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A little personal photo share if you don’t mind! Yesterday was baby Eliza’s first time on the beach and while she was a bit wary of the whole experience at first, by the time we left she was practically rolling in the sand (and doing her share of tasting it as well). I couldn’t get enough of those cute toes covered in sand and had to snap some shots before I got down and dirty with the girls (Addie was knee deep in a hole she dug most of the afternoon). I have a really FUN beach shoot planned this week … even my five year old, Adeline, has been helping create things for it (I just love it when picture time is truly PLAY time – even my husband is excited about this one, ha!). So, stay tuned for more “beachiness” to come!

These were taken with my D700 and 85mm 1.4G lens. Most were shot at f1.6 … I like to break the rules sometimes and was nuts to shoot in mid-day sun (which meant crazy high shutter speeds of 1/5000 most of the time). Really, I just wanted to capture Eliza experiencing the beach for the first time so I wasn’t too concerned about the technicalities. My goal in processing was to keep them very light and airy, matching the fresh and summery summer day. Everything was processed with Flirt and Beloved from Blessings, and the black and whites with Beachcomber from Summer Breeze (I love how soft and faded Beachcomber looks with these images).

Sorry for the photo overload!! ;)

And for those wondering, I do have that promised black and white tutorial/tips on it’s way (and, yes, the sun flare tutorial as well) … this was a spur of the moment vacation (thank you to my mama for hauling herself and her dogs over at 9pm on Sunday night to house sit for us!!), so I’m a little behind schedule this week. This is the first semi-real vacation we’ve had since Eliza was born last summer!

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when doing black and white conversions is thinking they can get away with hiding bad color/exposure/etc by quickly converting it to black and white. While this can hide a bad color cast, you’re not going to be left with a stunning black and white image. Doing a simple “clean edit” before converting to black and white will bring you much more pleasing results.

This is an image I edited in a previous Step by Step. Here is the straight out of camera shot. It lacks contrast and needs to be lightened.

This is what I get when simply running a black and white action on the straight out of camera image … it’s muddy and dull. Just kind of blech.

So, I take a couple minutes to run some simple corrections (as listed in this Step by Step), and here is the corrected image.

Now look at the stunning results after running my quick black and white action (this is Silver Screen Goddess from Picture Perfect … no adjustments or further editing needed).

And the before and after …

And in other news … (don’t forget the survey will be up till the end of the month if you’d like to still tell us what you think!!):

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