Handy New Concepts

In my adventures around the photographical community I've been discovering, I have seen lots of technical terminology that I've heard but never really knew. I used to be so intimidated by *real* photographers that I would just ignore anything anyone said about the technical end of things and keep doing my thing - capturing the pictures I love, by hook or by crook. Thankfully, I own a very forgiving - I might even say benevolent - camera, that automatically seemed to know what I wanted.

Lately, however, I've been absorbing new terminology like "aperture," "exposure," "dof," "bokeh," and "lightbox" - the list goes on and on.

One of the handiest little concepts I've absorbed recently has been the "orton effect," a shooting/editing technique involving a composite of two differently-exposed images. This shot was taken with a cell phone and edited with the orton effect.

I've already been able to use this concept for my most recent wedding:



On the left image above is cropped out of a photo of the entire wedding party. The the shot on the right is the same cropped image after I applied the orton effect.

I created this by duplicating the photo layer in Photoshop Elements 4.0 and applying a blurry effect to the back layer. Then I used the cookie cutter tool to crop the front layer around the couple. I used the smudge tool to blend the cropping line, and I ended up with a photograph that was all about the bride and the groom.

I don't really know how technical it all is, but I liked the result, and the bride did too!