Fall in the Texas Hill Country 2011

Lost Maples State Park has some beautiful Fall foliage this year and the Cypress trees along the Frio and Guadalupe River are spectacular.

Here are my photos from November 12th & 13th.

Click on the above photo for more images.

6th Street Photo Shoot with Zoraima

Photographer Tim Babiak conducts some outstanding Photography short courses through the Austin People & Portrait Group website. I attended one of these called “Downtown Walkabout with Zoraima” on Tuesday, April 26th. A group of us met up with Tim and his lovely model Zoraima at the corner of 6th and Trinity in downtown Austin. We spent the next two hours moving down 6th street shooting at various locations as the mood and light dictated. It was very informative. I had a great time.

Click on above image to view gallery.

A Collage How To

The Horny Toad in Big Bend image is made up of three photos.

The Big Bend photo was taken at dawn at Grapevine Hill in Big Bend in March of 2006.

The clouds in the sky came from a sunset image taken at my house.

The Horny Toad photo was taken in Uvalde TX at 7 pm in May of 2008.

 

 

 

Beginning with the Big Bend photo, I selected the sky using the magic wand tool set to a tolerance of 32–this worked here since there was strong contrast between the sky and ground. Then I added a new adjustment layers for levels–since I had the sky selected the thumbnail in the layers panel showed the sky as white and everything else was black so only the sky was adjusted. Then to adjust the rest of the image, if you hold down the option/alt key when you click on the layer thumbnail your entire image goes to black and white and you can click in the black area to select it and add another layer mask for levels and now the sky is blocked out and you can adjust the rest of the image.

 

 

 

To add some clouds to the sky I selected the sky in the Big Bend photo as mentioned above and saved that selection (from the top menu under Select choose “Save Selection”) named it “sky”, then deleted the selection, dragged the sunset image onto the Big Bend image. Loaded the selection “sky” onto the sunset layer, inversed the selection and deleted the bottom portion. I then deleted the selection and added a layer mask to the sunset layer, reduced the opacity and changed the mode to multiply. With the layer mask still active I chose a large soft paint brush and with the foreground color set to black and the opacity set to 25 to 30% painted away more of the sunset image until it looked natural.

 

 

 

 

To get the final image I started out by selecting the horny toad–no easy task. First I changed the background to a layer so as I deleted the background I would have transparency. Since the subject and background were basically the same color I used the polygon selection tool in Photoshop set to 5 px feather and at 200% view, carefully clicked all the way around the toad cutting out each little spine until the background was completely deleted. You can do this in sections since this is going to take a while. I saved it as a Photoshop with layers file after I deleted each section so I wouldn’t lose any of my hard work.

 

 

 

 

I opened the horny toad image which I had saved as a Photoshop file. If you have adjustment layers in the file make sure you click on the horny toad layer and drag onto the adjusted Big Bend photo.
Under the edit menu I used Transform to Scale, Skew and Rotate into position. Under the Layer menu I went to Layer Style and added a drop shadow adjusting until it looked natural. Again under the Layer Styles I added a Gradient overlay. I chose the preset gradient of blue and gold and reduced the opacity to 40% and set the angle to 130°. To finish the toad I used a small brush with a dark tan color set to 30% opacity and toned down some of the bright spots on the shadow side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Horny Toad in Big Bend Final image!

Romance Exhibit

“A Glass Heartfull”

My photo in the Romance exhibit at the A. Smith Gallery in Johnson City, TX

The exhibit runs until February 20th.