Welcome to the 40th week of Shoot and Edit: Part 2. Click HERE for all the details and upcoming prompts/themes (also including previous editing tutorials). This week’s theme or prompt was to show us one “Leaves” SOOC shot (this was just a suggestion, you can show us any SOOC shot). Hopefully you linked up with Jill’s blog earlier this week.
This week, I’ve asked Misty, who blogs over at Through A Photographer’s Eyes (where she hosts a weekly photo contest linkup called Favorite Photo of the Week, a weekly tutorial called Tutorial Tuesday, a weekly feature called Sunday: Focus on the Savior and a weekly linkup for other photog blogs to meet each other called What’s Up Wednesday) to share a lesson with us. Please give Misty a warm welcome!
Hello, all! My name is Misty and I live in the beautiful city of San Diego, CA with my incredible husband of 4 1/2 yrs and my awesome 2 year old baby girl. I received Christ as my Savior when I was just a small child and each day of my life I strive to give Him the glory He deserves. My photo blog is just another way to tell people how much God means to me and to show others the beauty in His creation. Come on over any time and say hello! I’m always excited to guest post for people and after recently starting my own Tutorial Tuesday I was asked by Ashley to guest post a tutorial on her blog for the Shoot and Edit Photo Challenge. So here it goes.
CHOOSING THE SUBJECT
The theme this week for Shoot and Edit is “leaves”. With it being autumn and all, I didn’t want to go with any ordinary leaves. I had to find some colorful ones! Fall colors are hard to come by here in SoCal but I did find one lone tree across the street from where I live that had a few sprinkled on it.
SETTING UP THE SHOT
Obviously some of the leaves had fallen to the ground. After trying a few shots on eye level with the ground, the grass was proving to be too much of a distraction so I picked up the leaf by the stem and held it up facing the sun. Using my 18-55mm kit lens, I attached one of my macro filters (which are a great inexpensive alternative, btw, if like me you can’t afford a macro lens), got up close and personal and took a few shots.
SETTINGS
I shoot Manual/RAW which I highly suggest for everyone. I had my camera settings at 55mm, ISO 100, f/5.6 and SS 1/250. No, I don’t sit there and choose out these settings deliberately. I typically set my f-stop as low as it will go and then adjust my metering wheel until the lines have disappeared on my meter. In this case though I had to over-expose just a hair to give more light to my subject since I had a strong back light.
POST PROCESSING
I do all my editing in LR (lightroom). I typically use a preset or two but in this case I started by clicking on the General – Auto Tone preset that LR already has and then all I did was bump the clarity all the way, up the vibrance and contrast and decrease the dark tones just a hair. Yep, that was it! Backlighting makes for a pretty awesome photo all by itself.
WATERMARKING
To avoid stretching this post out too long, if you would like to see how I watermark my photos then check out the tutorial I just posted this week on how to do that.
Misty – thank you so much for sharing some insight into your life behind the lens. For your edit, I would love to see you continuing using the lessons we’ve covered in the past 39 weeks as well as apply today’s lesson or share something you’ve learned recently. Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest tutorial for Shoot and Edit, please let me know. I’d love to have you! I hope you all have a great Thursday and I look forward to seeing your edits. Next week’s theme is “Pumpkins.” Have a great Thursday!
By the way, don’t forget to add your edited photo to our good to WOW {EDIT} Flickr Group (for those of you that prefer to upload and visit that way). When adding your photos to the group pool, be sure to include the Week #, the Theme and EDIT in the description section. You may upload one photo per week. I also want to point out that we are all here to improve our editing skills. When offering constructive criticism (either on Flickr or within blog comment sections), be sure to point out at least one thing you really like about the edit before offering any advice for improvement.
