tommy toes (via Peter Martin Photo)

delectable diced dinner

football practice (via Peter Martin Photo)

I’ve been doing some experimenting with a softening process based on composition (mixing very different light levels in the frame), hardware (lens: shallow depth of field), and software (decreasing clarity, or localized contrast, in lightroom). Working on the RAW files lets me turn out a much better end result than Photoshopping a jpg (which just looks like crappy blur anyhow). I like the ethereal, creamy quality the unfocused bit takes on. Feels like a dream.

julie work

Good example of the benefits of shooting digital, of shooting RAW format, and of Lightroom’s post-production workflow. RAW lets me adjust white balance after the fact, push the exposure by about a stop, and work a photo until it approaches what I’m looking for.

julie (via Peter Martin Photo)

somewhat out of character, this is all natural light…well, non-flash light i should say. tightly enclosed white kitchen plus bright track lighting = very large light source and nice soft wrap light at f/1.8, ISO400, 1/100. Futzed around in lightroom and photoshop to decrease local contrast, overexpose, and totally blow out the highlights on the white cabinets.

on the edge (via Peter Martin Photo)

Prep for my trip. I’ll be on the road with Faces on Film for the next couple weeks, documenting the tour.

Peter Martin Photo | Prints

An additional print from my Zenfolio public gallery. Diptych of roads in the Southwest U.S., including a dead butterfly on a West Texas highway.

Tiger (link)

The Zenfolio software I’m using should make it substantially easier for me to sell some prints online. In the past, the effort/expense of framing, fulfilling orders via PayPal, and mailing the finished product was just too much work to be profitable at all. Photoshelter was an improvement, but didn’t have framing options; it was also far too expensive for my needs.

I’ve added five high-resolution prints for now. I’m curious to see how it works out.

Kilroy Reunion

Helped out with some group photos at a friend’s family reunion this past weekend, and just sent along the finished files. I recently decided on Zenfolio for gallery sharing/printing, and I was pretty happy to see that they just installed an embeddable gallery module. This was one of the last things I missed from playing around with Photoshelter. I think I actually like this one better.

Halibut Point, Rockport, MA

I’m currently sifting through and doing post on 784 photos from a friend’s wedding I shot on Sunday. It was the first wedding I’ve shot, and my guess is that you could go a couple decades before shooting a wedding as simple, beautiful, and stress-free as this. This was the location for the (short, no-frills) ceremony - a cliff overlooking a rock quarry reservoir on the coastline of Massachusetts.

This version is a bit overdone on the contrast and saturation. I’ll most likely back off quite a bit for the final version, but I wanted to post this version now. I’m in a good mood.