Sunday, July 8, 2012

How to Clean Up Files for a Faster Mac

This week's photo tip is for all my Mac peeps out there... woot woot! Yes, I'm a mac girl.  It's true... I used to say I would never ever EVER get a Mac (much to B's dismay.)  Then one day my brand new PC with Windows Vista (aka the devil) kept crashing Photoshop.  I simply could. not. work.  Desperate, I bought a Macbook Pro.  I've been in love ever since.


Now here's the thing - my Macs are awesome, but sometimes they get stupid slow.  Like I'd rather stick a fork in my eye slow. It's the curse of being a photographer's computer: bogged down with insane amounts of high resolution images and HD video files.  I would break down and finally delete my unwanted files but it still didn't help.  Eventually I figured out that with Macs, just because you empty your trash bin doesn't mean it's gone for good.  In fact, you need to secure empty trash to actually erase those files so they don't take up space.  Or you need to erase the free space on your Mac.

Confused yet?  No worries! Here's a quick video tip for giving your Mac more pep in it's step :)

Friday, July 6, 2012

Light Painting

Here are some fun photos taken at our family reunion this summer. The first night we walked down towards the swimming hole where it was nice and dark. Then we set up and went crazy with lights. Eventually we discovered that using the bulb setting and the remote made our light painting attempts so much easier.

The next night I wanted to get a long exposure of my family enjoying karaoke. One of my cousins was quite entertained helping out and watching me look like a crazy person dancing in the dark for no apparent reason. We used a flashlight for the white light and my iGlowstick app for the colors. We had so much fun and loved the results.

p.s my ever faithful Ava pup was there there whole time. Chocolate labs rule.



camera: 5D Mark II
lens: 24-70 2.8 L
settings: f/6.3, 30 seconds, 24mm, 100 iso

(YES 30 seconds. We were running out butts off to do this in one shot!)






camera: 5D Mark II
lens: 24-70 2.8 L
settings: f/10, 1 min, 24mm, 100 iso



camera: 5D Mark II
lens: 24-70 2.8 L
settings: f/10, 63 seconds, 24mm, 100 iso

This picture actually said "davib" so I flipped the b to d in Photoshop. The "s" was backwards too. Easy fix in editing.



camera: 5D Mark II
lens: 24-70 2.8 L
settings: f/11, 2 min, 24mm, 100 iso


Light painting is so much fun. You'll need a tripod, remote and some lights to dance around with.  Make a night of it and see what you create!