Okay, so this next one on the left… I was trying to do this look with my flash where you overpower the sun– kind of like the awesome photos that Esther Havens often takes in Africa and other places around the world. So, as I was just messing around with it, I said “Kyah… could you stand there and model, please?” So, this picture cracks me up. She is standing like a perfect little model while you see the shadow of her crazy babysitter in the foreground doing all kinds of crazy contortions with her photography equipment. Kyah, you are a patient little princess.

I had to put more than one. Could you not just EAT. HIM. UP.?

These two beautiful girls are going to be my flower girls, too. Aren’t they just going to be precious?

Love. Flowers. Sunshine. Rest. Play.

There is a park near the house we went on a walk through.

You’ve gotta be careful though– the alligators could get you. Even the ones on the signs bite. Yep, they are that fierce.

The landscape was unique. It was desolate– sand dunes and trees– but in a way that made it beautiful.

Self-portrait. I am freckly… geez! I never see my face like this!

The park has a natural freshwater lake in it, which is quite unusual, since it is right next to the ocean. Here is a panoramic I shot. If you have Photoshop, panos are a breeze! You take several shots (making sure to overlap the shots about 1/3 of the way, so the computer has some material to work with when it stitches it together). Then, you open the files in PS and go to File>Automate>Photomerge  and let the magic happen!

If you click on it, you can see it bigger.. in all its glory

I sent Mom and Dad a special Easter present. What could it be?

Ooooh… its a Lagomarcino’s dark chocolate Easter egg! Filled with 20 assorted chocolates!

Dear old Dad. He’s happy about the chocolate.

Speaking of Easter– Mom decided that we should take a photo in our “Easter clothes” after church. Here we are!

But, I’ll have you know, the above shot didn’t just happen. I had to get my gear set up and ready to go… so while I was getting everything ready and testing the lighting, my parents were “modeling” (sometimes knowingly and sometimes not so knowingly.) These pictures were too hilarious not to post!! (I can do this. They are my parents

These next few pictures are just to show you a fun little trick that my friend Amy Turner taught me. The room below was completely dark. The photo was taken at ISO 400, f10 at 24mm with a 30 second exposure. I then walked around in the room, flash in hand, and hit the “test” button (making the flash fire) at different places in the room. Amazing, huh?

This next one is kinda awesome. Look at the shadows on the walls– its me! I was walking around the room firing the flash, just like in the last picture. You can’t see me since the exposure is so long, but the flash firing in a smaller space made a shadow on the wall that showed up!

Since I switched to a full-frame camera, my lenses capture scenes 1.6 times wider– so I love seeing how much of a scene I can now capture at 24mm! It feels soooo much wider! Here is Dad in his study. This was on a tripod with a 1.3 second exposure, which is why Dad is blurred.

This post doesn’t look very “Destin-ish,” does it? I promise we went to the beach, ate lots of seafood, fished, rode jet skis and the boat, hung out with the dolphins etc! Maybe I’ll put up some pics from my point and shoot once I get them uploaded.

And then the rest of the images are from recent gatherings of the Avenue: one a fundraising event, and one a regular church meeting– where we met in Old Louisville Coffee shop. Both environments were so fun to photograph in– full of personality and color! I realized in my last post about the Avenue, I didn’t really show too many people– which is really what the church is! So here are a few more images.

Fundraising event at The Block.

Peyton is actually dancing on stage in her light up shoes again– can you see her?

Gotta love The Harp.

Peyton and my little boyfriend, Henry. Quickly becoming two of my favorite kids ever.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that you should be a part of The Avenue. That is all.

]]> http://www.jgrace.net/the-avenue-old-louisville/feed/ 0 http://www.jgrace.net/spring-from-winter-desktop-image/ http://www.jgrace.net/spring-from-winter-desktop-image/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:06:03 +0000 JGrace http://www.jgrace.net/?p=1169 What a productive morning I’ve had! I had Lee text me early in the morning to wake me up– so I got going with Plyometrics (I hate it but I love it!) and I’ve been doing chores around the house and re-processing some photos I wasn’t too happy with. I reprocessed this pic and thought it was just begging for a quote!

If you click on the image it will take you to a larger file that you can use as your desktop image if you’d like!

It poses a bit of a challenge, however, to take family photos when you need to be *in* the family photos. So, all the photos that I am in either Lee or my mom had to take for us. Usually I would set up a shot, get everything fixed in the camera, tell Lee what I was envisioning for the shot, and have him click it. However, it was really hard for me to know how to arrange people when I had to stick myself in the mix as well.

I made everybody get *under* the boardwalk for individual/couple shots. It was the only shade around that I could find! They were great sports and climbed on under!

Isn’t my brother so cute??

This is our attempt at a serious, sassy family pic. Pretty ridiculous.

It’s kinda next to impossible to get *everybody* acting normal at the same time. We are only halfway there in the pic below.

Oh, Amy Rebecca.

My siblings. I love them.

This is what I mean about the group arranging thing. Eeeeh… awkward.

We are walking and swinging our hands. This prolly looks kinda funny if you don’t know that. Ha.

The Outtakes: Okay, because this is my family, I can do this. We are all pretty ridiculous, and this is reflected in some of the “outtakes” that were captured.

So, the day we shot… I thought the sun was going to be perfect. It was cloudy and was being diffused nicely. And then, as soon as we got ready to shoot, it came out again. Sun + the glare off the white sand= not ideal for pictures. It was reaaallly bright. Check out our faces in the next few pics (especially my sister– haha!)

I have no excuse for the ugly face. I dunno.

This next series is totally my dad being my dad… and my mom saying “Bob, quit it!”

I promise you, Adam’s eyes are probably crossed. This is his standard “make a face” face.

