Recipe for Photoshop awesomeness:

Take 1 low-contrast, overly bright desert panorama.

Add a single Curves layer.

BAM. Photoshop, you’re awesome.

One of my good friends from way back in high school just graduated from Wellesley and asked me to do her senior pictures for her. It was a great shoot – I’d never been out to the campus before, and it really is gorgeous! It was also fun to work with someone with (real) red hair. :) It poses an entirely unique editing challenge, but more on that later.

A couple weeks ago, Eric Schmiedl invited me to assist him and Nadeem Mazen on a photoshoot at a red carpet in downtown Boston. Here are some of the highlights of the pictures. The full set can be found on my flickr account.

Two of my photographer friends and I decided to take advantage of this lovely weather we’ve been having in Boston and headed out to the Mt. Auburn Cemetery with our cameras.

My favorite from the trip has nothing to do with cemeteries at all. :) I’m loving the heroic pose!

Not quite my name, but still kinda creepy. Not a bad burial plot, though – live flowers and everything. :)

Not as gorgeous as this one, however. Just a plaque in the ground with a name and 2 roses crossed over it – so classic.

My friend Clara Rhee lost the keys to her bike lock, so she had to cut it off with an angle grinder. Naturally, there were like 5 of us who joined in to watch. Lots of sparks ensued.

She was suuuper happy to have her bike back! It was really adorable. This was right after she did a victory lap of the student center.

Not a recent picture, but an adorable one. Ran across it while searching my photo archives remaking my portfolio. This is from the 2008 San Francisco gay pride parade.

To celebrate, here’s an awesome picture from my spring break trip.

1. Find their computer with carefully color-calibrated monitors

2. Change their OS & browser theme to include a slight blue cast

3. Do the same to their desktop background

4. Watch & Enjoy

I was taking pictures for our house composite, and while they said I couldn’t use this one, it was my personal fave. ;) I’ll be putting up more of these once selections are made and editing has been done.

Also, I’m STILL fighting this damn magenta cast I keep getting in jpegs. I’ve been working my way through a book on color correcting in Photoshop, and my tiff of this looks AWESOME, but I can’t make it convert right! Grr. Any photogs out there got tips?

I have to give a presentation on a technical topic to a bunch of high schoolers for my thesis class, and I chose the JPEG compression algorithm. Naturally, I knew absolutely nothing about said algorithm when I chose it – and it’s absolutely FASCINATING. I thought I’d put up my slides/explanations here so you too can appreciate the genius that is JPEG.

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