Shelly Perry, from Portland, Oregon, left a decade-long career working with children in a social services capacity to pursue her life-long love of photography in 2003. Now an established professional, her images have been seen all over the globe on album covers, books, magazines, catalogues, websites, ad campaigns, and even on TV. Her work has also appeared in several local exhibits and gallery shows.
While she makes most of her photography income through stock, her real photography love is documentary and creative fine art. An excellent presenter, Shelly has joined numerous Great Escape workshops to share her experiences and help our readers to follow in her footsteps. Shelly’s specialty is people photography - what she calls documentary or lifestyle portraits.
Today: I can't imagine ever having a "regular job" again.
Best adventure: I have had so many epic moments, but these are a few standouts: swimming with the giant sea turtles in the Galapagos, walking the Great Wall of China, riding an elephant in Thailand (way better than riding a camel in Egypt), flying in a tiny piper plane over the wilds of Alaska, being at the Lantern Festival in Thailand, seeing the Shaman in Ecuador, meeting and making friends all over the world.
Favorite Photographer: Gregory Colbert
People don’t know: I’m scared of heights!
Here in the Pacific Northwest, this holiday season brought us a winter wonderland. And, looking through the entries for this month’s Photo Challenge, I see it’s snowing all around the U.S., too. Venturing out with my camera to capture the snow, I was reminded of how tricky it can be to shoot for good results, […]
Shelly Perry here. I shoot a lot of portraits. It works well for me because I like photographing people, and my people shots are usually good sellers for stock — so sometimes I make twice the money. Occasionally, a client will ask me for a CD of all the images I took of her — […]
No matter where you’re submitting your images, it’s critically important to read and follow the guidelines. Any place that accepts photo submissions — whether it’s a newspaper, magazine, gallery, stock site, or contest — will have some specific requirements and you’ll get published more (and make more money for your photos) if you follow them […]
This full-body pose is the quickest way to look slimmer in photos – and it works on almost everyone. Just flip through a beauty magazine and you’ll see models and celebrities doing it on every page. Here’s how to do it, step by step: ** 1.) A person’s body positioned at a 45-degree angle appears […]
Yesterday I told you about our new e-book: How to Look 10 Pounds Thinner and 20 Years Younger in Every Photo You Take. And I said the tips inside are so good, I’ve pulled three of them out for this week’s newsletter to run as a special How-to-Look-Good-in-Photographs series. Today is the first of that […]
This month’s photo challenge theme Laughable Photographable has brought in a lot of funny pictures. Several of them, I noticed, have one thing in common. And that one thing is actually the element that makes the photograph funny. It’s the photographer’s unusual perspective. What I mean by “perspective” is the photographer’s vantage point… or where […]
Every image needs some processing before you can sell it as stock. Think of it like taking photos with film. When you shoot film, it doesn’t come out of the camera as a finished print. What you have is the negative, which needs to be processed. Digital files straight out of your camera are like […]
Last week we took a look at adjusting underexposed photos in Photoshop with Levels and Curves. As promised, today we’ll look at the Lightroom rescue remedy for those underexposed shots… The first thing you will have to do is import your photo into Lightroom (for instructions on how to do that click here). I’ve chosen […]
You’ll remember we covered how your camera reads light and interprets what it sees to achieve “middle gray” and proper exposure. You can find that article in our archives, here. Most of the time your camera is fairly accurate. But what happens if you have a once-in-a-lifetime shot that’s underexposed? Is there a way to […]
May is officially Physical Fitness Month. Which means that the education world (at least here in the U.S.) celebrates national physical fitness and sport. With this and the upcoming controversial Summer Olympics in Beijing taking top slots in the news these days, I thought we could turn our creative attention to sport — hence this […]
