Change it a little and make it your own!

Change an ingredient or two and suddenly the recipe is YOURS! Who is with me? I'm a pretty crafty person [scrapbook/baking/etc-crafty, not like underhanded and deceptive ;)]. I've got a good bit of creativity. But to be completely honest, most of my ideas start with someone else's idea, then I just mold it a little to my liking.

One of my current endeavors is learning to become a great photographer because I love photos, and I love photos of my family! And something I've been doing to help me along this process is a 365 project. Today's picture was inspired by something I saw in a recent People magazine. A friend asked about it, so I thought it would be fun to blog about.

In my workshop, it suggests to cut out pictures that you like. This picture of Jim Carrey caught my eye LOL.



I'm really attracted to picture-in-picture type of photos. So I immediately cut this one out and added to my book of fav photos. Most that I save are because I like the composition of the photo, but this one was more of a fun idea to attempt myself.

Here's the simple explanation (more details below):
- While looking in the mirror, I took a picture of one eye with my smart phone.
- I then held the picture displayed on the phone back up to my face while taking a picture with my good camera. (This took about 10 tries.)
- In the middle of adjusting sharpness and levels on the computer, I decided to try it black & white with only the camera picture left in color.
- And the end result. . .



If you'd like to try it yourself, here are some better instructions:
- While looking in the mirror, take a picture of one eye with your smart phone, cell phone, or another camera with a display screen. Be sure to move in/out to make the picture size as close as possible to match the actual size of your face. I held my phone out from my eye about 4 or 5 inches.
- Set up another camera on something steady if you don't have a tripod and set it up for the self-timer. I used my dslr with a 50mm f/1.8 lens because I hugely HEART shallow depth of field (focused subject, blurry background). I set the aperature to the lowest, f/1.8. If you have a regular point-and-shoot camera, just forget everything I just said after self-timer. You can still do this. :)
- Pull up the 1st picture on the screen of whatever you took it on, and practice holding it up to your eye (I took a minute in the mirror so I could remember where to hold the phone). It may take a few tries unless you can get a mirror in front of you to do this step, but behind the camera of course. Focus (half-push of the shutter button on most cameras) and press all the way down to take the picture. The self-time will give you a second to get your hand back down so it doesn't look like a cheesy self pic.
- Upload it to your computer to edit in whatever photo software you have. I shot the picture in RAW format and edited it in Photoshop Elements. Simply adjust where needed, select everything but the phone picture to convert to black and white, adjust lighting, etc. In the RAW editing stage, I increased the blacks slightly and the clarity. The rest was done in the jpeg editing. I sharpened and also used the unsharp mask to make the phone picture more crisp.

I usually adjust as I go, not always remember every single step. So if you have specific questions, just let me know.

Hope you like it!