specializing in wedding, family, children, high school senior photography in Utah
Lately the BOYS have been impressing me with their GQ’ness (yes..I just made up that word thank you very much). Spencer really worked the camera. I mean WORKED IT! He rarely needed direction and honestly, he was so easy to shoot. It was a good thing too because if you’ve noticed the weather lately, it hasn’t been too good. It was raining & windy and super cloudy, but we still made it work! A special thanks to Corrinne for being my mama assistant! You rocked it out! Mom and Dad are gonna have to worry about this HEART BREAKER! 
I thought I’d share a tip for those of you interested in taking photos of your kids with a black background. I like to do these because I hate buying school pictures. The backgrounds they use are so cheesy and so 1980’s if you ask me. I want them to be simple..so I opt for either a black or white background. I don’t have an in-home studio right now. (Hopefully I will have one soon because I have a lot of great ideas in store…but that will just have to wait). For now, I work it out with stuff that everyone has around the house. That’s right people…ANYONE can do this.
I just use black fabric (perferrably about 4 yards is great)–pin/tape, or use clamps from home depot to put it up against a wall, table, etc. Be creative. (I used an outdoor folding table to tape down my black fabric on these shots). I rested the table agaist my house, draped the black fabric, and then taped down the edges so it was tight.
Now if you are totally LAZY like me…you don’t want to iron the fabric. (You should try to iron it, but if you’re not up for it, then you can do a simple trick in photoshop that I do…only if you are using black fabric, though).
So check this out: picture below is the unironed black fabric before I edited the picture. No studio lights–just all NATURAL light. See all the wrinkling?
Now this is the EDITED version. No wrinkles! Just dark crisp background! So how did I get rid of the wrinkles? I just burned the heck out of the background in photoshop. Go to Layers, Adjustment layers, Curves…then take the middle of the line and drop it down to make a oversized U shape. Put a layer mask on it because you don’t want the darkness applied to the entire picture. Then use your brush tool and brush all around the background to get that rich black background color and get rid of the wrinkles!
So that’s it. Work it out at home ladies!
Those of you who follow this blog know that I ADORE black and white pictures. Just simply LOVE them. If you’re in my house, that’s basically all I have. There is something simple and real about black and white pictures that draws your eyes into them. I did a little experiment while I was editing the Smith family pictures (see post below) to see how this picture would look b&w–and this is what I came up with. I would say Mitch would take the cover of GQ Magazine don’t you?
They have 5 BOYS. Five fun-loving HUNTING boys! I was a little nervous before the shoot since I assumed that boys hated getting their pictures taken and it would be quite a task to keep them focused. To my suprise they were TOTALLY AWESOME! I must attribute it to their mom and dad because they are just amazing. Everyone was so great and needed little direction! I’m so glad I got to photograph their cute family–they hadn’t gotten pictures for YEARS so it was about time. Next time you will have to bring all of your guns with you!!:)
Hope you like your sneak peak!
