David Blackwell.'s photostream  

Hm, where do I start with this story? One of my neighbors is a professional photographer, earning her money with portraits, architecture, wedding and generally any other type of photography she can get commissions. This is not a very easy and reliable way to make money, I can tell you.

So we get talking and I ask her whether she had ever considered stock photography for the times when business was not brisk. Turns out she had not really. So she promised to look into it and ask my help with "that internet thing", i.e. the commercial side of stock photography.

Then we talked about retouching portraits in photoshop. She nearly never retouches her work because clients don't generally pay for the time and don't always appreciate the results. She asked me to share some quick and easy portrait retouching techniques that she could apply so that she could offer clients an additional "beauty" pic as an add-on service.

This is how I started to think about the quickest and most effective portrait retouching techniques. Yesterday we sat together in the afternoon and practiced the few steps I had come up with. She was amazed what could be done with very little effort and time, provided you knew how to use photoshop effectively. My technique for retouching has few steps, but requires advanced PS know-how as I use filters and methods not usually used, in this case the "Apply image" method.

She promised to practice and I promised to check up on her learning.

Back home I used a stock picture to create this piece just to wind down from an intensive teaching session. I am really into the old masters' style as you can tell. :-)

Thanks to Jolindar on deviantart for the girl stock.

Big Game Hunting is not a game.

Perhaps you remember the series of animal portraits I posted some time back, with the polar bears, penguins, etc. I created the rhino picture at that same time but never posted it. Until today that is.

Another one of my relatives to share with you.

I promised to share more pictures of my relatives with you. This is uncle Maxim. I was told that he wasn't necessarily the brain in the family. During the 1970s he undertook a jungle safari in Africa. This is the last known picture of him. He was obviously out to impress the ladies. His camera was found on the ground by a ranger shortly after a girl reported an incident with a gorilla. We don't know what became of him since he was never heard of again.

My line of ancestors goes way back in history. I own family portraits of ancestors going back to the 16th century. I thought I'd start the year by sharing some of these portraits with you. Here is a crop of a larger scan of a painting by Dutch artist Willem van de Dijken. It shows my ancestor Romanus de Seltzame and is dated 1586. We like to believe he was the founder of the Carneval Tradition in the Rhineland. To this day folks dress up in costumes and celebrate carneval in the rhineland every year. We don't like to believe some of the other theories around.

Best viewed large in the lightbox.

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