Society of Stampaholics

MIA but Still Amongst the Living!

In case anyone was wondering about my whereabouts, I'm still alive.

I know I'm still alive because I see no angels anywhere. Nor are they offering me the much-deserved glass of wine I am fully expecting to be given upon admittance into Heaven. (That would be grape juice for all you Baptists out there.) And since I'm also not being poked with a pitchfork by some twit in a furnace, I must deduce that I am definitely still here on Earth.

Although it has been hellishly hot over the past two weeks....

I've not been around because I committed an act so incredibly stupid that I ought to be committed, period. I share this experience with you on the off chance that at least one of you may also be COMPLETELY NUTS and be contemplating doing the exact same thing as I did. So listen up, you Crazy Woman (whoever you are):

DO NOT SPEND YOUR PRECIOUS ONE WEEK OF DESPERATELY NEEDED VACATION TO TAKE A SEMESTER-IN-A-WEEK DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY COURSE BECAUSE YOUR HUSBAND GETS FREE CLASSES FOR FAMILY MEMBERS AS PART OF HIS EMPLOYMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY DOWN THE STREET!

It will not be fun.

It will be stressful.

Much more stressful than your job (if that's possible). It will be hot and miserable and occur during the summer's hottest heat wave, and your teacher will make you go outside and take pictures because interior lighting is not allowed. You will be forced to wrestle with a tripod that is an instrument of torture - possibly even designed by Satan himself - and you will not be allowed to use it to beat your teacher - even though she richly deserves a beating because she is a rude, mentally-deranged "artiste" who thinks it's okay to change the assignments and syllabus three times a day AND hollers at you as if you were a red-headed stepchild.

(I have been both an "artiste" and a college professor, and I'm telling you right now, there are a lot of posers out there. Tenure is pure poison for these people - and you can always tell just how truly talentless they are by how many times they let you know they have tenure and then mention how they can do anything they want now.)

You'll end up getting one of those losers because they're the only ones unethical enough to make the claim that you can learn in one week what you quickly come to realize requires a whole semester. But, hey! She got her paycheck, and that's all that matters, right?

On the bright side, I can say that you will finally understand the mysterious trinity of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. And, as a student, you'll get to finally upgrade from the world of Photoshop Elements and purchase Photoshop Extended CS5 for $149.00 instead of $999.00. (It is these perks that saved my teacher's life as I would otherwise surely have taken her down with that wretched tripod.)

And enjoyed doing it, I might add.

Seriously, I have never, EVER had a worse instructor or a more miserable excuse for a class. However, I'm over it now. Despite my little tirade here. (I had to fill y'all in, didn't I?)

I also suffered some major dehydration while out shooting at some damn apple farm she made us all go to, and I ended up pulling the calf muscles in my right leg - I was limping like a pirate with a bad peg leg from Wednesday to Sunday. On Friday, after the class ended, I went home ready to celebrate and finally get to make some cards... and proceeded to have a massive sinus episode that kept me in my bed for the rest of the weekend. The only thing that brought me out from under the covers was my responsibility to Paula's blog hop (which was a success, BTW - thank you, everyone)!

I spent all of last week trying to recover from my "vacation."

And trying to catch up at my job. Can you believe they actually changed the name of our group while I was gone?! We used to be the project's field deployment PMO and now we're totally revamped and are calling ourselves the Business Support Something Or Other.

This is like going to visit your father and finding somebody else living in his house. (Where did he go? WHEN did he go? Did he go to the Final Roundup in the Sky? Did he leave a forwarding address?) 

Very disorienting and not just a little flabbergasting, I can tell you.

(I speak from experience. The year was 1992 and I didn't send my rotten Daddy a Christmas present that year I was so ticked. Well. That and I didn't have an address.) 

Despite the past two weeks, I'm feeling optimistic. Gigi's school starts in a fortnight - which means my life will be getting much better. She's been here with me all this summer, and it's been very trying for both of us. She, understandably, wants me to play with her, entertain her, take her places. While I wish I could do these things, I work from home, so I can't very well just stop analyzing data to go have a tea party. But she persists and fights for my attention anyway. Far too often I've had to wait until she's gone to bed so I can go back to work to make sure they're getting a true 40 hours. It's been rough and frustrating, and given the whole spinal issue this spring, I've had practically no time at all to create anything.

Good grief - do I need some cheese to go with that whine or what?!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, that's where I've been and what I've done.

The coming week will bring you more posts with pictures of the fabulous get-well cards I received because...

I AIN'T DEAD YET!!!

;~D

Tutorial on Some Photo Fixes (DO try this at Home!)

This may or may not be of use to many of you, but just in case....

Agata commented on an earlier post, asking me what I meant about cropping and correcting the exposure and color cast of a photo I took. Now the photo in question was truly unfortunate, but after I put it through a very few paces in Photoshop Elements 8.0, the thing makes me look like I'm an awesome photographer.

I feel it's my civic duty to sacrifice any sort of reputation I may have as a gifted photographer so that others may learn. (hee-hee!)

Don't ever say I never did anything for you!

For those of you who don't have Photoshop Elements, you can get similar photo editing programs online FOR FREE. Whereas they don't have all the options as PE 8, they'll make you very happy until you're ready to make the leap to a more extravagant program. Picasa is excellent.

Also, there are a ton of photo-editing tutorials out there - any google search will give you more hits than you'll know what to do with. Lisa Spangler was doing some nice ones on her blog, but she hasn't done any in awhile - probably because of her leg surgery and getting ready for the 2010 Hero Arts catalog release and CHA. Now that she's on the mend and the other things are over, she'll probably start again. So check her blog regularly. (Actually, I just went there to get the address for the link, and she's back at it - bonus for us!!!) 

However, I already created this little tutorial, so I'm posting it, by cracky!

Okay, here's the photo in question.

By several accounts, I am nothing short of brilliant for having captured this little rodent as he quivered on my my porch rail.

As much as I hate to correct this sort of thinking, I must confess that it is my photo editing software that deserves 90% of the glory here. I took the original photograph, yes, but let's see what you think about it in its original, un-edited state:

Whoa! What a disaster, eh?

To be fair it's all the squirrel's fault.

Seriously!

He refused to let me open the door so I could get a decent shot of him - that dark edge you see along the right side is an extreme close-up of the door's frame. The storm door is open less than 3", and I thrust as much of my camera through as I could, but it wasn't enough to get an unblemished shot of the squirrel. In my pre-PE days, this would have been a discarded picture, but now I have magic at my fingertips!

The first thing I did was crop the photo using the rule of thirds.

The rule of thirds says that "most designs can be made more interesting by visually dividing the page into thirds vertically and/or horizontally and placing the most important elements within those thirds."

For this picture, the first thing I had to do was determine how much of this picture was even usable - clearly the whole right edge had to go, right? So here it is without the offending right side:

Now we need to crop the photo to get the best parts on those intersections - and we're going to do it by imagining a tic-tac-toe grid - with each square being the exact same size - lying over my picture. Here's what you might get at first:

I didn't draw my grid over the whole picture, because the only part that's worth looking at is the squirrel. So I'm going to ditch all the rest and concentrate on zooming into the good stuff! Now the problem with this grid at present is that it's very close to being a perfect square - and photos are usually presented as rectangles: 4" x 6" or 5" x 7", etc. So I decided to play around with the crop tool in PE by restricting it to a 5" x 7" shape and then tried different placements - all while mentally imagining my now-elongated grid on top of the subject.

The squirrel's eye is the focal point of the photo, and I needed it to fall on one of those four intersections. After playing around with the crop, this was the best intersection placement.

I eventually ended up with this:

 

And here it is without the grid:

One thing I should note here is that my camera was on its highest quality setting, (meaning it was using as as many pixels as possible) and I took the picture using the MICRO function - which I had pushed to the max as I was at least 12' away from the squirrel. Had the camera been on a lower quality setting, the number of pixels would have been much smaller. The fewer the pixels, the more distorted the image becomes as you attempt to blow it up. A crop this tight requires a substantial amount of magnification and would have resulted in a muddy stew of pixels had I used a lower setting.

