Quick and dirty tips for killer selfies.

Selfies, (Self Portraits) are the electronic counterparts  of looking at the mirror and saying “Wao I’m hot” with the advantage of mass sharing with friends and family and eventually the world. They can project who you are or what you want people to see of you, but often times when taking selfies you don’t really get the best photo of you. I got some quick and dirty tips for killer selfies.

Chin Up: No matter your weight if you don’t pull your chin forward there’s a big chance you will get a double chin. When chinning up follow this two simple steps: First, go chin forward and Second, pull it down a few inches. This will help you look natural and not like you are being pull by some magical spell or something.

Angle Up: Everybody has a good angle—or a favorite one. I don’t really need to tell you to pose using your best angle because you will do it by default but when doing it, have this in mind. Keep the camera an arm away from your face—unless you are doing  closed ups it’s always a good idea to have around two feet away from the camera for a better composition. Make sure you turn your head slightly towards your favorite side. Avoid taking selfies facing forward the camera—unless you want it to look like a mugshot.

Body Language: This is a very important part of taking selfies. Even if your body won’t be in the frame post like you are going to take a full body portrait. The curve that your body makes when posing will translate as a whole and your selfie will look more natural and glamorous.[pullquote] A quick tip for posing
 Place one foot forward and arch it like if you are wearing stilettos, push your bump back a bit and turn your shoulders towards the camera and fuacata!
Take the photo[/pullquote]Lighting:  This is the key. If you fail all the above tips make sure you A’s this one. Photography is light, make sure you have a good lighting for your selfies. So what’s good light? Good light is light that makes you look natural on its position relative to you. In simple terms, look for light that mimics the position of the the sun at 4 o clock in the afternoon.
Let’s put it into practice. Make believe that a simple ceiling light is the sun. If you get under the the light it will mimic the light of 12 noon. Taking a photo with that light will created raccoon eyes (shadows around eyes). If you move to the side around 4 feet away it will mimic a softer more natural look. More desirable for portraits.
If you want to find good light got to a window. They are best for selfies. Never use direct flash. This will only make you look flat.

Conclusion
No matter how many times you read this if you don’t practice you won’t get ass kicking Selfies A.K.A selftraits. So just take your phone and start clicking yourself away. I know that it can be difficult and it may feel unnatural but when it comes to selfies if it makes you feel funny its because it looks good. Beauty is painful!

If you dig this little tip please share using the share button to you favorite social channel. Also you can follow this blog for monthly tips. 🙂 See you next time.

Why is important to print your photographs & Why we don’t do it anymore

This is the outcome of your session. This is what’s going to make everything last and be there for your future enjoyment.

We are in switching times when it comes to technology and the photography industry has been part of it full blow. It has been easier than ever to take photos—as a matter of fact, people from this decade has been the most photographed through out history. Yet we also hold the record for the most lost memories inside our precious devices and computers. We stopped printing photographs… Why?

The problem

[pullquote]“Here in this room,  you can find the things we don’t use anymore. In that corner you can see my wedding computer…”[/pullquote] The story goes like this —”Here in this room,  you can find the things we don’t use anymore. In that corner you can see my wedding computer. There is my son’s first year computer and there is our Cancun vacation computer.” 

As crazy as that sounds this is our reality.  We take pictures with every electronic device we own and just upload them until the computer fills up and dies…taking all our precious memories with it in a very irresponsible way. We can’t help it, it is so cheap to do so! Back when you only had 25 shoots you really only took photos of very important things because every click was money. Now its just machine gun style like it’s 1990 all over again.

What to do?

Thinking about it, I don’t blame my generation for not wanting to print images… I get it— but the real reason is that we don’t know how much value a printed image has over a digital download. I remember my parents album and all the old photographs of my grand parents and relatives. It is so rewarding to revisit the past embedded into these images. It feels like I’m traveling in a time machine where i get the opportunity to feel past emotions. [pullquote] The real reason is that we don’t know how much value a printed image has over a digital download.[/pullquote]

But there’s still hope, you can build your own photo-time machine like our parents used to. Now even easier than ever. Here is a list of places where you can use your photos and create albums and many other cool things. You can even use the photos you uploaded in your social media channels.