Below is the clock tower on the University of Louisville campus, and on the right, a beautiful church in the area.

Does that picture on the right not look exactly like a face?!

The guys I was meeting with for this photoshoot told me they were envisioning vintage imagery with little pops of color… kind of like the Pleasantville posters. I, however, was not a big fan of that idea. They were saying “Yeah, Jess, what is that called?” And I said– “Cheap photographic trick??” But, alas, I caved. I did a series of photos that all have a pop of green in them. These, to me, symbolize new life coming up from the old. We, as a part of The Louisville Project hope to bring revitalization to the neighborhood through the power of the gospel of Jesus.

Here’s one example of the amazing architecture down there. This is a famous mansion on St. James Court. Can you imagine living there back in the 1800′s??

So, the next time you are out shooting pics in an area, take time to see the interesting textures around you and take a pic of them to use in your image editing. I think it is especially neat to overlay a texture from that same area onto a pic. Its as if you are infusing a bit more of the spirit of the place onto the photo or something.  As I was shooting around Old Louisville I snapped this one:

You can click on the picture above and then save it to try on your own images! Or, another great source to find free texture files on the web is Grunge Textures. If you have some cash to drop, see Jesh de Rox’s incredible fine art textures, or these by my friend’s husband, an awesome photographer, Matt Nicolosi. Of course, there are also the Totally Rad textures from the Boutwells. You MUST get the Totally Rad actions if you’ve not… I process nearly every image on this blog using something they’ve made.

Basic Texture Layer Tutorial:

Here’s what you do in Photoshop–

1. Open your photo you want to apply texture to

2. Open the texture file

3. Go to the layers palette and drag the layer texture over onto your photo. Then you will see the texture on top of your photo. Make sure they are lined up so your texture covers the whole photo (this may involve changing the size of the texture layer–(hit Cmd- T to transform the layer size)

4. Set the layer type of the texture layer to Overlay (this is in the layers palette… it says “Normal” until you change in)

5. Change the opacity of the texture level until you like what you see!

6. Flatten and Save!

If you try this tutorial out– leave us a link in the comments so we can see your newly textured image!

]]> http://www.jgrace.net/adding-texture-to-your-photos/feed/ 0 http://www.jgrace.net/focusing-on-the-details/ http://www.jgrace.net/focusing-on-the-details/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:06:08 +0000 JGrace http://www.jgrace.net/?p=883 So, as my boyfriend was equipped with his newfound knowledge of the basics of photography, I would ask him little quiz questions as we were strolling along. I said- okay… so you are at f2.8 (the lowest that lens goes) and your shutter speed is 1/50*… and your photo is still underexposed– what do you do? He thought about it a minute and answered “Raise the ISO?” I said “Yes! You are so smart!” and beamed with pride at my new little student. (*I had told him that 1/60 was usually about the slowest shutter speed that is very safe when you are handholding, as a very general rule of thumb.)

So, it was on to his next assignment. I said… you see these leaves? I said I want you to focus on *these* leaves… and none of the others, but I don’t want them in the middle of the shot.

And he did it!

So, I was teaching him a couple of different, basic things.

1) The rule of thirds– For some reason, things are aesthetically pleasing to the eye when they sit at the intersection of a photo that is divided in thirds. So, when composing a photo, you should think of a grid like this in your head. One of the places where the arrows point should be the focal point of your photo

So, at least he didn’t put it smack in the middle of the frame. I told him that I’d recently heard that Hitler was a painter, but he was always criticized for putting his subject smack dab in the middle of the pictures. Let’s see if we can find an example, internets.

I found some. Interesting.

They are a bit middle-ish.

So, that was the first thing Lee (and not Hitler) learned– for an interesting composition, most of the time, it will be aesthetically pleasing if you remember the rule of thirds.

**feel free to skip the jibber jabber below if you are not a photographer. Otherwise, you might want to punch me in the eye and tell me to stop talking. And well… that’s just not pleasant for any of us… *

2) Focusing- I hope that somewhere, this helps just one photographer.

You have to realize, internets, that I’ve had nobody to teach me the fundamentals of photography. Just a bunch of blogs and a couple books, and of course, my camera manual. (Okay, let’s be honest. I didn’t actually *read* the manual…) So, when I got my Rebel xti I first began by putting the dial on the little green square (Automatic) and started snapping away… elated at the quality of photos it could produce. Once I graduated to shooting in Manual mode, I had to figure out this focusing thing. I first began in Automatic Focus with all 9 of the focus points selected. When your camera is set this way, your camera chooses what it thinks you want to focus on and picks those things. But sometimes (like in the above leaf picture) it would NOT have chosen the leaves I wanted.

And so, I moved onto phase three– I started adjusting my focal point. I would move the focal point to the one on the left (if I wanted the above shot) and then would switch it to the one on the right if I wanted to compose my shot with the subject on the right of the frame. Switching the focal point for every shot got real old real fast. But I didn’t know what else to do! Until I went to a photography workshop my buddy Stephen Seward had in St. Louis. He was incredibly generous to donate his time for a good cause, and answered a bunch of my amateur questions.

He rocked my world with this (totally duh!) trick. I leave my focal point on just the center dot. You focus on what you want focused on (if it is a person, it is the eyes) with your button only pressed down halfway. Then, without lifting up your finger you recompose your shot and then press the button the rest of the way! Genius!

Like I said, this is something that hopefully you are saying *duh* about… but it was such an eye opener for me that I thought maybe it might help somebody just starting out.

I processed the leaf pic, shot by my uber-cute boyfriend, a couple of different ways. Which do you prefer? I think I’m diggin the color one. Isn’t the bokeh from the twigs behind just so, so beautiful?