kerry ould

A taste of things to come | Horse photography

I've had a few fantastic sessions this week, and can't wait to sit down and edit the sessions.  For those of you wondering what a session entails, editing is where I spend most of my time.  Even more time than during the actual shoot.  This allows me to bring out the magic in the images and get them just right.  Basically my editing workflow goes something like this:

• Upload all the images to Aperture as a new project
• Quickly view all the images and make sure everything loaded before deleting the memory cards
• An average session results in around 300 images, so my first pass is to delete any that are less than perfect straight out of the camera - e.g. eyes closed, ears back, visual distractions in the frame, focus not perfect, poor exposure, etc.
• The second pass is where the hard work begins - finding the best of the best; these images are tagged for later as I go
• After finding the top pictures, the others are hidden from view to make things easier to manage, and the entire project is backed up to a DVD and again to an external hard drive
• Now for the fun part - editing!  I spend anywhere from 5 min to 30 min in Photoshop for each image.  This includes subtly enhancing the images, retouching, and, in some cases, converting the image to black and white
• Once this is done, your images are loaded to a password protected site for you to view
• The files are once again backed-up

Here's a couple of images that caught my eye as the images were loading to my computer.  I couldn't resist pulling them straight into Photoshop.

Ckeyarko (Arko)

This little guy is just a week old and as bold as can be.  He is going to be a serious handful for his human mom.  We managed to catch him playing in the paddock in the early evening light.  Here he is in a temporary moment of rest.  I love the yellow buttercups in the background and his cheeky expression.

Katie and Hopper

I love having repeat clients - and Katie and Hopper are no exception.  Some of you may remember Katie's winter session.  Katie wanted to add some more images to her newly decorated room so she was looking for some summer images to complement her winter images.  We headed out super early in the morning - just as the sun was coming up.  As we were walking back to the forest a misty fog started to roll in which made for the most dreamy photos.  We couldn't have asked for more magical light.  There will be some extra editing required for this session to remove flies from the images - the bugs were horrible!  Here's one of Katie and Hopper in the old orchard.  I love how it looks like Katie is having a conversation with Hopper here.

Thanks to Alison and Katie for two fantastic sessions.  Watch for more images to come.

b&w conversions

Another way I use Photoshop is for conversion to black & white.  When I shoot, I always shoot in colour.  This gives me the most flexibility as you can convert a colour image to b&w but you can't go the other way.  There are lots of ways to convert to b&w but the way I like to do it is:

1.) working in colour, adjust the image so I am perfectly happy with the exposure, contrast, etc. 

2.) i save this image

3.) working on a copy of the image, I then use the gradient adjustment and select a b&w gradient

4.) I'll then adjust the curves a bit more

5.) then I go to the selective colour option and choose "neutrals" and increase the black for a bit more pop

6.) sometimes from here I'll do a bit more burning and dodging as well

Here's another before (straight out of the camera):

 

and after the conversion to b&w:

good resources for photoshop

Want to learn more about Photoshop?

The good news is that there are a ton of resources on the web.  Here's a few of the ones that I find most entertaining:

- Pioneer Woman - I love this woman.

- The b school blog - check it out on Fridays for Photoshop tutorials

- YouTube - just search on Photoshop and the choices are endless; one of my fav's is "You suck at Photoshop" for it's rather unique approach

- Scott Kelby - the God of Photoshop; I have a few of his books which are an amazing reference

If you are an iPod user, do a search as well for podcasts on Photoshop, there are a ton of them out there!

Happy Friday...