December, 2009
© Tim Pannell Photography
Sometimes its easy to forget about your camera once the weather gets cold outside and it starts snowing.
Sure it might be a little bit more inconvenient to shoot, but there are some great images out there just waiting to be taken.
In the interest of full disclosure, now that I’m in my 40’s the snow doesn’t really turn my crank much anymore, but when I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get outside and hop on the toboggan.
Most likely your kids are the same. There’s nothing better than taking pictures of your kids when they’re actually having a great time.
So what if its cold. So what if its wet. So what if you have a runny nose.
Take advantage of the joy your kids all feel and that you maybe used to feel when you were a kid and there was fresh snow on the ground.
I remember sitting by the radio in the morning with my fingers crossed hoping they would read off the code that would get us out of school for the day.
I remember that once that number was announced we’d call everybody in the neighborhood and within an hour we’d be on the side of our house with sleds, disks and toboggans.
We’d stay outside way past the point of being cold. We would be frozen to the bone. We’d build a fire in the fireplace and sit as close as we could without burning ourselves.
As a kid, I loved everything about that. How weird is that?
As an adult, that doesn’t sound fun at all. Maybe thats because the last time I shot in the snow I was up in Whistler shooting on a lake and I fell through up to my thighs. That was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life.
Fortunately, my assistant helped pull me out and we were close to the house we were renting so I could get warmed up pretty quick.
So……..get your butt outside whether its snowing or not and shoot your kids.
Just stay off of the frozen lake.
As promised, here’s a little photoshop tutorial that will show you how to salvage an image by using a piece of another image.
The base image is the one I want to use, but I have a leaf covering the boy’s eye. I found another image from the series where his eyes are free from any leaves.
All I have to do is isolate the area I want to use and drag it to my “base” image to hide the “offensive” leaf.
The tutorial is a bit simplified. If I were doing this for the client I would spend more time massaging the final image.
This is at the very least a good place to start. If you’re looking to get more in depth instruction you should consider registering for one of my upcoming Photo Mommies Workshops.
The tutorials for the workshop are more detail oriented.
Once you understand the principles behind this stuff you can play around with all kinds of options and variables.
In any case, have some fun with it……I hope it helps.
