Emerald Bay Photography News and Updates

This is the season in Central Oregon where one can get outdoors and take on pretty much any sport that trips one fancy. Thanks to the fantastic snowlevels this past winter, the rivers are raging right now, and rafting the Deschutes River can turn into some serious fun.

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a little photo excursion with fellow photographer Stuart Gibson and we amused ourselves by doing some "raft-by" shooting when two rafting groups from the COCC floated by.

Here are some of the shots (the entire gallery can be found here):

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, editorial photographer Bend Oregon, Editorial Photography

Ahhhh ... SUMMER.

Yes, it's finally here. With 95+ temps and glorious thunder-and-lightning storms every evening. Heaven. (The fact that we still shovelled snow in Central Oregon no less than 4 weeks ago is *almost* forgotten already ...).

So during our 6th Bend Slideluck Potshow last night, this photo was taken from the porch of our host house:



And somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear Judy Garland singing ...

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, editorial photographer Bend Oregon, Editorial Photography

If you've seen today's Health & Fitness section in the Bend Bulletin, you couldn't have missed the front page feature on Pilates (sorry, folks - no link to the actual story... uhmmm... it's subscription-only).

Incidentially, the pictures that accompanied the article for once weren't shot by the paper's own PJs - rather, they used the shots I had taken a few weeks back at my friend Diane's Pilates Center of Bend (she was interviewed for the article and tipped the paper off to the images).



So I thought I'd tutor anybody interested in creating similar images on how to achieve these kinds of motion effects. It takes a bit of planning ahead, but it's easy, really.

Step 1: Shoot numerous images while your model is in motion. The important part here is that you either mount your camera on a tripod, or if that isn't possible, you employ a steady handhold while shooting. You want the lines of the body to match up later.

Step 2: Open the desired images in Photoshop. I don't recommend working with more than three images at a time - unless the motion stretches across the entire image, overlaying more images can get visually confusing.



Step 3: Choose your background image (above). Go to your second image, and with the Marquee tool, select the part of the image you want to overlay. Cut and paste that as a new layer onto your background image.

Step 4: Go to Layer > Add Layer Mask and create a mask on your second image. Reduce Opacity on that layer to about 30%. Click on the mask, and with a soft black brush (at 100%) erase everything but the parts you want to showcase the motion with. Your images should now look something like this:



Step 5: Repeat with your third image. Play with the layer opacities to get the desired effect. Done!

Labels: Bend Oregon photographer, editorial photographer Bend Oregon, Editorial Photography, photography, sports fitness photographer Bend Oregon