Happy Friday.  I hope your basement is dry.  Jeanne and I stopped at Menards last night and purchased an extra sump pump just to have as a stand by.  Ours as been running about every 20 – 40 seconds.  When I went outside this morning to get the paper it’s snowing.  You have love the weather in Iowa.  🙂

Yesterday I have an enjoyable side assignment.  I do a lot of the photography for our organization and one of our banks publishes a monthly newsletter.  They wanted to feature the bank’s excursion agenda for the coming year and feature the people who lead the trips.  The news letter is published in black and white so the final image will be in black and white as well.  They wanted a cruise theme.  How to accomplish that in a bank?!?

I shot the image with the 24 – 70 Nikon lens as it is one of the sharpest lenses I have.  I moved the subjects about 5 feet away from the wall to do away with shadows and used one SB800 speed light with a domed diffuser and directional reflector.  I got a nice sharp image on a neutral back ground so extracting the subjects from with back ground using Photoshop CS6 and the quick selection tool plus the refine edge adjustment was pretty easy.  I learned a new technique on how to use both the quick selection tool and the refine edge adjustment, which has made a world of difference in my selections.

Finally I went to Google Images and found an image of a cruise ship and inserted the extracted subjects onto that image.  Converted it to black and white and there you have it.  A nice looking image for the article and it took a total of 30 minutes from taking the image to final product.  Like I said, fun assignment.  Of course for me anytime I can take pictures it is a fun thing.  🙂

Enjoy your Friday and the weekend.  It is supposed to be relatively dry on Saturday.  That will remain to be seen.  I’ll be out trudging through car dealerships trying to find a bargain.  🙂  Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.