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Portraits

Bannack

Reflectors

Flexible Edits

Flora &Fauna

Color Study

Perspective of 12

Adobe Camera Raw

Lightroom

Enhancements

HDR

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Portrait photography to me is perhaps one of the most creative forms of photography. With portraits I feel like I am challenged to be creative in order to find the best way to display the true personality of the model. Each photo is interesting because they each have a lifetime of experiences contained within them. Portraits tell stories.

How can you produce the greatest portraits? Get to know the subject. Compliment them. Help them feel comfortable and confident. If they begin to feel like they can be themselves, then you will start to get beautiful shots.

Portraits

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There is a small gem hidden in Montana called Bannack. It is a ghost town that has been preserved for the community, the nation, and the world to enjoy. This little town was one of the first gold mining towns in Montana during the gold rush times. The town has long since been abandoned, but the land marks, and buildings still stand to testify of the lifestyle of the people in that era.

We enjoyed a day long photo excursion here in Bannack. The instructors had arranged for a number of models to dress in apparel consistent with the time and area and were placed throughout the town to model in places where their counterparts perhaps dwelt many years ago. It was an awesome experience learning how to create interesting photos.

Bannack

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Reflectors are the secret weapon. In class we learned that light is power. The difference between the average person wielding an iPhone camera and a photographer is that the photographer knows how to use lighting to their advantage.

Reflectors allow you to get the perfect light in the exact right place that you need it. They are cheap to buy, and they are easy to carry around and the use. To use a reflector, always stay in a triangle. The subject is one point, the camera is the second point, and the reflector is the third point. Keeping the triangle will help you to have interesting lighting.

Reflectors

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Learning to use flexible edits is a valuable skill to learn. When editing a photo, most people go right into Photoshop and start ripping things apart. One of the valuable lessons that I learned in this section was that when you directly edit an image in Photoshop, it loses pixels. After a certain amount of times editing the same image, you will lose too many pixels and will lose the image quality.

Non-destructive editing is imperative on each of your photos because it allows you to change them whenever you feel that they need to be changed without losing any of the image quality. To do this, create mask layers, so that you are editing the new layer, instead of the photo.

Flexible Edits

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Plants and animals are special things to photograph. They are nature. They do not pose or primp themselves. Pictures are taken of them exactly as they are, doing things that they do on a regular basis.

As I took these photos, I was able to learn more about how to use my exposure correctly, how to adjust the aperture, and playing with shutter speed. Learning these skills was pertinent to my knowledge of photography. It helped me to be able to control the shot, and make sure I got the picture to be exactly how I wanted it to be, not just to be pleasantly surprised when the auto function produced a great photo.

Flora & Fauna

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As you can see, the color that I chose to spotlight in these pictures is the color orange. It is important to learn what colors work well together, and is intriguing to find how many things are of one color when you are focused on it. The world is full of color.

During this project, I continued to learn the importance of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. Each subject presented a new challenge with a thousand different ways to be creative.

Color Study

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This was an interesting adventure, trying to take 12 unique pictures of a singular subject. There are only so many close up shots you can get before you have to start being a little bit more creative. It is important to have more tricks up your sleeve, although your go to shots are always important as well.

Being forced to think outside the box was good for me, getting me to search my creativity to see what other shots might be nice, instead of going with the shots that I knew would be good. It was good to find techniques that I could add to my skill set.

Perspective of 12

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Adobe Camera Raw. This is a fantastic tool for those shots that do not have major issues that need to be fixed, and provides a quick way of editing. I liked going into camera raw, because it was a lot like Adobe Lightroom, just with not as many features.

Being able to have multiple avenues available to edit images can be helpful, as each photo merits a different level of attention. Some may only need to go through a light edit, while others may have some edits that are a little bit more complex. Having both at your disposal is important.

The photo on the left is the image edited in Raw. On the right on top is the photo opened in Raw, and the one on the bottom is the before image.

ACR

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Talk about convenience. Adobe’s Lightroom is for batch editing. In photo shoots, there are usual multiple shots that the lighting is all the same (think wedding or engagement photos). In these cases, having Lightroom saves the photographer loads of time as they can do quick edits and apply them to the entire batch at the same time. This program also allows great ways to save as a batch.

Learning this program has been very beneficial to me, as I am able to keep up with industry standards, but also find a way to save a lot of time when editing these images.

Lightroom

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Most photos need some sort of enhancements. It takes a real expert photographer to consistently be able to get great photos on the first time. That is why being able to make enhancements comes in such great handy.

The program that I use in order to make these larger enhancements (not just quick edits like in Camera Raw or Lightroom) is Photoshop. In Photoshop I am able to make more significant edits. For instance, in the photo to the left, the girl’s jacket was bright red and was taking away the focus from her face, so I changed the color to a softer green color in order to not distract.

Enhancements

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HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to a scene that includes both light and dark elements. How this is done, three shots are taken of the exact same thing, not a budge different: One that has a regular exposure, one that has a low exposure, and one with a high exposure. These three images are then combined into one image (most easily through a program called Photomatix) that accents each of the three qualities. This makes it so that you can see great color in the sky using the underexposed picture, but get great color and light out of the subject using the regular and over exposed images.

These became my favorite way of shooting. I love the look and feel of these images as I feel it is closer to the actually site that I saw. I also love the color that is brought out in each of the images. The HDR feel is definitely one of my favorites.

HDR

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Josh Powell208.206.6531joshuapowell42@gmail.comjoshuapowellportfolio.wordpress.com

Photography, editing, layout design, writing by Josh Powell.

This photo book was designed to showcase the photography skills of

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