Portrait Session with Jake and Brooke

These are the final pics I'm sharing (probably!) of my shoot with 3-year-old Jake and his 2-year-old sister, Brooke.

And I think they're my favorites.  I just love her little princess dress and his little hat.

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That last one of Brooke on the right is my favorite :)

Come back Tuesday for Tips & Pics to see some editing before and afters of these shots!

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Tuesday Tips & Pics - Expanding Your Canvas

Welcome to Tips & Pics! My tip today is how to expand your canvas to change a vertical picture to a horizontal picture.

I was editing pictures from my session with 2-Year-Old Brooke and I realized that the vast majority of the pictures were vertical.  I forget sometimes to shoot horizontally because I like to fill my frame--but negative space can work so well!  So I started with this picture of Brooke:

First, I decided to put in black and white, because all my pictures of her were starting to look the same!




Then I went to Image-->Canvas Size. I hit the middle right arrow, to anchor my image to the right side and I expanded my width to 6500 pixels.



Then I used the clone stamp to start filling in the white space. But first, I duplicated my layer. I always do my cloning on a duplicated layer. And then I can create a layer mask, that way if I mess up my cloning I can paint in black on my layer mask to erase my mistake. It was a bit of a painstaking process, because I you can see there wasn't a lot of background to work with! But once I got a little bit of it going, it was easy to keep copying it to finish.



Once it was all filled in I darkened it a little and added a touch of texture to help my cloning blend better (and used a layer mask to remove the texture from Brooke.) This was my result:




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It's a helpful trick to know how to do, but the time it takes to get it right reminds me of the importance of getting it right IN camera first! I need to remind myself to take more horizontal shots!

What have you been shooting?

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Portrait Session with 2-Year-Old Brooke

Last week I posted a session with 3-Year-Old Jake. Here are some shots I got of his little sister, barely 1 year younger! As I mentioned with Jake, this was a difficult age to shoot, and Brooke was about 10 times more difficult than Jake! She was an adorable little ball of energy that would just not sit still for the camera! I was actually worried after that I didn't get a single shot in focus, but luckily I managed to get a few!



Next week I'll post some of them together and the last couple of them by themselves, which happen to be my favorites!

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Orange and Mascarpone Creme Brulee

I confess. I found and made this recipe for 2 reasons and 2 reasons only. 1, we had leftover mascarpone cheese we didn't know what to do with, and 2, it sounded like it would be pretty and I wanted to take pictures of it!

Ingredients
-1 Cup Heavy Cream                                      -3 Egg Yolks
-1/4 Cup Mascarpone Cheese                         -1/8 Cup Brown Sugar, solidly packed plus 2-4 tablespoons
-1 tsp Vanilla extract                                         brown or white sugar for the topping
-The Zest of 1 Orange                                     -3 shallow ramekins, or 2 deep ones

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
Put cream, mascarpone, and vanilla in a pan and heat until almost boiling. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, whisk together egg yolks, sugar, and orange zest until fluffy.  Slowly add the hot cream mixture to the yolks, constantly whisking.  Pour mixture into ramekins.
Bake for 30 minutes, but check after 20 minutes to ensure you don't overcook them.  The should just set, but still be a little wobbly.  Some like to set their ramekins in a large roasting pan with enough water to come up the sides of the ramekins before baking.  Refrigerate for at least 1 hour, then cover the tops with sugar and use a blow torch or a very hot broiler to caramelize the top.  Top with orange slice--we used blood oranges.















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By the time we finished making these the sun was almost gone! I went into panic mode because the whole reason I wanted to make these was to photograph them! When they were done, all light was gone from the house! I had to take my little shooting platform outside and find an area of yard that was still getting a scrap of sunset sunlight on it! I also had to use a little bit of a higher ISO than I generally prefer and was super rushed trying to get these pics! I had literally about 5 minutes before light would be gone completely! But considering the circumstances, I think they came out ok! Also, I really wanted to crack into and take a picture with a spoon showing the custard, but we had decided to actually serve them after dinner that night and I don't think anyone would've liked being serve a Creme Brulee with a bite missing!

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