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Articles Tagged with: Pinterest

Kids’ Valentine’s Day Cards

My wife saw this idea on Pinterest the other day, and asked me if I could do something like it.

Challenge accepted!

Here’s Mackenzie’s:

And Kegan’s:

The setup was pretty simple. I used this 5’x7′ collapsible background, a flash lighting the background right behind the kids, and an umbrella as the main light on the left. I used the window as the fill.

The background light was set to manual 1/4 power, while the main light was using TTL and was bouncing off the umbrella with a +1 exposure compensation. I shot at f/4.5 and 1/60th of a second at ISO 200. By shooting with a slower shutter speed, it ensured a good mix of the window light with flash.

Here are the final images for both:

I added the graphics and text in Photoshop, made 4×6″ prints of them, and used an X-Acto knife to cut the slits above and below the hand. Add a Blow Pop, and that’s it – Instant cool Valentine’s card!

If you want to try it, I made a template in photoshop that you can download here. Just add your photo to the bottom of the layers and resize it to fit with free transform, then change the name to your kid’s name with the text tool.

Hope you have a happy Valentine’s Day!

Photo-Centric Social Media Explosion

I’ve been quite a busy bee lately, and unfortunately I’ve been neglecting you fine readers. One of the things I’ve been doing in my spare time (which is sparse) is checking out some of the newest social media sites. The one that’s been most intriguing to me has been Google’s Google+ (or Google Plus).

With it’s fair stance on content ownership, which basically reads that what you post is yours, not their’s, a large amount of Facebook-hating photogs have rushed to the new platform. There’s even a nifty Google Spreadsheet of thousands of photographers that are currently using the site. This is a very vibrant community that is still in Beta, and so far I find it a lot more fun and interactive than Facebook. It’s like a cross between Facebook and Twitter in that you can follow strangers/celebrities, but better because you can share only with specific groups of people as you see fit. I’m interested to see what happens when Google opens it up to the masses. Hit me up in the comments if you need an invite, as I usually have some in my account.

The next site I’ve been messing around on is 500px.com

500px.com started as a LiveJournal community back in the early oughts by two photographers, Ian Sobolev & Oleg Gutsol. The name came from early limitations the group set on photo sizes due to CRT monitors and slow internet connections. The original idea was to have a place for photographers to receive constructive criticism on their work. The site still aims at commentary by your peers, and it differentiates itself from Flickr by attracting artistic work instead of being a dumping ground for your cell phone shots or last night’s party pics. I find it very inspiring to browse the site’s most popular photos.

Finally, its a very quirky social experience that my wife turned me onto, Pinterest.com.

When my wife first told me about it, I thought Pinterest was going to be another bookmark site like Delicious.com. Once I looked at the site it reminded me more of Tumblr.com if it exploded all over your screen. It’s actually quite addicting, albeit hard to describe properly. The best advice I could give you is to go there and sign up (or hit me up for an invite in the comments). My first impression was that it was very feminine, but I quickly realized that it is what you make it by who you follow and what you post. Much like Delicious.com, they encourage you to create a “Pin It” link in your browser’s favorites to easily add any content you come across on the web to your “boards” (which are virtual cork boards that you can categorize your “pins” with).

Let me know if there are any other cool social sites for photographers that you use. Here’s my current list:

Flickr
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Google+
500px
Pinterest