Early Morning Family photos At Muscatatuck Wild Life Refuge

So it was early in the morning and the weather was perfect!! No Really. It was perfect. It had been soooo hot the week before, even in the morning. But this special morning the temperature was in the high 60’s low 70’s. And you guys, I cannot say enough good things about this family. They are so sweet!! They drove out of their way to come and get their pictures done, and it was such a treat! Being from Missouri they trusted me with the location. They are the type of people that are just seem so laid back. Billie is a photographer as well, so that’s like a super honor for another photographer to trust you with their own family photos. Hope you enjoy these!

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One of my Favorite Lenses- Lensbaby Twist 60

The twist 60 is part of the Lensbaby series. Their website says: True to an 1840 design by Joseph Petzval, this lens reveals striking separation between subject and background. Twist 60 is a metal-bodied, non-tilting lens that mounts directly to your camera.

My Lensbaby Twist 60 is one of my favorite lenses to get me out of a creative slump.  It is a 60mm f/2.5 manual focus lens.  This is the most unique lens in my camera bag! It gives a twisty swirl around the edges of photographs.  It naturally gives a vignette when shooting with a wide-open aperture.  So, to me, the photograph has a very vintage feel when used. 

This lens utilizes a central focus. The swirl will be very prominent at wider apertures, but when you close down it is not nearly as noticeable.  It is best to use on a full frame camera, as the central focus point might be too wide on a crop sensor camera.

I love the lens flare that you can get with the twist 60.  It handles light so differently from my other lenses.  Sometimes you can get nice light leaks, or even a full ring of light flare.  

This lens is not equipped with auto focus, so you must manually set your aperture and focus. It is kind of difficult to use the manual focus. But it helps me to use my sensor in the camera to let me know when I have achieved focus.  This appears as a small dot in the bottom left hand corner of my viewfinder.  So, with some patience, perfect focus is achievable!  With quick moving kids it is really hard! I have to keep reminding my kiddos to SLOW DOWN! (extra bribery is always required, but always worth it, ha!!)         

Buy your own: here! And start creating beautiful and unique photos of your own!    

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How to do a Levitation Photo

A levitation photo can add a bit of magic to your repertoire! For me, a bit of fine art photography is a nice break from doing regular clean portraits.  This is how I started out doing photography! And it is fun to experiment with.  For this example, I went out early in the morning (which is just a terrible idea for a night person like myself) and took a photo rather quickly.  Since I knew what I wanted to do with this photo it was easy to set up.  I wanted to do a dream like image where I was sleeping and levitating. So, I set up my 3 chairs with my pillow on one end.  I used live view on my camera, set my focus and set the self-timer.  Then I took about 4 photos at a time. Here is my original photo with the chairs:

Then I took a photo of my pillow.  And then I took a photo of the scene without the chairs.  I made my basic edits in light room and cleaned up things like my shoes sitting off to the side.  Then I brought my three pictures into Photoshop.

I then used the picture without the chairs as my base.  I then selected myself and the chairs and copy and pasted on a new layer. 

Using a hard brush, I removed the chairs by painting black on a white mask for that layer. I was then stuck with the chair cutting into my pillow.  So, I took the pillow from the other picture, selected it and pasted it on a new layer. I then used this layer to cover up the black chair on the pillow.

At this point I needed to make the shadow underneath me.  Without the shadow I just looked weirdly lying on the ground.  This is where you need to take note of your light.  Is it soft or hard? Do you have a hard shadow or a soft one? Is there a multiple light source or just one?  As you can see in my picture with the chairs, I have a very soft faint shadow underneath me and I need to recreate that. So, I then made a duplicate layer of myself (without the chairs) and hit CTRL+M for the curves layer.  I blacked it out by pulling the highlights all the way down.  I then used gaussian blur to blur the shadow even more.  Then by using the short cut CTRL+T to transform (and simultaneously clicking the mouse on a corner square and holding down the CTRL key) I skewed the perspective of my shadow to flatten it a bit more.  I then placed it underneath my floating body and set my opacity to 45%.  (The 45% is just what I thought looked about right).  

At this point it is all artistic license. I enhanced the light to make it a bit hazier. I did this by adding a radial gradient layer. I increased the contrast. I added a texture from I bought from Jessica Drossin. Then I thought it looked a little too yellow and intense and I wanted to give it a more painterly T.C. Steele tone to it.   So I added a hue/saturation layer. 

I then thought it looked a little dark so I added a curves layer adjustment.  Two more texture layers from Jessica Drossin to add that painterly texture and feel. (Sometimes adding a texture can make an image come together).  Then I added another Hue/saturation layer to tone some of the yellow out.  Here is my final image:

If you want to see more fine art images, I highly recommend taking a look at Brooke Shaden.  She does some amazing work! Thanks for reading!