Feb 19, 2010

Photo challenges and results

Sometimes we're faced with taking photos ourselves when the World Wide Web lets us down. I've joined a number of stock photo Web sites and regularly use photos that cost very little or are free. Sometimes, however, there just isn't a photo there that matches the idea I've got in my head. That's when we ask for volunteers from local families. The Künzli family has always been ready to help and since they have six children, there's always the age range I'm looking for. My project is for a Bible correspondence course starter lesson that will be distributed with Meet the King books. The design needs to have continuity between the two, but my general idea came from a fantastic flyer CEF Germany did.
I took two hundred photos of the children, but since I'm still not a very good photographer, there were problems with the files. I narrowed my selections down to two of the best. In these two photos the color temperature is different, something that I needed to fix. I also had nasty
looking shadowing on the boy's collar. I had to tone that down a bit, too. Had I used a diffuser, I could have taken care of that problem before the shoot.
In Bridge and Photoshop I did my color-correcting, masked them out and placed them in my InDesign document. Overall, not a bad product. I'm hoping and praying many children can learn of the love of the Lord Jesus Christ through the lessons!