Friday Finds: Black & White

Happy Friday everyone! I can hardly believe another week is at an end!

This week’s photographic topic was Black and White and the Flickr Group received a whopping 145 submissions this week! It’s by far the most submissions yet and I cannot explain how painstaking it was to select just 18 photos to highlight. Starting this week, I’m also including a short blurb next to each shot explaining something I like about it, how it makes me feel or why I chose it. I hope you enjoy the Black & White Gallery, but please do scroll down to the end of this post and enjoy as many of the submissions as possible. They are all unique and breathtaking.

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Black and White Conversion and Retouching

It took me a while, but I had a lot of fun editing the photos taken at Noah’s birthday party. I really appreciate all the feedback you’ve given me on some of my before and after shots lately. I truly appreciate your honesty! I think the consensus is that I’ve been going overboard a bit. Also, I’ve learned that just as with editing the written word, editing photographs is best when you have another set of eyes (or twelve) taking a look at your work and providing feedback. It’s very beneficial before publishing.

Mark took a photo of his brother, sister in law and niece sitting on our couch. Due to the window behind the couch, the exposure wasn’t too great and the photo was very noisy. I tried salvaging the entire photo, but Whitney and her dog Bert were the most interesting part, so I cropped around her. The problem was that it was still quite underexposed and horribly noisy! I did what I do with most noisy and oddly exposed photos I want to save: I converted it to black and white. Specifically, I used Pioneer Woman’s B&W action. My old method of greyscale conversion was to use the channel mixer to tweak each color until it looked its best. Since I have probably 20-30 B&W actions I’ve long since stopped manually converting them. Even with all the B&W conversion options, I usually end up going back to PW’s B&W. The light and soft light layers make the results very customizable.

I reduced the noise several times during the course of editing, through Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise and used Coffee Shop’s Baby Powder Room to smooth and lighten her skin. There are about 70 CoffeeShop Actions and I haven’t played around with many of them except the retouching ones: Baby Powder Room, Perfect Portrait and Glamour Glow specifically. They are all powerful tools with many different options to retouch portraits. The skin smoothing tools are almost like magic!

I do have a couple of actions I’ve paid for which have the same or similar retouching capabilities as Rita’s CoffeeShop actions. I’ve used them and honestly, I cannot tell the difference! So before you shell out $80 or more on actions, check out what Rita is offering for free!.

Overall, I am really happy with this conversion. I’m not sure how it would look printed large since the resolution was shot to hell with the crop, but I think it would make a cute 4×6!

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Kaleidoscope B&W Experimentation [153/365]

More experimenting tonight with Kaleidoscope textures. I promise, I’m getting it out of my system and will not be using them so heavily in all my pictures from now on.

All Photos Taken Today

Click a photo to bring a larger version up in a lightbox, then navigate through them all.

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A Picture Kind of Day

Today started out well, as most Sundays do when it’s my turn to sleep in. I woke around 10am and Noah was already down for a nap, just moments earlier. Mark, Elias and coffee were waiting for me out in the main part of the house.

I quickly discovered I left out the mug I got Mark for Father’s Day when he thanked me for it. I am so upset at myself! I took it out of its hiding place to show my mom last night and then I forgot to put it back. The mug is full of photos of Mark and the boys and one photo of the two of us. (I don’t think we have any photos with all four of us.) I was so excited to give it to him for Father’s Day and I didn’t even get to see his face when he found it! I cried a little bit, how could I not?

Before long we all headed outside. It was already close to seven million degrees out there and it wasn’t even noon yet! Elias helped Mark water the plants, which is one of his favorite things to do since he gets to hold water or maybe the hose, if he’s lucky. Since it was so hot out, we decided to get Elias’ swim trunks on and he and Mark took turns squirting each other with the hose.

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Running a Site as a Project Management Exercise. (And the contents of my purse.)

Despite the lack of response to my heartfelt entry the other day, I am super excited to actually have a personal project once again! Since launching this site, I’ve been spending lots more time with the laptop and staying up later too. I am concerned that maintaining a site will once again take over my life and deplete the amount of quality time I spend with my family. Elias and Noah are at great ages where they will usually play quite happily in the playroom for up to an hour at a time. If there was a way to gate off the room, it would probably be more than that! I can sit on the arm chair in the corner and plug away. It’s not without interruption and I do interact with the kids during this time, but it’s mostly free play and up to them to entertain themselves. While I think that’s great in moderation, it’s not great if that’s the only way I spend time with them. So yeah, I don’t want this project to take over my life.

I feel it’s important to tackle this site from a project management viewpoint because: A) I really like project management and think I’m good at it, B) having clearly defined and achievable goals makes this more official than just another girl starting another personal photography website and C) if I treat and manage this site as a project I’ll be able to put it on my resume.

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