Many thanks to all the students that came by yesterday to get their Nutcracker portraits taken. And thank you parents  for being so patient. I like to give each individual child the attention they deserve. Every year I try to improve the experience and I appreciate everyone’s feedback.  Now I move on to the next phase of the project which is processing each individual photo in each order. Did you know that I shoot in “Camera Raw” format? That means the camera does not apply any processing to the image as it does with a jpeg image. Raw format allows me to capture the most amount of data to get the best final results. When you first see the Raw image it will look a little muted, a little dark and, well, kind of blah.  It’s in an unfinished state and needs to be processed. Post processing involves cropping the photo, color and tone adjusting, adding sharpness, removing wrinkles, blemishes, and any other distracting features and applying some other “magic” that will enhance the final image. The reason I go through the extra work of shooting in Raw and then post-processing is that, plain and simple, I get can get the best image possible. And for me, that’s the bottom line.

Many, many thanks to my assistant, Stephanie, for the long hours, cheerful attitude, attention to detail and friendship. Much gratitude to Andrea, Linda and Alex Fox – all who, for the sake of just wanting to help, gave me a tremendous amount of support yesterday. Your kindness and generosity mean more to me than you can ever imagine.