Pretty Cards made by Me!

Photo #1 Textured Tulip using Chasing Dreams Textures

Photo #2 Purple and Orange ya happy set

Photo #3 Pastel roses on scalloped edging (courtesy of Coffee Shop's Free Downloads)

Photo #4 Same as first photo slightly muted with linen texture

These are perhaps my all time favorite textured flowers I have photographed.  The pastel roses were hidden in another hard drive and I'm so happy I found them.

I have been wanting to make something with them and not just hang them on the wall. So my sweet friend Colleen, from Chasing Dreams Photography gave me this idea.

Why not make cards out of them, so that's exactly what I did and I hope you like them.

The winner will have their choice of one of the four watermarked photos you see.   They will be printed without the watermark of course into a double sided open 5x7 card

THE SET COMES 25 CARDS WITH ENVELOPES

STARTING BID $18.00

AUCTION WILL CLOSE JULY 9TH @ 6PM EST

THANK YOU.

FOR THE LOVE OF TEXTURES

I admit that I have become a photographer that absolutely loves using textures to enhance my portraits. My absolute favorites sets come from these amazing women: Shana Rae of Florabella Photography, Colleen of Chasing Dreams Photography and Jessica, from Jessica Drossin Photography. I must say I haven't a clue how they do it, but I know it takes lots of time and talent to sit down and create "art" that will look unique and give photographs that wow factor that in some cases often represents a painted canvas.

With some creative vision and persistence, using textures can actually help salvage certain photographs. For example in this portrait of my beautiful model Macy, I purposely over processed and over-exposed the RAW file in photoshop. Of course there were several steps I took in the before photo to get it that way, but for the purpose of this tutorial I am going to stick to why I did it.

I changed the colors in the backround using some selective coloring, curves to give it a warmer glow. Now Macy's skin is flawless and her color on the pale side so I could have used just a warm filter that would have done the trick, but for me it just didn't have enough depth nor the right hue I wanted for this image. By adding Chasing Dream's "Sun" Texture in an overlay blending mode I was able to create a nice warm hue and even cast a natural shadow effect on her arms. It also warmed up the entire photo and made it more eye appealing to me.

I don't like to erase or mask out the textures on the face and hands so I usually grab my lasso tool and select the areas around her, go to Select>Modify>Feather (setting the feather radius between 10-20) and then with the marching ants still visible, select Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur (I like the radius set at 98) hit okay and this removes the marching ants.

The result is a lovely portrait that maintains the color of the texture without the textured effects, in other words if the brushes are a netted look, grunge or other design element it won't be apparent in the final image.

Not bad huh? Plus in this particular image I really didn't need to do any skin tone adjustments as this texture worked perfectly!!!

Please feel free to try this and just have fun.

The Next Miss South Jersey Teen Winner

Gorgeous with a heart of gold! That's just one way to describe this very special teen whom I happened to have the distinct pleasure of photographing a few weeks ago. She's a natural beauty, a normal teenager and simply adores her parents and friends.

She placed third in the Miss South Jersey Teen pageant (I think she should have won, I mean just look at this face) and runner up to most photogenic, YES, I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!

She also recently found out that she loves the world of Pageants...so keep your eyes and ears open because she just may be the Next Miss NJ or Miss America!

Presenting Miss M.