Johnson Family Session

Today, I had the opportunity to take some nice family pictures for a friend of mine from church. Becca and her two boys, Alex and Evan, were great sports in the strong Iowa wind and sunshine! We decided to meet at a park in Ames and had so much fun strolling around, utilizing all of the beautiful scenery! It's always so much fun to photograph families; you can just tell those little boys love their mommy!

Thanks Becca!

Bird watching

Today was a lovely day, a little windy, but sunny. We decided to take the boys for a walk through town, which literally takes about 15 minutes from end to end. One of the nice things about living in a small town.

During his fishing travels around the local creek, my husband found a few spots with lots of birds. I brought my camera, because honestly I need the practice capturing things that are moving fast! Sadly, some of them were just too fast, like the woodpeckers and the cardinals. They sure were pretty animals though.

The coolest was the hawk, and yes, I superimposed the shots together in photoshop because I took so many. It looked like it was having some trouble flying, and now looking at the pictures, I can see why. It was missing a clump of feathers out of one of it's wings. Poor thing. It was beautiful nonetheless.

And then, at the end of the trail, we ran into a big Russian Blue farm cat. With giant yellow eyes, watching from behind the grass. It was a fun walk.

Getting Artsy

I don't have the space in my house to achieve a great invisible black background image. I still like how it looks, so I thought I would at least give it a try in photoshop. It's not perfect, but dang! Isn't it cool what you can do with a little software editing??

I had two spotlights with silver umbrellas on either side of my baby, and then a silver reflector under him. It gave the shadows I wanted, but because I kept the ISO low and the aperture wide, I was able to get the soft warm light I wanted.

Here is the before and after.

I also kept playing with the reflectors a bit, and here is what I got. I will admit to one mistake. I had my white balance set on cloudy….so that is the reason for the yellow hue. But, looking at them, I kind of like it, makes it warmer.

Silver umbrella behind, reflector under chin to the left. ISO400 1/200 f/2.2

Silver umbrellas on left and right, reflector straight on to the right. ISO400 1/200 f/2.2

Jumpy

When I was a kid, I always wanted a pet squirrel. The ones back home were loud and obnoxious. They would sit on the tree outside my bedroom window chittering as loud as they could. But they were dang cute.

Living here, there are at least two or three at any given time in the front yard and the back yard. More so now that we have the bird feeder. Our birdie visitors are very sloppy eaters, and lots of the seeds fall onto the porch, perfect for a wandering squirrel.

A few days ago, I saw one in the back yard. He was far enough away that I could pretty successfully stalk him slowly. Every time I got closer, he would jump closer to the tree and sniff at me. He let me get about 2 feet away from him before he scampered up the tree.

Tristan calls them Jumpies, after Jumpy squirrel from Curious George. Yesterday, it was sunny, which was a first in a long time. While the little jumpy was munching on our porch, I was able to get a few pictures of him through the window. I know, I tried opening the door ever so slightly, but it spooked him and he ran off.

A New Logo

Working towards being an entrepreneur is very difficult. There are so many little things that you really have no idea about until you try and do it yourself.

One of them being the brand. What is the company name? What is the logo? Is it memorable? Is it accessible? Does it make sense? It's a lot to consider. And I'm still considering it. My first logo, that I made all by myself in photoshop was a silly base relief of the name text.

I thought it looked pretty cool, until I saw what other people had. Then my logo seemed dull. I didn't have illustrator or lightroom or anything like that, just regular old elements. So I played around with shapes until I eventually came up with what looked like a film canister. Now this is cool, I thought. After all, I got my start in film, and it was artistic. I changed my text font and added the canister.

Yeah, it still just wasn't right, and the tagline was distracting. I realized that when I tried to make a decent looking business card. The logo was too much, too confusing. So back to the drawing board. I knew it needed to mean something. Not necessarily something that was obvious right away, but something that had to do with the name itself. The name, Arastan, is unintentionally Persian. Yes, it is the combo of my children's names, but it's a word I didn't know until I googled my website. And I thought that was pretty neat, so looking through the different fonts I had, I found one called 'Papyrus'. That seems appropriate. And what is papyrus made out of? Grass. There, got my font and my logo.

Haha, I know I know, it's a little weird. But, in the end, it's a very minimalistic, memorable logo. I mean, come on, it's not any more far fetched than all the lady photographers who have swirlies and flowers surrounding their logos, right?

A little history

After reading the history of photography, all of the old family pictures suddenly became very interesting to me. It's amazing how far we have come in just a short amount of time. From silver nitrate to pixels! Isn't it incredible? I'm very happy that my family saw the importance of portraits, even though I'm sure they were very expensive and hard to come by in those times. I guess that's part of the reason I'm so interested in family portraiture. One hundred years from now, our children are going to look at our albums, maybe they won't be on paper or even a computer screen, but they will look at them and be appreciative. It's such a beautiful way to record our history. So I thought I would share a few of my family's old portraits.

How cool is Photoshop?

You can take an otherwise bad exposure and turn it into something else. Love photoshop