Alder Photography

I wanted to share with everyone one of my favorite techniques to give my pictures the other-worldy, surreal look that you see in the pictures above.

First you need Lightroom with “Matt’s lomo effect” preset installed. You can get the preset from Matt’s site www.killerlightroomtips.com. You also need Photoshop or any other photo editing program, just as long as it allows you to use layers.

Open your photo in Lightroom and adjust the color and other settings to your liking. You only need to worry about the way you subject looks because we are going to change the background to give it the surreal look later. Now hit control+e and select “Edit copy in Photoshop with Lightroom adjustments”. This will create a copy and open it in Photoshop. Go back to Lightroom and apply “Matt’s lomo effect” to the same photo and hit control+e and again, select “Edit copy in Photoshop with Lightroom adjustments”. With the “lomo” version selected press control+a to select all of the photo and use the picker tool to drag everything to the regular version of the picture. Now you should have the regular version with two layers; the bottom layer should be the regular version and the top layer the “lomo”. Create a copy of the bottom layer and put it on top. Now delete everything on the top regular copy except your subject. This will reveal the lomo layer beneath as your surreal background. Now you can play around the opacity of the different layers to make your subject/background look more/less surreal.

Have fun and be sure to leave links to some of your pictures in the comments section and I’ll add them to the slideshow.

I just wanted to make a quick post in honor of my son’s birthday. Just click on the picture to start the slideshow. I’ll add some more pics from the party later tonight. Happy Birthday Eli!
UPDATE: Just added new pics from his birthday party. Hope you all enjoy them! Feel free to press the comment button above and let me know what you think or leave Eli some birthday wishes!

We’ve all heard the saying, the eyes are window to our soul. Well, I took it a little more literally in this picture. I actually had to cheat for this one though. You see, those window reflections aren’t real. At first I tried to keep it legit by setting up my Canon 430ex flash outside my ground floor window. It did a good job of lighting up the subject but, the reflections in her eyes were just round, white, undefined blobs. So I took my picture and went into Photoshop.

First, I made a new layer and created a white square using the rectangle selection tool and the fill bucket. Then I took my eraser tool and made a cross in the middle to make it look like a four pane window. Next, I went back to my rectangle selection tool and selected the window-like reflection. This was so that I could transform it to give a slightly rounded shape; After all, it is supposed to be reflecting off of a spherical eye. Once selected, I right clicked and selected “Transform Selection”. Then I right clicked again and selected “Warp”. From there I just played around with it until I got the shape I was looking for. After that it was just a matter of bringing down the opacity of the layer containing my “window reflection” to 40%, copying the layer for the other eye and once I had my second layer matched up with the other eye, I just applied the gaussian blur filter so that it looked out of focus like the eye it was “reflecting” off of.

So, what do you think? Please let me know by clicking the comment button above.

The last photo assignment I did was titled “collections”. Now originally, I wanted to do a picture of hundreds of military “dog tags” all in a pile with a small American flag in the middle of said pile. But I don’t have hundreds of “dog tags”.

So instead I did this pictures of my Dad’s gun collection; his prize piece being his Colt .45 Peacemaker. A replica of the same gun Wyatt Earp used to… uh… kill some bad guys (I think).

For the lighting, I used my Canon 430ex Speedlite and set it up behind the gun at about a 115 degree angle (from the camera). To give the light a warm color, I used a piece of orange/yellow colored film that I bought from the local Hobby Lobby ($3.95 per roll) which was held on to the flash head with a rubber band. The 430ex was triggered wirelessly by my camera mounted 580ex II Speedlite which was set not to fire.

My camera info:

• Camera: Canon EOS 10D
• ISO: 100
• Lens: Canon 50mm 1.8
• Focal Length: 50mm
• Aperture: f/2.8
• Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec

So what do you think? Please leave comments by clicking the comment button above.