Photoblog 1.0

Greetings! One of my hobbies is Photography and I thought I'd share some ways that I enjoy this hobby. Yesterday, I was with my kids at the Jacob's Dream sculpture, taking pics of them playing and I noticed this stone and thought it would be funny to pose with it. In a moment of madness, I gave my thousand dollar camera to my 3 year old son and quickly coached him on how to frame a shot and ran to pose behind the rock. He did a surprisingly good job, considering I wasn't even sure I was in the frame when he finally clicked the picture (it is hard to take a bad pic in broad daylight using the auto settings on the camera). Anyhow, here is the picture Ethan took:

Yesterday evening, I sat down and opened the picture in Adobe Photoshop and did a little editing. First, I cropped the picture and allowed the zoom effect to work. The shot would have been better, but more difficult to frame if I'd used the lens to do the zooming manually, and, seeing as Ethan's 3 year old fingers barely reached the button to snap the picture, I figured I'd get the close effect when editing. After I cropped the photo, I used the BURN tool, setting it for about 25% flow with a soft edge and burned in the word GOD, going over the shadows. After darkening just the shadows on the rock, I used the Text tool to select a font that resembled the GOD font and used the eyedropper tool to choose the same color as the GOD text I'd just finished burning. After typing in the verse from Psalm 18, I went to blending options and embossed the text to make it look like it was carved on the rock. Finally, I used the lasso tool to select the area above the stone wall and grabbed the sky (it was that day's sky) from another picture I took that day and created a new layer for the sky and cut away all the parking lots behind me. Finally, I merged all the layers and saved the image at size I could upload and volia... a nifty picture!

I'll try to share some more stuff like this in the future. I like to use my camera for interesting photos and I enjoy playing around with them in Photoshop, too.
-jeff