Animated Gifs : North Herts Portrait Photographer

I just had a play with making animated Gifs in Photoshop.
I had to look through my photos for some that would work as a sequence.
Here are a few I played with.

I couldn't resist using these shots from Christmas Day. Hubby was a wee bit merry from the unlimited alcohol.

I had been wondering how easy it was to do an animated Gif. After reading one of my favourite bloggers recent post I had a play.

Amanda's original blog is here.

It took me a while, to work out I had to resize all my images for viewing on the web. The Gif reduces the quality of the original images, but I still like the affect. 

The one below is of my niece Taya, from a shoot in the summer. The images are all the originals straight out of camera shots, except one. An edited one snuck in there. See if you can spot it.

I can't wait to shoot a collection of Teddy. He is so hard to shoot without movement, but this will be a great way of showing how truly mad he is.
It's a shame you can't post them on Facebook. It would be a great way of sharing a quick little slide show for clients to share their shoots.

Engagement shoot : North Herts Portrait Photographer

I bought my daughter a lovely engraved silver frame as a Christmas present. It was engraved with her and her fiancés names and the date they got engaged. But I realised we hadn't taken any photos to celebrate the occasion. Her fiancé is at University in Newcastle and rarely goes home.
He was home for a few days, and the snow was just thawing, so I dragged them across the road to the nature reserve. Everyone was moaning, especially my husband who I said had to hold the reflectors and throw some confetti. He moaned so much that we sent him home.

So I only had a few minutes to grab some images.

I played around with some textures in Photoshop.

It was only later I realised, that I had made the mistake of shooting in Landscape mode and the picture frame is for a Portrait shot. So I had to crop one of Tasmins favourite photos to fit the frame. She choose the one below.

This one below, was the only one I could use of my husband throwing confetti at them. Craig would always screw up his face, or a huge batch of confetti would cover their faces. Hubby just could't get the grasp of what I needed, so we sent him home.

Today, I had a play in Photoshop. The result was a bit naff, but cute in it's own way.

India 2012

It has taken me forever to get around to writing about our recent travels in India. I think because I knew it could be an epic post. I had been putting it off.
It was so long ago that I shared this post of the Smash book I put together to take on the trip


From the off our trip was amazing. Our seats on the plane weren't the best, so a tour rep waiting for us at Heathrow, said leave it to me and we did. When we got to our seats, we were ecstatic to see we had the extra leg room,emergency exit seats. I popped some sleeping tablets and slept the whole journey, only to be woken by the sounds of breakfast. I was lucky I slept, as the tour turned out to be full on.

Erica was to be our amazing tour guide for the entire trip, there aren't enough superlatives I could use to express how great she was. We had enough time to have a quick shower and then we were straight out to experience the delights a smoggy, polluted Delhi had to offer a coach of 20 tourists.

During our tour the Hindu festival of Diwali was taking place. So there were a lot of Indians taking time out to visit their national treasures. This was always my favourite part of each monument we went to. Watching the faces of Indians taking in the beauty around them.

Everyone was eager to have their photos taken with us or by us. We were as exciting to them, as we thought they looked to us.

 Everyone wanted to see what they looked like in the back of the camera...............

Months later and I still hadn't finished this post, so I have now decided I'm just going to show you some of my favourite images from the holiday and then share videos of the photo-book, and SMASH scrapbook of our tour. Otherwise this post will never get done.

Here's the Smash book scrapbook I finally finished today of our tour. To begin with, the focus isn't great. I forgot to reset the focus from a previous video. Sorry.

And here is the My Publisher photo-book I put together.

There is a fantastic giveaway going on over on Photobook Girls website here, for a chance to win $100 of a My Publisher product. It's a great site for finding out all you need to know about making Photobooks.

Dubai Christmas 2012 : North Herts Photographer

I recently spent three days watching a live workshop on the next step coming in photography, video. Sue and Hayley were showing us how to make short, snappy videos.. Our homework is to put together a two minute video, after a month of shooting. I chose my model to be Teddy. Now it is way above my head, and I think it will be a miracle that I ever get to cut a months worth of video into two minutes. So just watch this space.

But whilst I had my DSLR camera out, I popped it on a tripod and videoed some recent scrapbook projects. I have finally finished a scrapbook of my recent trip to Dubai to see my son. At a recent crop in Enfield, we had a bring and buy stash sale. I picked up some freebies and quickly put together a layout for a photograph I took when my daughter got engaged. Everything but the white 12 x 12 card stock was free.

 I also spotted a Christmas inspired album that was for sale by Denise. I hope she likes what I did with her cast off.

PS.. I noticed when I watched the video back, that some of my small word stickers had come loose. So I went back and used some Glossy accents on them. They're not going anywhere now !