How I Did It - Portrait of a Leaf

Name: Bill Fantini from HouseofSixCats
Title: Portrait of a Leaf
How I did it: I took this photograph a year ago. Last Thanksgiving morning I woke up to a very foggy morning and the sun just starting to peek through the clouds. I grabbed my camera and went out to the trail that ran behind where we used to live and started taking pictures. This particular leaf was just laying on the ground and I thought it would make a good image. Once I got it in Lightroom, I started playing with it and found out how cool the shot was. I cropped it close and found a preset that gave it the look that you see now, that's pretty much how I did it!

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It - Save Coney Island

Name: Eve Simone
Title: Save Coney Island
Location: This photo was taken in Coney Island this past summer during the Mermaid Parade with a Holga.

How I did it: A Holga is a Russian camera and one of my favorites to shoot with. One of the many great things about a Holga is that you can advance the film however you like. Most of the film from this particular day is overlapping so when I processed the roll I had many pleasant surprises!

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It - WHOOSH!

Name: Michelle Campbell-Zurek of Urban Junkies Photography
Title: WHOOSH!
Location: Downtown Los Angeles
How I did it: My husband and I used to live in downtown Los Angeles and I wanted to try to capture the energy and activity of the streets. Downtown is one of my favorite places to shoot! There is so much going on and so much to document. Buses are everywhere and they boldly maneuver their way through the crazy streets. So for me, the sound and feel of the buses zipping by (WHOOSH!) will always be a vivid memory.

We were standing on a corner and I saw the bus coming. I changed my settings to include a slow shutter: 1/6 s, at f/20. I caught it right when it passed by and I was so excited to have caught the other bus through the image as well. At home, I tweaked the levels and curves in Photoshop and this is the final result! It is one of my favorite pictures I have taken and it will always remind me of downtown living.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It - La Femme

Name: Michelle of Montage Studio

Title: La Femme

Location: France

How I did it: The process of arriving at the final image was very interesting for this shot, La Femme: 35mm film photgraph taken in France, altered in Photoshop, printed onto a transparency and mounted on a painted canvas, then photographed again...

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Name: Ian Parry
Title: Hide and Seek
Location: a gothic graveyard in the UK countryside
How I did it: I was playing with an idea of ghostly images in a churchyard inspired by the Bruce Willis film "The Sixth Sense." My little boy has that blonde "midwich cuckoo" look, so I took him to a churchyard in Derbyshire while on holiday and got him to run around. I love spinning the camera off its axis, filling the frame in different ways. I used my Nikon D1X with a long lens f4 (I think), deliberately focusing on the foreground to make him softer and adding to the mystery, and ramped up the contrast in PhotoShop. There is a strange white blur on his shoulder, but I really don't how I got that. Spooky, huh!

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Name: Kate Schick of Tuscany Studio

Title: Hope Floats

Location: The photo was taken in on our farm in Florida before we moved here to Texas.
How I took the shot: I had a "secret garden" in Florida that you reached by going through arches of honeysuckle and ivy. Every morning the honeysuckle would be draped with the most amazing cobwebs covered in dew. The mist would be rising up off the fields - it's an image that I will always remember!

The photo was taken with my trusty Pentax K10 with a Sigma Macro lens. All of the cobweb photographs in my shop (like Spiderweb and Concentric Circles) were taken in the same location at the same time, with different textures added later. I used a sky/cloud texture shot I had taken and layered it with the Hope Floats print on Photoshop. The end result was a nice watery, misty, muted color that combined well with the dewdrops on the web.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Name: Susan O'Connor (Pretty Petal Studio)

Location: New Market, Maryland - field on the side of the road

How I took the shot: I was driving along and saw these huge dandelions growing along the road...but they looked bigger than your normal dandelion. So I pulled over to take a closer look and they were these gorgeous robust weeds scattered everywhere. I always have my camera with me wherever I go, so I took a few macro shots using my 100mm, 2.8 lens (Canon). When I got home, I was pleased with the photo but wanted to give it a little more interest and dreamy feel. I used Photoshop (CS2) to adjust levels and added one of my favorite vintage actions to it. That's what cast the bluish hue. Then I chose a photo of one of my textures and placed it on top of the "dandelion" photo. I changed the texture layer to multiply and dropped the opacity to get the subtle look of the texture around the edge. And voila..."Two Minutes to Twilight" was finished. I named it that because I took it right before the sun went down.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Name: TeaPhotography
Location: Los Angeles County
How I took the shot: Looked in my view finder to see if everything looked good, then I snapped it. Threw it into Photoshop, opened my branch photo. Where did I get the branch photo? Well, I “found” the branch in Angeles National Forest and took it home as a souvenir. I placed the branch against a wall and photographed it. Threw the photos into Photoshop and worked the magic, then added vintage texture to it. That’s basically it. And the model is my older sister. Also dressed her up and forced her to be my slave for the day!

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Artist: Amy, of ara133photography
Photograph location: Spring Mills, PA
How I took the shot: I was driving around late one afternoon looking for storm clouds to photograph, as it had just finished raining. I'd been driving for quite a while, and it was actually getting sunnier and less cloudy! But I turned a corner, and saw the view I was looking for at the top of a little mountain (it's quite hilly in Pennsylvania). The clouds were on the driver's side, so I just pulled over to the side of the road, got halfway out of the car, and took the shot from there. After I got the angle I wanted, I brought it home and tweaked the image until it was just right. I wanted it to remind me of something you'd find in a scene in a children's adventure book, like A Wrinkle in Time or the Neverending Story, my favorite types of books of childhood.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Artist: Lupe Grainne, of Honeytree
Photograph Location: Lopez Island, North of Seattle about 1 1/2 hours, in the San Juan Islands, in a garden I was working in.
How I took the shot: It was taken with the macro lens and I was trying to get the light coming through the flower so I had to almost lay down to get the right angle. The macro focus sort of focused more of the back of the flower than the front but it gives it a dreamy look. This is one of my favorites.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.

How I Did It

Artist: Morgan Kendall, of mkendall
Photograph Location: Atlanta, GA
How I took the shot: This piece is part of my cardboard series. I took regular cardboard and cut objects out of it, in this case a moon and stars. I then tacked the pieces onto a blank wall in my studio and made a little lasso out of some string. Once I got a shot I was happy with using the self timer, I worked on it in photoshop. I overlayed a photo I shot of clouds and a few textures from my library. I really liked doing this series because you, the artist, are actually creating the entire scene. You're only limited by your imagination.

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How I Did It is compiled by Susannah Tucker. Susannah is a self-taught photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been fascinated with photography since she was a young girl, and enjoys experimenting with techniques, layers and textures. View the collection in her shop here.

Please contact Susannah if you would like to participate in a future How I Did It feature.