"Are you smoking yet?"

The theme for this week's assignment was smoking.  Among several black and white portraits, I also had to create two ads - one pro and one anti smoking.  Granted, graphic design is not my strong point and I don't have an incredible eye for advertising.  All the same, I kind of like how they turned out and I thought I would share.


The first one was actually surprisingly easy to shoot - I created an 8" studio in my apartment!  All I did was place an apple on a sheet of white paper with a light shining through from the other side for diffusion.  I had one lightbulb from a lamp shining down from about five feet above.  And that was it!  So easy!


The second one took a bit more work and obviously some post work.  The other photos for this assignment were not photoshop-intensive, just curves adjustments, really.  But the ads were allowed to be edited, so I thought I'd have some fun.  We had to make up a brand name, and since I don't smoke, I wasn't really sure what to use, so I made something that hopefully works with the image.  What do y'all think?

Making do.

Today is the family reunion, and it's raining.  Well, if I've gotten good at anything, I'd like to think it's making do with what I've got.  I almost never use professional lighting- I depend largely on sunlight and what's available in my settings.  The photo I took here was in a poorly lit bedroom with sea-green walls and piles of clothes.

When I'm not having fun with my digital-manipulations, I do try to avoid excess altering.  I don't mean lighting and color- I fiddle with those a lot, but I almost never add or remove objects from the original shot.

With this one, obviously I did a lot of work.  I took out the piles of clothes and shelves to her right, I changed the color of the wall and a few other little things.

I doubt I'll be doing all that with the pictures I take today- probably just color correction.  We'll see how it goes.