, this shot was long forgotten... but now it finally gets to see the light of day :).

Isn't that funny though? When you shoot something and think for yourself "I'll keep that one in mind for future use, it's perfect for this or that kind of contest" but then you totally forget? It happens constantly to me. But I guess it's only natural since my archive is now... let me see... it's storing 19 413 pictures!? No wonder stuff get lost! I guess I'll have to create some kind of new filing system for potential contest pictures haha.

/MrsHjort

Day 5 - Snowdrop

This picture was a though one to edit, I am still second guessing the processing I used. On one hand the white flower needs contrast to shine, and on the other the "contrasty" background may be a tad too much. I like the glowing foliage in the background and the golden quality it adds, though at the same time I am worried it takes the glory away from the flower, buuuut at the same time I like the overall impression of it all. Aaaargh! Maybe I'm overthinking this haha. After all, those dark areas are where they are supposed to be.

The main thing I like about this shot is the way that little bell-shaped flower is only just open. That's when Snowdrops are the most beautiful. I love the clean innocent elegance of them, don't you? It's a pity they only bloom once a year. But then again we wouldn't appreciate them as much if they were more generous would we?

Happy Spring to you all

/MrsHjort

Day 4 - Wood Squill

Here's an other little ugly duckling who got to grow into a swan. It was one of those shots that got pushed aside in favor of a better one, plus, it always bugged me that the center of the flower is't in focus. Processed this way it does not matter to me as much though - since the glow makes it an entirely different kind of shot. Enhancing the light like this makes it into a "mystical fairy-tale" type of shot, and that takes the pressure off the that little imperfection. Funny how a photo can change genre like this, just through the use of different post processing techniques - in this new context the blur actually works in its advantage.

I'm gonna have to stop trowing shot's like this away haha. If only I can get that perfectionist inside me to keep her finger off that delete button. A photo does not have to be technically perfect to be enjoyable. That's the lesson I relearned today :)

Cheers!

/MrsHjort

Day 3 - Laurentia

This little nugget of mine has been a neglected for far too long. I have always loved the raw material, but I've never been able to do it justice in post-ed before. The original is much more "contrasty" and green, and therefore, being one to go with natural looks, the green has always turned out too powerful for my taste when I tinkered with it before. Either that or too boring, too bland or too ordinary looking... Bah!

Thanks to Morporkian, a fellow Quartermaster at Dagger Bay, I've now got a fresh set of tools to play with. The full collection of Nik filters is free for everybody, and wow are they fun to play with. It helped me step outside my comfort zone to try new stuff, the way new software often does, and it is wonderful. Thank you Morp!

Anyway, this little dainty flower really needed a pastel surrounding to shine. Well not exactly pastel, but close enough - it needed a bit of contrast too or it would have disappeared. I'm so glad to have these new tools to play with :)

/MrsHjort

Day 2 - Dahlia

This is from last autumn. The shot was doomed to the shoebox when I saw it on my monitor and discovered that the focal length didn't quite cover the bee. Alas I had no other shot that did, so focus stacking was out. Thus I gave it up at the time, and went with an other shot for whatever I was shooting for that day. Photoshop sure can do some magic though, a couple of bee specific High Pass layers later and I'm satisfied to use it.

This shot made me think of Alice in Wonderland. Maybe it's because the composition looks similar to a drawing in the children's book I had when I was young. That made me want to use processing to make it look slightly unworldly, as fitting for a fantasy story. So off I went and did several layers of cross processing and then cut them together with different layers softly spreading out from the bottom one in the middle.

Now that I'm done it makes me think of the book even more :). I love the time travel you sometimes experience through photography! Don't you?

/MrsHjort

Day 1 - Tulips

Dagger Bay has just started running a Shoebox Challenge! Fun fun fun! If you're wondering, the main idea is to finally get around to processing old picture that haven't yet seen the light of day. Boy do I have a tonne of those haha!

For this challenge I'm going to focus on floral shots - I absolutely love doing them and as a consequence I have a million of them gathering dust on my hard drive.

This shot is actually three shots - they're focus stacked in order to make all three tulips crispy sharp. I shot them two years ago but never got around to finishing the work. It was too time consuming at the time and I didn't really need the shot anyway. Today I found them again, and I'm so glad I did!

I am also going to try to focus on processing techniques that I don't usually use - I tend to go for the natural look, but for this challenge I want to focus on bringing out light and colors in new ways. Time will tell if I'm successful.

Wish me luck!

/MrsHjort