Summer Berries

Inspired by my own 4th of July Berry Session, I decided to once again pick up the camera after buying some berries in the store.  They're just so fun to photograph!  To change it up, I decided to add a little texture to these shots and I kinda like how they came out.  I may have to do a series like this for my kitchen!









For these I put either light blue or pale pink paper underneath for the background. The background colors were pretty subtle, but popped when I added texture to them.

Happy Friday!

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli

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Good to Wow - Laughter Edits

On Monday I posted my Straight Out of Camera Shots of Adi.  I found some fun shots of her laughing that I had previously overlooked and did some clean edits on them.  Mostly, I brightened them a little if needed, and ran Pioneer Woman's Boost action.  And I cropped them.  Here are my results and the before and afters.

I also cloned out part of her bra that was showing in that picture.

And lastly, Ashley offered up a picture she took for our creative interpretations.  I kept my edit on this pretty simple too, but I also ran MCP Mini Fusion action at about 50% on top of it.

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Good to Wow - Laughter

Jill and Ashley's "Good to Wow" prompt for the week is laughter.  Today we share our Straight Out Of Camera shots with Jill, and on Thursday we link up our edits with Ashley.

At first thought, I didn't think I had anything to show for this prompt.  Then I thought I'd go back through my last portrait session with Adi to see if I had any laughter shots that I had not yet edited of her.  Turns out I have quite a few.  So I'm grateful for the prompt this week because it made me take a second look at some pictures that I had previously overlooked.  I actually had so many cute shots of her cracking up, I had a hard time deciding which to post!

These are all completely unedited and uncropped, which is always hard for me to show! I always want to touch pictures up before anyone can see them! But here they are anyway!

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Catching Up

I've been a bad blogger lately.  I've just been a little uninspired and haven't shot too much.  I need to put something beautiful in front of me and shoot it for hours.  I'm itching for it! In the meantime, I found some pics from the last few weeks I haven't posted yet so I'm going to try to catch up on a few challenges.

As you know, if you've been following me for a while, I'm obsessed with sunset silhouette shots and jump shots! My lovely friends are always good sports and jump for me! Somehow I never managed to post this one and I thought it was beautiful.

Here's a lovely flower I came across the other day. This shot is completely straight out of camera. Not even cropped!

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Fitness Portraits with Francesca

Please go here and vote me, #4, Live, Love, Travel--just click the "like" button, thanks!

My lovely friend Francesca asked me if I could take some pictures of her while she was working out.  Personally, this is about the last time I'd ever want a camera pointed at me, but she just happens to look AMAZING when she works out!  I actually took these quite a while ago and never really got around to editing them.  The light in the room was so bad and made everything look yellow and it made everything a little challenging to edit.  But I finally got around to it.  This is quite different then any shoot I've done before so I'll give a few quick tips.

What I Learned
-I should've manually white balanced.  I think this would've helped offset the horrible fluorescent lights.
-We were lucky enough to be in a private gym where we could move equipment around.  I did my best to have her always facing the windows that had the most light coming through.  If we weren't able to move equipment, I don't know what I would've done!
-Fitness equipment can act as a prop! I wish I had done more of that.  I did a couple shots with weights but I think I could've incorporated equipment even more.
-I also liked the idea of getting shots of her doing interesting movements and exercises but it was difficult to do that and still get decent light and focus.
-I did think to ask her to bring different outfits and had her change part way through. I think this helped changed things up a bit.
-I think these all may have been better if she had been working out outside under natural light with prettier backgrounds, but I had to work with what I had!  I tried to clone out distracting wires and outlets on the wall here and there.

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