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powder room supplies at airbnb
Fly ass manicures, words of wisdom, my fave style posts, some accessories I added to my wish list, new DIYs I wanna try, new blogs I visited, and other fun stuff!
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Adding a watermark to your photos is good practice. In the event that your pictures end up on image-sharing sites like We Heart It, Tumblr, or Pinterest, where links to the original sources are often lost in the shuffle, at least your photos will have your stamp or “brand” on them. Your ownership of the photos will be completely unambiguous. Granted, it’s easy to remove your watermark with Photoshop, but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that the offenders are unambiguous assholes. I know, I know — not really a silver lining, but oh well. :)
While I was thinking about this, I compiled a list of some fonts that I think would make suitable watermarks — I hope it’s useful! My favorite watermark font is Futura Medium in all caps.
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Taco @ Letterman Digital Center, SF
My first appreciation of photography happened at Whitney’s blog, The Ugly Green Chair. Her photos were unlike any I had ever seen before. Some parts of her photos were blurry while other parts were sharp. Years later, I learned that this “blurry background” effect wasn’t actually a Photoshop trick, but a camera technique. So I signed up for Photography 101 at CCSF. But the class moved really slow, so slow that a month into the course, we were still discussing the first week’s photo assignment. I grew impatient and read ahead in the textbook. I almost died from happiness when I read about shutter-speed and aperture, the two technical components needed to achieve that blurry background effect.
Anyhow, I found a great treasure during my last surfing expedition — a 30-minute Asos Summer School Photography 101 class with Michelle Bobb-Parris in which she talks about how to get that cool, blurry background effect! In the video, she covers: depth of field, focus, composition and framing, and light. It’s short and sweet, but loaded with wisdom and composition tips.
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My proper introduction to Visual Supply Co. came when I visited Dynamo Donuts with Celeste. While we were standing on this street corner in the Mission, snapping photos of trees like tourists seeing trees for the first time, she asked me if I had heard of VSCO. I told her that I had… well… kinda. She said that VSCO had a cool iPhone app and then she gave me a demo. When I got home, I bought the app for 99 cents and I loved it (thanks, Celeste!). Compared to Hipstamatic and Instagram, VSCO is subtle. There are 10 filters with no borders, and no exaggerated effects. It’s elegant.
AS I did for Hipstamatic, I made a table of all of the effects available in the VSCO app — at least I tried to. The thing is, the VSCO app has a subset of features that will allow you to modify the 10 basic filters with fade, grain, contrast, temperature, fill, exposure, vignette, saturation, highlights, and crop (*). There are far too many possible combinations to show in one post, so I’ve limited myself to the 10 base filters. On a side note, the grain effect is one of my favorites because it gives an image just the right amount of noise to make it look as though it was captured on film.
Below you will find 3 sets of images that show the range of the 10 basic filters (click on the thumbnails to view larger photos). By the way, if you watch the VSCO demo video at the bottom of this post, be careful not to get hooked on the techno music. It swept me back to my ravin’ days and I must have watched it 20x straight! You’ve been warned.
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Have you ever noticed how some magazines use outline legends to identify people or items in their photos? You know, those little numbered outlines off to the side of the page? I thought it would be fun to create a tutorial showing how to outline objects in a collage. So, I made some outlined collages, BUT the outlines just didn’t show up very well when I turned them into mini legends. That’s when I decided to try silhouettes instead and thank goodness, they worked out really well.
As you work through this tutorial, you’ll notice that we’re going to use some of the tools we’ve used before, like brushes and masks. In addition, I’m going to show you how to use the Pen Tool to create selections. In the process, you’ll learn how to make straight and curved paths. Heads-up, guys: the secret to curved paths is in Step 5! :)
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