So now that we have our picture cropped to reveal it at its best, we need to do something about the exposure. We have a lot of glare off the white snow and the squirrel was in shadow. The flash wouldn't have helped matters because there was over six feet between me and my subject - so the light wouldn't have reached him. (Besides which, the squirrel would have raced off when the flash activated - leaving me with nothing but his blurry backside when the shutter finally released.)

There are a variety of ways to correct an exposure problem. The quickest way I know is to go to the toolbar and select  ENHANCE > ADJUST LIGHTING > LEVELS. This opens up a dialogue box and you push sliders around until you're happy with the result (you can see the changes as you play around). However, when you have a very stark contrast of dark to light - like we have here - pushing sliders in the LEVELS box ain't gonna cut it!

So now we try ENHANCE > ADJUST LIGHTING > SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS. This opens up a new dialogue box (with more slider) and simultaneously applies itself to your picture. As luck would have it, this is what it did to my picture before I even touched a single slider:

DANG!

He's looking pretty good!

Just to give you an idea of how crazy you can go with this feature, here's a picture where I pushed all three sliders to 100%:

Of course, this is waaaay too extreme, but I wanted you to see how powerful this feature is. 

I decided to lighten the picture a little bit more by sliding the Lighten Shadows lever to the left a little bit more:

Now it's time to determine if we have any sort of color cast. A color cast is "a tint of a particular color, usually unwanted, which affects the whole of a photographic image evenly." I tend to see it manifest itself mainly as a dingy, yellow cast - kind of like what movie stars' teeth looked like BEFORE teeth whitening came along about ten years ago.

Again, this is a simple fix. ENHANCE > ADJUST COLOR > REMOVE COLOR CAST. Your cursor turns into a little eyedropper that you use to select a portion of your picture that is supposed to be white. It then re-samples the image to take away the color cast.

Here's an example from a card I made awhile back. The image on the left has a color cast. The same image on the right has the color cast removed:

There actually wasn't that much of a color cast to be removed from my squirrel, but here's what it looked like after it was removed:

Okay - one last thing to do. I want to sharpen this image a little bit because it seems a wee bit blurry. I will use the Unsharp Mask. (I know that sounds totally backward, but it's a throwback to graphics before the dawn of computers.) You have to be careful with the Unsharp Mask - a little goes a loooooooooong way. This time the path is: ENHANCE > UNSHARP MASK. A dialogue box opens and you get to play with sliders again - as you move them around, you can see how it's affecting your picture. When you like what you see, you click on the OKAY button and you're good to go.

And here it is:

And there you have it!

I hope that answers your question, Agata!

And although it took forever to read this very long post, the actual fixes on the photo took about five minutes. So go forth and try these tricks yourself.  There's no telling what kind of magic you'll work on photos you cast aside!

Project 365 - Feeling a Little Squirrelly

I woke up this morning to find it had snowed another two inches while we slept. This, alone, wouldn't be too bad, but it didn't stop there. All day long it has snowed - fairly quickly in the morning and slowing down as the day passed - but never stopping.

I've been trapped inside, amusing myself occasionally by watching a fat little squirrel rifle through my garbage can. I decided to try to get some shots of him, but that meant I had to open the front door and stick my head and arm and camera out - which spooks squirrels, generally. However, I had some popcorn from yesterday's movie, so I tossed a few handfuls onto the porch and tried to entice him to eat some while I stood in the open door.

He was having none of it.

Oh, he came close, but the minute I got the door open far enough to stick my camera out, he scampered out of my sight lines.

The little cousin of a rat!

I did manage to capture him on the post, and then, later, I leaned out the dining room window and snapped him high up in the tree. My favorite, though, was his descent from the tree to retrieve the popcorn he dropped. The look on his face just goes to show that squirrels aren't exactly thrilled by falling snow when there's popcorn involved.

