One Weekend Wiser

A Million THANKS to Amanda & Holly who were the instructors at the Picture Life Workshop in SLC this past weekend. I'm a huge fan of their photography. These women are impressive, talented, & inspiring. What a pleasure for me to meet them and learn from them.

I've always LOVED taking pictures, but it's been in the past couple years that I really started caring about taking pictures well. We bought our first SLR camera just before Christmas in 2005. I used it as a glorified point n shoot while lurking for HOURS in the photo gallery at 2peas (which is where I originally found Amanda's beautiful photographs). It's just been these last couple of months that I've gotten serious about learning manual mode.

I'm also pretty much self taught in Photoshop Elements. What a pain. I read Scott Kelby's book, online tutorials, etc. I was beginner enough that I couldn't figure out how to create a new layer or toggle between the edit screen and the organizer. Forget about color correction, B/W conversion, and what's a burn? I couldn't locate my tools nor did I know what most of them did. When I'd look at a photo, I couldn't diagnose what it needed, but it needed something. Anyway, I've trudged along and in my opinion improved over time.

So I thought I was pretty creative when I used the bath house at our campground in Moab to take this picture of James. I loved the color and texture of the wood. I liked that James was in his swimwear with Moab colored dirt on his elbow. His eyes were a bit red from the clorine and his skin was sun-kissed. We quick-styled his hair and the photo shoot was on.

So I'm going to hang my pride out to dry. Here is the photo straight out of camera (SOOC) + sharpened for web:



Here's my original edit as posted previously:


And here's a re-edit attempting to apply techniques from my workshop:

I love all the color minus the redness in James' face.