End of my challenge, Wedding Dreams Magazine, and a great bridal session

Yeah, so I pretty much have given up on my 30 day challenge for now. I was going strong for about 17 days, but then I ran into some issues. For those of you who don't know, my wife is pregnant, and she had some medical issues last week. I ended up spending two nights in the hospital and three afternoons, leaving me with very little time for photography.

On an exciting note, I just received my copies of Wedding Dreams Magazine. Through a random email, I was able to send some work into the magazine and ended up getting probably 10 or more photos in the magazine!

Last Saturday, I got the chance to shoot bridal portraits in a brand new location. We met with Misti at Lacuna Modern Furniture and got some great photos. Unfortunately, I still have about two months till their wedding so I can't post any yet.

30 Day Challenge: Day 17 Back to Photoshop

I've gotten off the everyday track, but I'm still shooting for a total of 30 days. Life has been pretty busy lately, and I just haven't had the time to work on something every single day.

Today, I went back to photoshop because it's the program I use more than anything. I had fun playing with After Affects, but truthfully, I won't use it very often. I decided to mess around with a maternity photo of my wife. Since she is such an angel, I decided to make her into...an angel.

All I really did with this photo was mess around with brushes. I found a set of wing brushes and used it to create the two wings. I know it's not that realistic looking, but it's more of a mystical look than realistic. I used a soft brush to create directional beams. You have to look closely to see them, but they are there. The last thing I did was mess around with the scattering effect on brushes. I cranked it up, so the brush scattered all the spots. I don't really like the positioning of all of them. I think I would rather have smaller dots and less of them. They stick out too much as is.

Photography wise, I have Misti's bridal portraits coming up. It's going to be awesome. We're going to go to Lacuna Modern Interiors and using some of their fabulous furniture, and I'm going to play with my new Cheetah softbox.

30 Day Challenge: Day 16

It's very hard to know if a tutorial is worth your time before you start it. Unfortunately, I have run into several that were a waste. The first two for After Effects didn't work, and the one I just finished didn't really teach me anything useful.

The tutorial focused on writing expressions to control movement. These expressions are pretty much complex/wordy instructions for the program. If I didn't have the guy telling me what to type, I would have been completely lost, which is the first problem. I don't think I will be able to transfer these skills/knowledge to a new project. The second real problem I see with this is that I could have accomplished the same end product in a much quicker way. It might not have been as mathematically correct, but it still would have worked. I could have used position and keyframes to create a dropping action without any coding.

30 Day Challenge: Day 17

I'm not too happy about my progress the past 3-4 days. I've tried now two tutorials and wasn't able to finish either one. The first one, I don't think was my fault because I didn't have the right effects installed. The second one wasn't very well produced. The narrator didn't really explain what he was doing. Anyway, I still learned a few things from both, so it's not a complete waste. Today, I started a new tutorial, and this will probably be the last one I do for After Effects. I'm going to create a falling, bouncing effect. So far, I've learned that you can actually use mathmatical equations in the program to create some effects. We messed around with sin, cosin, and absolute value so far.

30 Day Challenge: Day 15 After Effects flop

I'm a little angry today. First, I thought I had fixed my problem with the missing effect for the tutorial. Then I found out that the effect I was missing isn't available in the trial version, so I pretty much wasted yesterday.

Today, I started a new tutorial in After Effects. It looked interesting. I would make a laser that would cut out a word. Unfortunately, after messing with it for 30 minutes, my preview did not work. I managed to get the laser to follow the path of the words, but the timing was off and the laser wasn't positioned over the words.

I'm not sure if I will continue with this tutorial tomorrow or give up and try a different one; I might even just give up on After Effects and go back to photoshop. That's how irritated I am.

30 Day Challenge: Day 14 After Effects plug ins

I didn't get much accomplished today, but I did find out something that I think will be beneficial in the future.

I'm still working with After Effects, mainly because I find it interesting, for the next few days. I found another tutorial. This one involves making a video with an alien ship! Well, first off, it's very difficult to understand the guy with his accent, so I spent most of my time rewinding and trying to interpret him. At one point, he tells me apply this effect and I watch him scroll to it. I did the exact same thing, except I didn't have that effect. I started getting frustrated, but then I went to my problem solver: google. After a google search I found that this effect is a free download. Not only did I find that effect, I also learned that there are a ton of free effects out there, jackpot!

Even though I didn't accomplish much, I think the effects are well worth my time and frustration with the guy.

30 Day Challenge: Day 13 Final Product

Today I finished the last section of the video. The cool thing about this section, and this program in general, is that the video was created from 4-5 separate pictures in photoshop. The sky, clouds, grass, pole, and blades were all different images/layers in photoshop. Then, in after effects, I was able to create a video by adding motion to the each image. Many of the items popped up on the screen. That was simply moving the image. The best effect is the windmills. To create the spinning motion, all I had to do was add rotation to the blades. Since the blades were an image by themselves, they were the only thing affected by the spin effect.

Here is the final product. It took me three days to follow all of the tutorials, but I really am excited about the possibilities that are now open to me. I've got all these crazy ideas for videos and projects that I could make. Yes, there are several things about this I'm not completely excited about. The videos in it are random. I didn't choose them. I simply used what I was given in the tutorial. The same thing goes with the music. My next After Effects project will be completely my creation: my own video, images, and ideas.