Here is the list:
Foxgram: it’s a service to print the social media. You can make books and many other things with your Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest.
printstagr: Here you can print wall arts and other cool thing like business cards, posters, and even wearables.

socialfotobar: This one is a very cool one. Now we are using hashtags (#wedding) for events like weddings, get-togethers or any other gathering and quite often the images taken just disappear in the social media universe. It’s just crazy! Now you can print cards and send them as a thank you post card. Cool stuff.

Snapfish: And finally, the good old 4×6 prints are so affordable that you can literally have hundreds for less than 30 bucks. That’s an album right there.

Whatever you choose to save your memories with, please let be in a print format. Don’t let it die in your device. Your images will not only will outlast you but they will also immortalize and give our families a sense of unity and legacy.

Hollywood Glam Bug—George Hurrel, greatest photographers that ever lived

I’ve always been a fan of the silver screen— the glamour, the almost goddess appearance of the actresses, the wonderful use of lighting and camera angle… all together, to create one of the most fascinating times in Hollywood history, the Glamour Era.

This crazy and beautiful time on the  silver screen was nothing like we have now. Actresses needed to be in front of their audience all the time but their appearances needed to be “Greek Goddess” perfect— enter George Hurrell. Hurrell was one of the greatest photographers that ever lived. It is said that he was the first one to coin the word “Glamour”, often to describe his work. There was no actress or actor that was not photographed by Hurrel. Often times, being photographed by Hurrell meant success to any Hollywood big star wannabe.

A few months ago I got a few books about him and all his wonderful stories. All of the ups and downs of his career and the volatile personality that made his so famous and yet not so easy to control. The book George Hurrell Hollywood is a great resource for anyone interested on this type of photography and since I got bitten by the Hurrell bug, here is an attempt to create some Hollywood Glam. Enjoy

If you dig this please share with your friend. Gracias!

How a hard drive failure changed the way I see and do my work.

File storage.

I know I’m guilty. I’ve been saving my files very irresponsibly for a photographer—One terabyte drive on my working machine and 3 terabytes of external backup. It may seem that this set up was plenty for the type of work I was getting but Oh Boy I was wrong. The story goes like this. I own a one terabyte iMac which needed desperately a hard drive update. The whole thing was full. I poorly could work Photoshop out of it and I needed a replacement fast.

My old set up
This was my set up for saving and archiving my files, 1 terabyte internal HD to save my RAW files (really) and 3 terabytes external to back up my computer. For me this was the perfect set up but then I started to shoot more and more and it got to the point where I needed to update.

The Problem
I moved all of my computer files to my trusted 3 years external HD (big mistake) at the time I didn’t really know that the lifespan of a hard drive is 2 to 3 years. Mine was due for disaster. After installing a fresh operating system copy and deleting my computers internal HD, the very next day my 3 terabyte back up dies. No previous warning. Now what?

The Solution… maybe.
I tried so many recovery softwares that took days to go over the 3 terabytes and gathered most of the files, YES… 90% of them were corrupted. Meaning I got garbage. Now what? I said, maybe this software is not the best approach for this particular case so I took the drive to a professional recovery company. After three days I got a call form the recovery company guy, Alex. “I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do. It seems that the drive was wiped clean” meaning reformatted. “There’s nothing we can do about it but you can get a recovery program to gather your files” …Yes he suggested the same program I previously used. At the end I lost a great deal of work, from my graphic design days to a few events and portrait shoots I did. Luckily I didn’t lose a pending wedding I had shot the week before. Everything was saved on an external HD I was testing at the time for onsite flash card dumping.

So tell me, have you ever lost a photo, a song on that old computer that made you cry “WHY?”