Cropped with adjusted exposure levels so his little face wasn't in shadows.

Cropped with adjusted exposure levels. This is why I love my camera's twisting body - I could never have gotten this shot with a stationary lens.

Cropped with a very small exposure adjustment.

(You know, I don't think I've ever seen a squirrel with its eyes shut. Well... not one that was breathing, anyway. He looks like he just woke up and is groping for his coffee.)

I know there's only supposed to be one photo per day, but the Photo Police will just have to get over it.

Project 365 - Bill & Gigi Watching a Movie

I found them in the bedroom watching Big Fat Liar for the 168th time....

That man is a saint.

Here's the original photo:

And here's a crop:

I don't know which one is "better."

(I want these Project 365 pictures to be posted on the date I took them, if you're wondering why they didn't show up on the actual date of the 12th.)

Project 365 - Inside Bill's Glass

Hey, this whole picture-a-day thing has already taught me something: photographing little stuff is very interesting to me - I like to capture micro-moments!

Tonight it was getting rather late and I still hadn't taken my picture for today. I skulked around our dining room table - which is a disaster. (Spouse's oil painting activity is dominating one end of it, there's all kinds of daily debris in the center, and then at the closest end, there's this little spot where we actually eat.)

I took a few shots of a nice little Modern American Family still life: an ink cartridge spilling out of an Office Depot bag, the pepper shaker, a Wendy's kid's meal toy, and a roll of paper towel (yeah, we're real formal around here). 

And then I noticed Spouse's drink glass.

A nice, contained environment.

With no mess.

And that's when I learned that microcosms are my friends!

I didn't use a flash (the overhead light provided the illumination), but I played around with the cropping and corrected the exposure in Photoshop Elements.

In response to the comments people left about the reinker tool wheel....

Use your 40% off coupons and get these inker tools for about $3 - and it's worth the persistence, because once you don't have to swap out your foam pads... well, it's the difference between using colored pencils alone and using colored pencils with Gamsol.

The holder is the Inkssentials Craft Spinner made by Ranger, and you can get it in a variety of places - including JoAnn's online here. It costs $19.99 - use a 40% off coupon, and it comes down to $12.00

Alice, the wall behind is sponge painted. It's a work in progress - you can see pictures of it here. The wall is sponged because the walls were never properly finished.

And a little insight into how I "see" the world: my camera is a Nikon Coolpix S10 and has a body that rotates 180 degrees - which means I often look at things while holding my camera at my waist, and turning the lens up or down. (This is very handy as I'm too lazy to crawl around on the floor and point my camera upward!)

Thanks for looking!

Lisa Spangler's Scribble This! Photography Challenge #2

I missed Lisa's first challenge (although I intend to go back and do it as it was about how to set your camera's white balance).

But I finished her second challenge lickety-split!

These are very nice challenges because they are actually photography tutorials! (That Lisa is so smart - she's tricking us into learning!)

I use Photoshop Elements all the time to get rid of the "gray blahs" and other poor-exposure issues, so I wasn't sure if I'd learn anything new, but I did, so I'm really pleased I did it! I encourage y'all to head on over there and read what she has to say. And even if you don't have any photo editing software, she's got a link to a FREE program that she says is no slouch - so DO hop on over, get some free software, and commence to save your photographic "goners"!

I decided to use a photo of a card I made for my minister because it had a healthy amount of white on it and that photo really stank. I took it in the late afternoon, and, as you can see below, what a STINKER!!!

Isn't that a murky bit of yuck? It's got such an overload of grey, it's heading into the world of purple, for goodness sake!

Now after two very quick tweaks in PE:

It's still not the best photo in the world, (I used the flash, I fear) but now it looks presentable! NOW you can actually use this photo. (I have to admit that there are other things I can do to it that will continue it's journey of improvement, but those things lie outside the scope of this challenge.)

So go try it!!!

You can visit Lisa's challenge here.