I just added the family portraits I did two weeks ago of my ‘new’ family. This includes all the kids that are still at home – my 3 and Cheryl’s 2.  I failed to get one single picture of all of us – but that’s a little tough when I’m holding the camera.

2012 McCuistion Family

I also redid the Profile shot I did of the kids 2 years ago. I was going to do it every year, but the whole ‘life being seriously screwed up’ thing messed me up last year. But maybe every two years will work?  I added Cheryl’s 2 kids so I have three versions. One with all 5 of them, one of just my kids and one of her kids. I also built a base template that I can drop the images in, so it should be much easier and more standard going forward. This is the full composite of all 5 kids.

I’m still working on our engagment pictures. I have a couple of ideas I want to try. I’ll share them if they aren’t total bombs. Here’s a teaser.

This is the first test of my gallery concept. A way to post pictures for customers to view and select from. It’s worked pretty good so far, I think. It took a lot of time though. Uploading to the web site is slow – and WordPress is even slower when I have to fix things. It’s completely manual at this point. I will be looking for a better solution going forward. But this was a huge gallery. It consists of 7 sub galleries. I shot over 400 pictures, 4 groups, 2 sets of 6 individuals, 1 set of engagment shots (my patient daughter pushing the button under the direction of her impatient father), 3 locations and 2 seperate studio setups. I think I pulled out 140 final shots which I posted in the gallery.  I was wiped out at the end of the shoot.

I fine tuned shooting head shots on white seamless with my new strobes and gear. That worked well, except for when I shot before the strobes recycled.  I can’t adjust the grey out of the seamless on those, at least not cleanly, without impacting the subject. But the darker background looked nice on some of the shots and I always like the deeper shadows. I’m constantly fighting myself to pull up exposures.

I worked on my group shots. I’m getting better at arranging groups. These looked better.

I’ve extended my work flow. I setup a WorkArea on my hard drive where I will work on pictures that need more than just LightRoom adjustments. That way I can save source images, different stages, notes and the final image(s) all in one place. I am using the same LightRoom catalog (for now). We will see how that goes.

The fun shot…

Bye