Arden Prucha Photography

Wow I cannot get over the amount of snow Fort Worth has had this winter!  It has already snowed four or five times… not just wimpy snow, but inches of hard core snow!  Once again here are some snow images:

We measured the snow around 4pm… 5″!

I am throwing this image in to show the crazy amount of snow we have received:

Pete has a few neighborhood friends… meet Manny 🙂

Our Neighbor’s snowman… thanks Luke!

Then, Boomer joined in the fun!

I had a couple of friends mention the difficulty photographing in snow and that some images appear gray.  So I decided to share my settings.

ISO: 640 (keep in mind this was at 7:50 a.m.)

SHUTTER: 1/250s

APERTURE: f/2.8

I first opened in Adobe Bridge and bumped up my exposure a tad.

Now for some effects…

Once again opened in Bridge for some basic exposure and white balance adjustments… but this is straight out of the camera.

Then with a little bit of “Pool Party” action by Totally Rad and a bit of a blue colored fill layer set on Exclusion.

I love our home and apparently the snow does too.

Most photographers have heard of Doug and Chenin Boutwell’s “Totally Rad” site.  They’re photographers that have created action presets to use in Photoshop.  They sell these so other photogs can add great effects to their images as well as speed up work flow when editing.  Well, they have created new actions for Light Room – a photo editing program.  They asked for photographers to submit raw images for their site to use as examples and after doing so they chose one of my photos fort their site!  This is very super cool to me – I cannot imagine how many hits this site gets a day, let alone how many images were submitted.  They are launching the new presets (where my image is) today!  Totally Rad is so generous for giving me a discount on these new actions.  They do fab contests, give helpful tips for photographers, post great interviews, as well as share cool products that they recommend on their blog.   Big shout out to them and a huge THANK YOU!

Special thanks to Regan who you will remember from this post and her mama Teri for helping me capture this fun and beautiful image!

Below is my image with the “Eddie Would Go” action, creating a pop of color and contrast.

The next action is “Great White” and is gorgeous! 

I would LOVE to hear from YOU – COMMENT BELOW 🙂

Just a shout out to the soon to be Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Torres… Paul and I are heading out to Jamaica to photograph their intimate tropical wedding!   We will return on Sunday night during the Super Bowl.  I cannot even tell you how upset Paul is over the fact that we are traveling the night of the Saints’ FIRST Super Bowl.  Thank goodness for our DVR!

I am ending this post with some sweet shots of our Little Miss P(arker) whom is already 3 months.  Wow how time flies.  Most of these are black and white for the timeless and classic look.  These towel photos were taken in my bathroom with beautiful light provided by my sky light.  See how Parx’ eyes are nice and bright?

I used my 50mm on 1.4 aperture… notice the lovely half blurred half textured towel.  The ISO set on 500 with shutter speed around 1/100. Learning camera settings is the best thing you can do as a photographer.  I learned most of what I know by second shooting for Heather Essian.  I am not good at reading books, watching tutorials, etc.  Hands on is my learning style and always has been.  I’m still learn something new about my gear everyday. 

Now for these photos I had to bump up the ISO to 1000.  The higher the ISO the more grain/noise that will appear in the photo.  The shutter speed was 1/60 which can show some movement or blur, but most of them turned out well.

This image below is my favorite.