My own worst enemy

I seem to be lost in a sea of confusion and distractions. I sit down to work on generating leads for future business or work on finishing my pricing matrix and I can’t focus because I am looking around my living room and want to do something to clean up the clutter and mess. Then I get overwhelmed by the clutter, unable to figure out where to start, so then I don’t do anything. I give up and watch TV or play a video game or take a nap. I am a really good photographer, but it appears that I am even better at self-sabotage. That sums me up.


The truth of the matter is that I am simply using the clutter as an excuse to fail. When I fail I can say, “It was because of [insert excuse here].” I can blame it on the cluttered living room. I can blame it on the fact that my life is interrupted every two weeks by my kids. I can blame it on not having the latest gadget. I can blame it on the phase of the moon. I can make up 10000 excuses for the failure, but the only reason for the failure will be me. That is a hard pill to swallow.

I am making these distractions. I am making these excuses. I am making my own failure. How do I go about fixing that? I need to figure out why I am afraid of succeeding, because it all comes down to fear. This is going be both easy and difficult. It is going to be easy because there are thousand reasons for fear of success; my childhood and youth is a virtual landmine of success killers. It is going to be difficult because I am going to have to be honest with myself about my fears; I am going to face these fears and come to terms with the skeletons in my closet. This process isn’t going to be fun. It is going to be an emotional rollercoaster of a trip. But I have to get my shit together, and soon, or things are going to go horribly wrong real fast.

Another thing I am dealing with is this emotion of shame for charging for my work. Even though I know that I am worth every penny I charge I have to assert myself into actually charging my rates or my wife and I will be homeless real soon. Now if you know me in real life, you have possibly heard me assert myself in talking with others in regards to charging for their work and to stop doing it for free, but alas, I am, it appears, one of those who can’t practice what they preach. This needs to change.

Anyone out there in the cyber (or real) world have ideas how to do this on your own without paying thousands in therapy. I am not opposed to therapy, but really can’t afford it right now for the obvious reasons of no insurance and lack of employment. Things to ponder for the short term I guess. Real short term.

Until next time… don’t under value yourself or your art.

Lightroom Preset: CMS-High Key

Wow I am running so behind on everything, even blogging.

Before High Key Preset

The purpose of high key in photography is to remove as much of the dark tone from the photograph as possible creating a noticeable lack of contrast.

High Key images have a bright and happy feel to them, especially compared to Low Key images which are dark and moody.  This bright happy feel tends to allow the view to experience positive emotions. Keep this in mind when selecting your high key subjects. High Key adds a nice effect of softening the image through tonal control and High Key works extremely well for removing any skin imperfections as well.

For this preset to work your image must be at least properly exposed. Under exposed images will generally experience noise and only appear to be slightly over exposed; rather than high key.


This preset is accomplished by bumping the exposure and brightness quite a bit, but also adding some fill light and tweaking the tone curve with the following settings:

In the after-image on the right, you can see the final results. A strong light feeling is applied to the portrait and there is a nice loss of detail to the skin which cleans the image up nicely. And although the subject's facial details are lost, this is sort of the point. High Key works really well with non-people subjects like a white rose on a white backgorund, or even chess pieces. Have fun with this.  

Download Here

To install the preset, copy the file in the zip (xxx.lrtemplate) to your Develop Presets folder on your computer. If you don't know where to find this folder, open Lightroom. Click on Edit menu and select Preferences. Click on the Presets tab and click the Show Lightroom Presets Folder... button.


Sorry for the delay in getting this out... but it is here now. Enjoy. Come back on Monday for another preset.

Highlights: -66

Lights: +43

Darks: +100

Shadows +9


After High Key Preset