Category Archives: Portraits

Technique Experiment

I used the same technique on these as I used on Maya’s photograph the other day. Both of these were processed in Nik Color Efex Pro, then brought back into Photoshop where I merged the Nik and original layers. From there I created a new copy layer to which I added the Gaussian blur filter. Using the erasure at 40%, I removed the blur from our faces and hair.  Then upping the strength of the eraser to 85%, I focused on removing more blur from the eyes to make them stand out.  Kinda fun.

You may recognize this photo of my daughter from the shoot I did in October.

This shot of me is a new one, just shot yesterday. More work on my portraiture lighting, I was going for a dramatic look. I think a darker background would have been better, but I was focusing on the lighting on my face more than anything and I was too lazy at the time to hang the backdrop.

Day 358 – Meaningful Day

I spent several hours today in downtown Reno at the 12th Annual Reno Firefighter’s Christmas Party for homeless and underprivileged kids.   It was my honor to serve as the Santa photographer.

Santa and Mrs. Claus (Rick & Laura Griffin)

We provided the kids with prints to take with them as a memento of the day.  Obviously I cannot post any of the photos with the kids, but here’s one of us with Santa that I shot later in the day.  The firefighter is in my Freethinkers group and asked some of us to volunteer. The two young woman took care of the printing, and I did the shooting. We worked out a system where I did about ten kids, pulled my card to give to them to download and print. In the meantime I’d do another ten on another card. They were able to keep up with the volume and we never had any long lines of people waiting for their prints.

Day 349 – Holiday Party

We held our company holiday party last night.  It’s a chance for us to dress up,  relax (and cut loose) and basically have a good time with our co-workers outside the constraints of work.  This is Delbert, who serves on the events committee with me. He and his wife, Lisa, were teammates with my husband and me on our company bowling league.  Unfortunately, that league was Del’s last hurrah at bowling since he managed to finally blow out his bad knee towards the end of the league. He hobbled through the next few weeks, and a couple of months later underwent surgery to fix it.

Del asked me to get a shot of him for his daughter and I happily obliged. He’s a super guy and I think his personality really comes out in this shot.

Susan is our receptionist extraordinaire, with more energy than I thought it possible for any human to have.

She and her husband sharing a moment on the dance floor.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get as many photos of the festivities as I had hoped. I thought I had extra AA batteries in my bag for my flash but they turned out to be AAAs (grrr). So when my flash gave up the ghost, my camera got put away and that was that for the night. Lesson learned!