Playful Youth Calendar

I have always enjoyed photographing children, usually from a far without them knowing.  When my husband and I were just dating and I didn’t have any money I decided to make him something for Christmas instead.  I found one of those ‘free’ calendar offers and put together these shots of his kids.  I used Photoshop to single the kids out from the background, turning the background grey scale, then copying the kids and putting them at 50% color so that they get your full attention.  I will admit that some photos lend themselves to this kind of treatment better than others.

In the end he loved the gift and we still have that calendar today even though it’s now a few years old.  The images are still beautiful and show their youthful energy.  I adore photo gifts and I try to hand them out when I can.

Event Schedule Wallpaper

While working for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I was tasked with creating a lot of Desktop Wallpapers.  These I really enjoyed working on because I had to think outside of the box.  They were to promote the various events that took place at the facility that year.  They were celebrating their Centennial Era so I tried to tie in the impressive past the place had with each event.  But focusing on when they could come and see the event that year.

Since some people were loyal to just their series, each event had their own and then there was one that had all three.

It’s weird but I actually kind of miss doing these each year and dealing with the challenge of coming up with something new each time.

Photo re-touching

At my first job right out of college I was an intern for a number of years and as the intern I got stuck doing a lot of retail outliners.  I was really good at it and fast.  There were so items that were challenging to shoot and required a lot of retouching.  This is just one example.  While it wasn’t always exciting it was a challenge to say the least and that part I did enjoy.

I used Photoshop for most of the harder outlines like this one but we also used Fireworks too.  I am not sure which I liked more.   While Fireworks seemed faster, Photoshop had more correcting tools.