Monthly Archives: November 2008

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Katie & Mike’s Wedding

Katie and Mike were married just last month at Faith Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg, PA.  Their reception was at the Susquehanna Club, also located in Harrisburg.  It was a beautiful wedding and a fun reception!  Here are some pics:

The above photo was taken by my very talented assistant Karen.

Karen captured this very sweet moment above as well.

The above shot is one of my favorite shots from the day.  Katie made this very cute sign to hold up so she could use it for her thank you cards.  I thought it was a great idea.  I’m loving the sweet sun flare in this shot, though.

This DJ was nuts, and quite possibly one of the best I’ve seen.  He really knew how to get the crowd on the dance floor.  His name is DJ Wild Bill.  I have his card, but there is no website listed.

I had so many more that I wanted to post, but I would have been all night!  Thanks, Mike and Katie, you guys were just great to work with.

Before & After

So I was working on a few photos to put up on my blog from a resent wedding I just made available online.  Well one of the photos was a portrait of the bride on a chair, which was taken before the wedding.  This photo had everything going for it.  Beautiful bride, awesome ambient light, cute little setting, gorgeous bouquet, and a clear plastic bag next to the chair.  Yes, a clear, distracting, plastic bag.  >:(  I don’t know how I missed it, but I did.  Thank God for Photoshop.  Now I learned a long time ago, that even though I’m working with digital photography, I still need to move or avoid distracting objects in frame.  If I don’t, it causes a TON of work.  I saw this photo though, and I thought it could serve as a great example of a before and after processing.  I was actually able to remove the ginormous bag and reconstruct the background all with Photoshop.  Now, this can’t be done all the time, but if you have data to work with it is possible.  So here you go the before and after:

To be honest, this isn’t my best work, in fact as I write this I see an area that needs a little more work, but yeah, this is just for a blog example.  :)  I’ve actually had to rebuild an entire window seat before, because a TV was in front of it.  Now that was hours of work, but I’m proud to say that if you saw the photo you would never know it was there.  :)  Besides removing the bag you may also notice that I bumped up the color and contrast a bit for just a little added pop.  Plus I added a slight bit of sharpening.  Quick note on sharpening.  If you shoot with a DSLR (and if you shoot with one you know it) :) and shoot raw, you always want to add some sharpening to your photos before making them jpegs.  Your camera raw camera files are automatically soft.  So increase the photo size to at least 100% and sharpen.  Your tip of the day.  ;)  Ok, let me know what you think of the before and after shot!

Molie & Caleb’s e-session

Mollie and Caleb are getting married next June in Chambersburg, PA, and will have their reception at Wilson College; it’s going to be beautiful!  She’s a high school teacher and he is a full-time student living in NC.  Needless to say they have a long distance relationship.  We met at Renfrew Park in Waynesboro, PA a few weeks ago to shoot their engagement session.  Did I mention the shoot was at 8 am!  :)  Here are a few snaps:

You guys were so fun to work with; I’m looking forward to June!

New Look

I’ve been updating the look of my main site.  Check it out and tell me what you think.  I’ve changed the color and I’m working on putting a very faint background behind the single images.  I hope to put more updated photos up soon!  The site is located here:

www.alifestudio.com

Email Issue

I found out last night that the Contact page on my main site has not been sending emails when the senders email is from gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.  This was because my hosting company saw these emails as spam.  I contacted my site developer and the issue was corrected quickly.  However, I have no idea how long this has been occurring and it’s impossible to know how many emails I may have missed.  So, if you have sent an inquiry in the past 60 days and you have not heard from me but are still interested in information, please resubmit your info through the site.  Thanks!

Senior Session Day 2

Well, like I said in my last post the senior session I had on Halloween had to be finished up on Sunday.  We met at 8 am at the church we both actually attend.  It is a beautiful old building built around 1919 as a nickelodeon type theatre.  It is huge! It took me literally years to find all of the hidden rooms and nooks and crannies, most of them quite creepy to be honest.  :)  This building has so much potential for some awesome shots, but because we only had an hour until church services started we just used the roof and the old managers office.  If you are interested in the architecture of the church and want to see photos there are a few on their website at www.bridgeoflife.org.  I think I actually took most of those photos, but there aren’t enough to do it justice.  But this post isn’t about the church or the building, it’s about these senior photos and this killer grad.

I loved her shoes.  She said they were her favorites and by the look of them they look well used.  Very cool.

These photos were so fun and ironic on so many levels.  First off they were shot in the church in a room that is not currently used, but has been used as a Sunday School classroom.  Second, her dad used to be a pastor.  Third she used to attend a private school.  I could go on, but I think you get the point.  So I thought it would be fun to make it look like she got in trouble, was by herself in detention, and that she had a little attitude about it.  I think she did a good job.  :)  Also, the photo right above this one is kind of poking a little fun at the typical senior shoot with the softness and way she is posed.  ;)  I amuse myself way to easily.

This photo was obviously not taken at the church.  :)  This was taken at her home with her very sweet dog.

As I said in my previous post, I could post and write about these photos all day.  L was so much fun to work with; we had a blast!  I ended up shooting literally hundreds of photos that ended up being over 10 gigs of data!  Thanks, L, you did a great job!  :)