Sorry for the delay guys!

I go through one day of feeling horrible and another day feeling good. And that’s the day when I try to do EVERYTHING I’ve been putting off. I’ll be back to normal posting once I hit 2nd trimester, hopefully, so hang in there with me.

So today I had to wait for hubby to get home to shoot the GIF, because I wanted to use about 100 images and that would require someone else pressing the shutter button.

And then I had to edit and put together 100 images – You get the point!

So I’m done and here’s what I have:

Me playing drums to “21 GUNS” by Green Day. I wish there was sound

We have finally graduated from specific learning themes for Selfie Saturdays to simple fun open to interpretation topics.
So you are now free to shoot whatever image you like that fits the theme, however you like. All that is required is that it is a picture of YOU taken by YOU {exceptions can be made if the photo was thought of, set up and edited by you, but someone else pressed the shutter button}

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LINK UP HERE

I finally got around to making and ordering my second Blurb Photo book. I have a lot of ideas for photobooks, but not enough time in the day to get them all done. Luckily, Blurb makes it relatively easy with BookSmart. They have really improved the software since the last time I made a book, including adding a photo spread, where you can have one massive photo have the span of two pages YAY

So my last book was about my mom’s adventures in the US, when she flew over to visit us. I shipped it all the way to Russia, straight from Blurb. This time the book was for me. I’ve been meaning to create a book of all the clones, photo manipulations and conceptual photos I’ve done, and use this book as a table book. Everyone loves seeing some of our trickier shots and this would serve as a perfect table book.

My next project will be The Book of Jumps ( self-explanatory), and then a book of 8 years of our life together, month by month, and then a pregnancy book, and then a baby book…. I can go on and on and on.

So this new book is titled Creative Self-Portraiture and it has 3 sections: 1. Clones, 2. Image Manipulation and 3. Creative Portraiture

I liked how the new Blurb software lets you create completely custom layouts, modify every layout, and of course the usual: themes, colors, etc.

So now I’d like to present to you my brand spanking newbook:

And if you’re all lucky, I might be able to do a Blurb book giveaway. Wouldn’t that be fun!?

Before I go into today’s tutorial, I’d like to feature one of the submissions from the PERFECTION challenge. As usual, I loved every single photo of every single participant this week. I loved the submissions that said “I’m perfect the way I am, I don’t need to be changing myself”, I loved he submissions that said:”I don’t think I am perfect and it’s something I struggle with and therefore I won’t make any changes to my photos”, I loved the ones that made minor adjustments and the ones that went further. Honestly, that’s what is amazing about challenge like that- everyone is different.

But I’d like to bring to your attention Shalay’s submission. I think she completely understood the whole point of the “PERFECTION” tutorial. It wasn’t to change yourself, it wasn’t to make yourself feel better about your body, it wasn’t to misrepresent yourself in pictures. It was to learn how to take a bad picture due to a wrong angle, or wrong lighting, or simply a bad hair day and turn it into something that you can look at and say “Oh I like that one!”

If you go to her post, you will see that she adjusted her hip that was sticking out in a weird way. I think the photo looks 100% better, and it’s still her, with her hips, but without the awkward pose! And looking at the edited photo, you’d never guess that she altered herself, because that’s how she looks normally!

Welcome to Week 19 of Selfie Saturdays.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 16 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations
Week 15: Stop Motion Photography
Week 16: Me then, me now
Week 17: Anonymous
Week 18: Perfection

This week’s topic is Animated GIFs

I know a lot of you have wondered how to make these fun animated gifs. Some people use services like GICKR, or sharewares dedicated specifically to animated gifs. But the problem is most of those resources put an ugly and annoying logo on your gif ( see gif below). So if you’d like to know how to make an animated gif fast and easy in Photoshop, read up!

