Aaron Barker’s Photoblog

Story behind this down lower…

I started with the following picture:

Did some work in Lightroom:

Then into Photoshop for the text (hopefully I can do this all in Lightroom 3 when it comes out):

Final Product

So the computer editing is all well and good, but at this point Dallin just looks like he’s shaking his fist in the air.  The funnest part of this project is when you add the lollipop:

Full Story

Full disclosure that I blatantly stole this valentines day card idea from Suzanne over at Lookie Loo Photography.  I am a huge fan of her work and if I were to have someone else take pics of my family, she would be one of the two I would go to.

So what is Dallintines day?  Last year when my son Dallin could first really register the word “valentines” he naturally thought it was Dallintines because hey… how many words have an “allin” sound in them? So when I started thinking about recreating this idea in making a card for him to hand out, I thought it would be fun to include that on the card.

Dallin doesn’t normally like to sit/stand still for my parentally enforced photo shoots.  Luckily he was kind of interested in this one after seeing Suzanne’s examples and so cooperated with me. He even did the arm on the hip like Suzanne’s daughter did without my prompting.  Here are a few more of the winning shots from the evening.  We got a few of each of them printed out to mix it up a little.

Thanks to Suzanne (who hopefully isn’t mad I “borrowed” her idea) for the inspiration. This was the most fun I’ve had taking pics with Dallin in a while.

Gritty Details

I shot this in my basement with my two AlienBees B800 studio lights, two yards of fabric from the fabric store and my normal camera gear.  The fabric is actually clamped on to a boxspring I have standing up against the wall… nothing too fancy.

I got the studio lights after the first studio lighting photowalk back in 2008. So far all I’ve used them for is pics of family (and the occasional macro).  I really need to break out of my comfort zone and use them more often so I can get good enough to charge a few bucks and get the cost back.  But until then, I sure have lots of great pics of my boys and their cousins

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A project that I have worked on for the last year at work has finally launched.  The Welfare Operations Training site.

When creating the site I wanted to use the iconic Welfare Square grain silos located next to I-15 in Utah as a recognizable banner on the front page.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find any good photos of the silos in the library of approved media.  So I decided to go take the picture myself

Here it is in place on the front page of the site.

We also needed a photo of a computer in our “How to Use the Site” section and again, none of the images I had access to would work as I wanted a white computer (not the norm) that wouldn’t stand out so much.  So I went to the home studio on my white seamless paper, and did a little photoshoot with my own computer hardware.

The LCD is actually a black Dell 2001FP that I did some fairly heavy Photoshopping on to make white/grey.

So while they are my photos, they were taken on the company dime (I signed over full rights to them).  But it’s still cool to have my work out on an official site of the church.

I am grateful I had the skills and equipment to get the photos I wanted.

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