Comment and share if you dig it. 🙂

Drives and Software I’m using now
Elite Pro Qx2 (for my RAID system)
One OWC Mercury  Electra 3g SSDs 240 GB, for my internal (replacing the optical drive)
One OWC Mercury Electra 3g SSD 120 GB, as my working drive. with an external encase.
and finally a cloud folder in my FTP server.
All that automatically sync using GoodSync

My “OTHER” Homes

As general a rule, we creatives I tend to have many passions—cooking, teaching, designing… etc. This help us shape what we will be doing with our art in the future, it also creates a sort of art junk if you can call it like that.  We love to share our creations and while at it, help others if possible. Some of us have Youtube channels with tutorials, others create blogs like this one, or even podcasts.  At the end, we want you to be able to view all of this content that makes the internet so great but we don’t want to mix everything we do in one website, other wise it will look like a pile of mixed-color-dirty laundry. So we create  homes for each passion.

In my case, I’m a graphic/web designer by trade. I did design for around 8 years. In that period of time I created many  things related to design as well as an audio post cast that shows how depressed I was during my college years and how by just doing this radio show helped me get over my worries. From episode 1 all the way to the 16th you will see the tremendous difference in quality. Here you can have a listen—but you need to understand spanish… sorry Bitacora De Un Estudiante De Diseño Grafico. Here you can also see my Design Page.

My other big love is photography, specially portraits photography— 🙂 but many of you don’t really know that I also love wedding,  commercial,  architecture photography….the list goes on…. But I only house two of those genres, Weddings and Portraits— because that what I want to shoot the most.
Then we got the usual suspects Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Vimeo.
Each of this channels is a gate way of communicating my what I love to do. Each one of them help me find the appropriate way to communicate, vent, and make people happy with my art. 🙂

If you enjoyed  what I do, maybe your friend will too. So please share me!
My Portrait page

My  Wedding pageMy Pinterest page

My Instagram page

My Design Page

The beauty & the dress—Why I love going to thrift shops

I love going to thrift shops! It’s been almost a year since my visit to the Salvation Army and getting this dress for 3 bucks but I had not found the time to shoot it until now. I have a “je ne sais quoi” for old furniture/clothing and I have been wanting to do a vintage-looking portrait with a Victorian style meets Renaissance period, meets Edwardian… If I make any sense.

The Set Up
For this shoot I wanted a dark, moody look that reflected an old painting style with soft and warm tones and very dark contrasting shadows.
I used an Einstein E640, diffused by a 22″ beauty dish, a sock  and a reflector. The lamp bolt also gave a bit of a warm tone.
Hair and make up was very simple. My MUA just did a bit of blush and nothing more. She actually told me that it was prohibited for women to wear make up during that time—crazy stuff.
Everything was shot with a 50 mm at 3.4 and the strobe at minimum power. The light was placed mimicking the position of the sun for a more natural look.

The final Images
At the end, I got the look and feel I was going for and finally, got to shoot my vintage dress 🙂

PIn Me Up

I can’t believe how fun this session was. A tease for
you… 🙂 With the beautiful Johanna Espinal.
MakeOver: Making Faces.

Gratitud—the end of the year

It is almost the end of the year, time I get all melancholic and revise my past months and see how little is left for this year to end. Then, What comes next? gets in mind. New ideas, exciting places to shoot and great people to meet… but before I plan my next 12 months, I think is time for a recount.

What happened?
This past three years I had learn so many things—starting by practicing gratefulness. And not just thinking about it, but to really feel it and experimenting how life-changing this positive feeling could be.
I once was a really negative person, not negative in being a dark cloud in peoples live but negative towards my own achievements and trusting levels. If something good happened to me, I was getting ready for the disappointment— because in my mind it was too good to be true. There were always something negative to the positive—You graduated from college… But not with an 4.0 gpa or a great school. You have your own place… But in a really bad neighborhood. I always found the way to bit the shit out of my happiness and my little achievements.

What did I do?
Everything started to change one night after letting go decades of anger and self hate. That was the night I decided to raise a family and bring a child to the world. But before that, I felt the need of a soul cleanser. First, I needed to ID my feelings and find a way to make peace with myself. Second, to take actions.

