Breakfast....Ummm...No...Dinner at Tiffanys

Tonight I spent the evening at my best girl Tiffany's house with her and her friend Meleah.

It's always a great time at Tiff's. I had to photo-document the occasion because I had my camera with me (did you expect anything else from me?).

Tiffany cooked us cheeseburgers which we had to enjoy on white bread...no rolls! They were delicious!

Meleah's son:

It was about 100 degrees today! HOT AS HECK! So after burgers the boys played in the pool...

One of Tiffany's son's Dominick:

Justin spraying Dom in the photo above:

And then fanny made me a nice cold drink.

Hmmmmm...where is the recipe?

How many cups??

All the ingredients so artfully displayed..

What a fancy lemon squeezer thingy!

The final result of all of her hard work!

After dinner Tiffany figured out how to take a photo with my camera. I had to tell her to hold the camera like she's not scared to death of it and put your eye up to the viewfinder to take the photo!





Somewhere in between all the fun Tiffany ran out to the store and got a flat...and didn't have her phone to call us...she got home okay...and didn't let it ruin the night. Of course I had to take a photo.

I love Meleah's t-shirt!

Self-timer time!

Back up in Tiffany's room later Meleah and her Mac

Thanks Meleah and Tiff for a great night with some good company!

Self Portraits and My Set-up/Burning & Dodging Tutorial

With the lack of models I have I decided to take some self portraits tonight.

I had a lot of trouble focusing and tried every trick I could think of. I finally had to have my husband sit on the stool and I focused on his eyes and then sat there.

I still feel like they're not perfectly focused but it was the best I could do for MYSELF!

This is the set-up that I had in my living room (except the stool goes in the middle of the backdrop (obviously) and the camera on the tripod (duh). The lights are hardware store bought clamp lights that I clipped to a lamp I had in the room.

Normally I'd clip my reflector to something on the left of portait area so that the clamp lights would bounce off of it.

(REMEMBER CLICK EACH IMAGE TO VIEW IT LARGER)



Now, on to the self portraits (I did a few different actions on this oneI figured I'd share them a couple):





2 versions of this one:





Yes...more of me...



Cross Processing Action:



And a black and white treament:




I like this pose....see all of these self portraits help me think of poses for when I do portrait sessions. If I like how they came out for me then I will most likely like them for others!



Another action to change the look up of the color:



I love how the Black & White came out for this one!



And lastly a funny one that I randomly did - don't ask me why I pointed at the camera but I did...LOL! Then I applied some fun actions to it to make it look like this:



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And you thought I'd never get to the tutorial I mentioned?

So, before I forget to share...here is a burning & dodging video tutorial I found courtesy of George who share an e-mail that let me to an online photo mag for the UK: