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About a month ago I had the pleasure of photographing Caraline and Markus. Markus is finishing up law school this semester and in May will hopefully leave school with a job as a lawyer! I can only imagine his relief having just finished up school last May myself.....
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When it comes to maternity photos I'm not the expert. I'll start off with saying that much. Maybe because I'm a guy and have never been pregnant...(not possible I know, unless you've seen that movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes pregnant, which is very improbable. Maybe a side effect of steroids.) Ok lets start over. That was an awkward introduction to this post. I enjoy doing maternity shoots because there is a real connection between the mother to be and her unborn child, a connection so strong you can feel the emotion through a photograph. So, when Cherie contacted me about doing her maternity shoot and told me the location she wanted I knew I needed to do something different. Of course the Scottsdale Civic Center park is one of the hot spots for local photographers around town, it's so overdone that I needed to do something different here. Especially since the LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana is the most over photographed thing in the park. Here's what I came up with.
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Lucky for me that day the fountains were turned off due to maintenance allowing for a clean reflection in the foreground water!
When Cherie requested this location I knew she would also request a photo with the LOVE statue by Robert Indiana. The two go hand in hand. But, I wasn't just going to plop her right in front, I needed the focus to be on her, after all that's why we were there! So we walked around a little bit and I decided to put her on the opposite side of the fountains from me in hopes i could get a nice reflection of her and the statue in the water. The stars aligned and I came out with a totally unique photo from a non unique location!
Here are a few more photos from the session, by the time of me writing this Cherie will have had her baby. Best wishes to both of them!
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As always you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, & Google+
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Emily Vincent & Shawn Cohen's Engagement Shoot
Emily and Shawn have been dating for over 3 years now, and little did she know her life would only get better on their family trip to Hawaii. For that is where Shawn proposed to her, on top of a mountain! So it was only fitting when Emily contacted me about shooting their engagement photos that we returned to the mountains for the location of their shoot. Below you can find a collection of different photos from the day.
Emily was very dedicated to getting some amazing photos, so dedicated that it didn't slow her down when she climbed up a bolder getting a few unseen cactus spines in her hand and butt! The image below shows them taking in the true beauty from the base of Tom's Thumb where you can see out over the entire Indian Preserve! It really is breathtaking.
Overall we had an amazing time on our shoot, walked away with only a few scrapes from the location, but with some amazing photographs they will remember forever! Good luck to Emily and Shawn in their upcoming wedding and marriage!
As always you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, & Google+
Here's a quick tip for anyone who struggles with retouching uneven skin tones in photoshop. It can be used for someone with a high number of blemishes or splotchy skin of any kind or variation.
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Hey everyone, I've been up to a lot lately and not been posting on the blog as frequently as I'd like. I'll give you all an update on what all I've been up to and whats planned but now I've got an interesting photo to share with you and how I composited it!
It all started about a year ago. Thats right, I haven't touched these photos for over a year, but I had some inspiration to revisit them on my hard drive, and found a few that I thought might composite well together!
Here are the 2 images I started with.
I had this awesome open field, and a really cool looking airplane. Neither of these images had been used for anything prior, they were just something I shot randomly one day driving around the countryside with my girlfriend. So I thought It was perfect opportunity to take the two, composite them into one awesome looking image, and practice some of the photoshop techniques I've been learning on www.phlearn.com
The first thing I did was carefully select the plane and remove it from it's photo, and transferred it over to the open field. I then had to make the plane much smaller, and try to make it a size that was proportional to the scenery it now resides in.
After finalizing where to place the image in the scene I added a gradient on the plane layer as a clipping mask going from white to dark to simulate the overhead light of the sun affecting the plane. This is important in making the plane look as if it was actually shot in the original scene, and was affected by the sunlight.
After that I applied a gradient map over the entire image in order to change the color toning. I wanted to give it that warm cinematic feeling by adding a lot of reds and yellows to the highlights, and greens and blues to the shadows. That brought me to the image below.
From there is added did some clone stamping/ healing brush to better blend in the wheels with the field, and took out the bright spot in the top left corner, as it was a distraction to me.
Next I did some more color grading to the image. First using a curves adjustment layer to bring in some more reds and yellows to the image to warm things up. After that I applied a levels adjustment curve to bring some more greens and blues into the shadows, and then applied a second gradient map to the image to really bring out more of the orange in the highlights, giving it that old Cuban feel.
And as for that pink layer 4, I used a technique taught on Phlearn.com by Aaron Nace to remove some color casting. What you do is select with the eye dropper tool the color in the area you want to remove the color casting. Then fill your blank layer with it and inverse the layer which will give you the exact opposite color of the one you selected. For me it was in the highlights I believe. What you do next is go to blending mode and choose Color, then change the opacity to 50% or below and there ya go, no more color cast! You can do this for both the highlights and the shadows.
Finally I decided the photo would look better if I clone stamped the pathway and the bushes to completely fill out the bottom of the image instead of having that gravel in the foreground. It took me many many layers as you can see in this image --> 
That way if I decided I didn't like something I could just delete that set of layers instead of having to start all over again. I did this for both the road path, and the bushes, making sure to group the layers appropriately and name them all so I knew if i needed to change something I could find it easily.
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And that brings us to our final image!
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If you enjoyed this post and would like to see more please remember to subscribe to the blog, and like my Facebook page Brandon Tigrett Photography. As always thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment below with any questions you may have on the process!
Hope everyone is having an excellent 4th of July, and for all you out there looking to take some amazing photos of the fireworks this evening, I'll give you a few quick tips on how to do so!
Read MoreChloe my girlfriend, and her friends asked me to follow them around this past weekend photographing them having a great time since it is all of our's senior year in college and most of us will be moving in separate ways after we graduate. During the day we decided to get creative and got the girls up in a tree and took a picture of the groups boots.
Welcome to the brand new Alpha Phi Sorority House! Iota Nu Chapter at the University of Kentucky! Move in day was yesterday and tomorrow August 5th is the ribbon cutting ceremony!