Many of this type of problems happens when you are part of a dysfunctional household when you are a kid— and I was not an exception. But it was time for me to put an end to the past and start fresh because I felt I deserved it. So I did it.
Today
That decision taught me so much about feelings and how you can turn you life around by just switching your thoughts and being gratefully positive. Now I see things so much clear and different. I now understand that life is full of problems but is how you approach to the problems that makes the difference. Looking for the positive in any situation instate of the negative bring me more of happiness and better results.

Now I let myself be grateful and happy.
I let myself to love more
I let myself to laugh more
I let myself to give thanks more
I let myself to give… but really give more
I let myself to joke more and be less serious
I must of all, I let my self to be who I want to be

Only you can make your own happiness.

Books that can change your life
–The Science of Getting Rich
-The Law of Attraction

Necessary Unwinding Creative Time

Sometimes as creatives we need to unwind and play like the kids that we are— just do anything without the need of having a particular aim. Take it as “Play Time,” time for you to just do whatever the heck you want. This time, we shot this two beautiful ladies with the fashion-careless direction in mind.

We headed to the Hunts Point Industrial Park in the Bronx where we got all sorts of textures and very factory like backgrounds… great place to shoot.
Make Up: Katherine Guzman
Model: Marialys Fernandez, Heidy Fernández

Mini-Sessions

Glam yourself up with our Mini-Sessions. This are themed-one-hour sessions that include all the necessary for you to look great and to celebrate you with a very affordable price tag. This time, we will be honoring Pin-Ups Glam.
A little be about Pin-Ups
Pin-Ups ads were a very interesting and important part of mass advertising in the late 40’s and 50’s. They were photos and illustrations of very sexy girls being friendly and sassy. They were everywhere, so much that promo photos of this images were “pinned-up” on boletin boards—and that’s where the name comes from. They were also  great at supporting soldiers during the war and served as an american patriotism symbol.

Details for the shoot
Each session includes:
—Hair and Makeup
—1 Hour of Photography
—Two Looks
—And Two 10×12 canvas to save YOU in style.
All this for just $350
This is a great opportunity to celebrate yourself and even better gift to a friend or significant others 🙂 … Psss. Xmas gift.
You can click at the “Buy Now” button to save your space and start planning.
It is time to celebrate yourself after all YOU DESERVE IT!

How & where to buy Vintage Props for your fantasy shoot for dirt cheap

So you are planning a fantasy shoot and are looking for that perfect vintage props that will complement your model and help tell the story you are trying to capture? Or you are just someone that wants to have a photoshoot showing a particular time in history and are looking for props for visuals? Then read-on. To illustrate my points, I will use “The Red Witch’s Dead”  a shoot I did a couple of years.

Planning the shoot
This seems a bit elementary but many of us forget to put together a concise plan on what the shoot is about and what elements are needed to tell that particular story.
I always start with a theme. For example, the topic of the shoot below was “Witch” but it was a witch with the quality of a vampire—you know coming out at night and being a huge enemy of the sun.
I wanted the main character to be colorful and somehow in fashion… I mean Dracula is always portrayed as a guy with good taste, why not this witch?. So started thinking about dresses  and other elements that will bring this character to live.
I got this dress for 3 dollars plus 7 dollars to have it clean up— total 10 bucks.   

Where to buy 

I started looking for a dress that had the elements needed for the shoot based on the story I wanted to tell. When I’m looking for props there are a few places that I always pay a visit to.
1- The Salvation Army: Love this store. There you will find anything from vintage picture frames to old wedding dresses for great prices. Most of the clothing there ranges from $4 bucks to $10 and so. They get new-old merchandise everyday so the inventory is always “fresh”.
2- Goodwill: Is the same structure as The Salvation Army. The store is divided by departments and have great things but they are a bit pricier that TSA.
3- Your Neighborhood Second Hand Store: If I need vintage furniture for cheap, and I haven’t had any luck at TSA or Goowill I’ll pay a visit to a second hand store. The prices ranges  depending on the furniture and the neighborhood but you always find great things that need little or no repair at all. Other options are garage sales and consignment stores where you can buy and trade furniture.