 Now, I spent a few years working on animated gifs manually, adding each photo layer by layer, which can get very very tiring and frustrating, until literally a few weeks ago, I said “Enough is enough!”. There’s gotta be a way to load all the photos into the same file as layers. After a lot of searching online, I finally found a solution and it’s as easy as I expected it to be. So now you get the benefit of not spending hours of your time messing around with each layer of the animated gif. I’ll accept thank yous later

Step 1: First you need a series of consecutive shots, of course
Step 2:  Make sure they’re all edited and ready to go, named in the same order that they need to appear
Step 3:Open Photoshop, FILE->SCRIPTS->LOAD FILES INTO STACK ( Do not click automatically align, it will actually screw up the alignment)
Step 4: Now that all your photos are in one file as layers, you need to reveal the Animation toolbar (Window->Animation)
Step 5: In the top right hand corner of the Animation Bar, you’ll find a little menu, and when you click on it, select Make frames from Layers
Step 6: Now  that all your layers are loaded as frames into your animation, select all the layers and pick the interval. Usually 0.2 or 0.5 work fine, but you can adjust it from there and even make it custom.
Step 7:Hit the play button on the Animation bar to preview your Gif.
Step 8:If everything looks good (remember to resize the image), go to FILE->SAVE FOR WEB & DEVICES and choose the 2UP preview screen
Step 9:Select Gif, Perceptual, Noise ( or play around with those settings to find those that fit your style, but make sure to always pick a GIF) and hit save.

Now you have a perfect animated gif ( remember you can only preview it in an Internet browser).

I have found so many uses for animations like that. Some of the funnest memories of my life are in the animated format, so I hope this tutorial will give you a few of those too.

So it makes sense to make this week’s theme ANIMATIONS and it does’t have to be taken by you, but preferably OF you ( that’s the point of Selfie Saturday, isn’t it?). So you can set the tripod up, set the settings and ask someone else to press the button to create a continuous motion.

Here’re some of my previous animations for inspiration.

These were, obviously, made before I had the patience to add layers by hand and was ok with using a trial version of some gif making program.

GO GET STARTED ON YOUR ANIMATIONS!

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LINK UP HERE

Yay! I finally had a chance to participate in Ashley’s Scavenger Hunt  again.

I’m feeling slightly better so yesterday morning we took a long walk around the local nature sanctuary. I didn’t take too many pictures since it was hot and I was tired, but the ones I took were enough to participate this week.

This week’s items:

1. Natural Frame

2. Emotion

This was one of the first days that I was feeling better and just driving to the Sanctuary with windows open and music blasting was the highlight of my week. I was full of happiness and emotion. It’s great to be health (-ier)!

3. From a Flower’s point of view

4. Letters

5. Bliss

{one of the self-portrait we took at the beach last time we were there}

Welcome to Week 16 of Selfie Saturday.

If you’re new here, read what this is all about.
If you missed last 15 weeks of challenges and tutorials, here is what we learned:

Week 2: Basic Full Body Shot
Week 3: Couple’s Selfies
Week 4: Arm’s Length Selfie
Week 5: Conceptual Selfies
Week 6: Me Myself and I: Multiplicity
Week 7: Portrait Selfie + Squinty Model Eyes
Week 8: Self-Love
Week 9: Focus
Week 10: My friend, the FAN
Week 11: Magic Tricks
Week 12: Jump Shots
Week 13: Family Portrait
Week 14: Collaborations
Week 14: Stop Motion Photography
Week 15: Anonymous

So this week we were supposed to shoot parts of our bodies, possibly favorite parts. And what’s better time to shoot my newly pregnant belly? That’s right,peeps! In case you don’t read my personal blog, hubby and I are expecting our first baby. You can read/see the announcement here. So I thought it was very fitting for this week to take a picture of my growing (or mostly bloated) preggo belly. If you’re into baby/pregnancy blogs, feel free to subscribe to The Art of Making a Baby, since I will be posting regular updates with pictures and stats (that is, as soon as this nausea will let me feel a little more human and not as handicapped).

Also this new week’s theme is PERFECTION and it also happens to be the last week of tutorials for Selfie Saturdays. I will give myself more time to write that post, if you don’t mind, so you should be seeing it some time this week or weekend. After we are finished with the tutorials, I’ll continue hosting weekly themed self-portrait challenges that will be more lax and open to interpretation.

LINK UP HERE: