Turning over a new leaf.

It seems like a very long time since I have officially written a new blog entry (I still write in my journal quite a bit but that is usually just for me) and I figured that with the advent of the new year, it would be a good time to start up that habit again. There have been a lot of changes in my life that had required me to go heads down for some time and limited my ability to take on new projects while I worked on them, but, thankfully, things are starting to open up again as my schedule starts to free up and I have been able to take on more projects for others but also some of my own that have been on the backburner.

Testing Out Some New Features in Photoshop

As always, I never fully realize how much I miss creative work and just the act of creating in general until I am finally back at it. I had been asked to do some editing of images and I finally got to see some of the new changes that Adobe had added into Photoshop and some of the other apps in the Creative Cloud in action. I have to say that I was pretty impressed. I really like the new symmetry brushes that were recently added in. I had played around with the Silk app for a while and always found it to be extremely relaxing and I am curious to see how I will be able to incorporate it into my creative work a lot more.

Another thing that really stuck out to me was the stroke smoothing. I generally like to use my Wacom tablet whenever I can, but I have one of the older models and it can tend to be a bit bulky. Trying to draw or edit some things with a mouse can be a bit of a pain, especially when you are trying to be very precise or need fluid movements, but I feel like this new feature really helps out with that. There are a couple of options that I was toying around with yesterday, but I found myself going back to Stroke Catch Up, which would slow down the drawing behind the cursor as you clicked and dragged, letting you make adjustments as you draw. I would say that it is still something that will take some getting used to, but I think that it is a good start for situations where I forgot to take my tablet with me or need to make some changes without getting it out setting it up.

New Upcoming Projects

I have a couple other projects that are in the works and am pretty excited about. The first one, I cannot talk to much about, because it is still in the early stages of development and the owner is worried that other people may take the idea, but it involves video work and a bit of coding, which I am pretty happy about. I think that it will be pretty cool to combine these two skill-sets. While I am definitely better at the video portion, I have been dabbling in coding and web design quite a bit more these days and it will be great to see what I can make with it.

I also have a couple more shoots on the radar that I am pretty excited about. I have been leaning a lot more towards portraits and fine art these days instead of events, not because events are just more work for less of a return but I find that am allowed more creative freedom in portraits. That is not to say that I will stop shooting event photos entirely, but I think that I am going to be a little more selective in what I take on so that I will not be overloaded.