What to buy
Great, I got my main prop—The Dress. Now I need complementary items that solidifies the whole story. For this shoot I wanted the witch to have a cape, just like Dracula. I used an old bed sheet and some rope I got from the 99 cent store to create the cape that will make her look like a million bucks. I also got me a carved wooden box a found at Goodwill for 3 bucks. These extra props helped a ton on telling the story.

This package cost me around 4 bucks

The shooting
Once you got all of your elements make sure they are in working conditions before they are use. For example, if you buy any wearables wash them before use. You never know.
If you got any furniture check for potential elements that can hurt your model—like loose legs, nails or any other things. But this is something you really need to pay attention before buying.

End results
There nothing more fun to me than doing a theme photoshot.  The whole idea of creating something out of pieces give me joy. But the best thing is to see the end result. Here I attached some behind the scene shoot and the final results of a few of my fantasy shoots. Enjoy!

It was a very cold day but we had lots of fun.

This shoot was done the same day different theme

You can view more about this particular shoot here

If you liked it please share it! 🙂 MakeUp— Yomaira Beltre

How to get ready for a glamour portrait session

There are many questions I get asked on how to get ready for a glamour portrait session. Topics go from choice of wardrobe to what to eat the night before.
Here I cover the 4 Must DO when getting ready for a glamour Portrait Session.

1. 1- Choosing Your Outfits
   Have a least 5 different outfits—Ball gown, Business attire, Casual, Lingerie, Etc. This will give you a plethora of options for your money and it will increase your chances to get that perfect photo that really talks about you.
   Where do I get clothes? Photography speaks the truth but it can be fooled. You can bring dresses that don’t fit anymore or pieces that have malfunctions but that you will really like to showcase. You can bring that dress you bought for that wedding which you only used one time or ask your sister, mother, friends to lend you their closet. If you would like something in particular you can rent it. Many of my clients use Renttherunway.com
   
2. 2- A Clean Body
   The camera never lies and  with better lenses and camera sensors improving, nowadays you get to see the smallest details. So, do your eyebrows, Remove any unwanted facial hair. Do your nails— your hands will play a very important part on the posing and they need to look great. Refresh your hair roots if you dye your hair. Remember that you will invest a lot of time and money on your session and you absolutely need to love you in every possible way the day of the shoot.
   
3. 3- Understanding What You Are Getting
   Make sure you are well informed as to what your session includes. Ask questions about the products & the process after the session. Also talk about prices and ways of payment. There are many photographers that accept payment plans and credit cards. Just make sure you cover all there is to be known.
4. 
5. 4- A Clean Resting Night
   Finally, a good night sleep will improve your energy levels making you look great the next day. Remember to avoid alcohol, hydrate yourself and to have fun at your shoot!
   Now I’ll like to ask you what else you would like to know about the process? You can start the conversation. 

Why this is important to me—why do I do create photographs

Finally the blog is here. This is one part of my site I really wanted to have since this is a great way for you to know me a little more and for me to just be me :). There’s no need for explaining what this blog is all about but it will be a place where you can read and see my idiosyncrasy and my virtues—Including typos and grammatical errors.

So, why do I do create photographs? I asked, and the answer is for pure enjoyment. I love making people happy and showing women how beautiful they really are, regardless of shape or any other popular believe. The whole idea behind my portraits is to bring a sense of well-being and self harmony. Also, to wrap it all up to be saved for ages.

It is not only about the photos and the Folio Box, it is your legacy as a woman saved to share with your future generation. I can’t imagine the feeling of one of my clients opening the box after 20 years and sharing their beautiful portraits with their grandkids and relatives. It is just priceless knowing that you will be here even if your time has expired.
This is my first post here. I welcome you to follow it—even thought I know it will be a bit hard for me to write every week but I’ll give it a try.
Let Love Adorn You.