The Best Free Gifts for the Photographer in Your Life

It's that time of year, endless promotions, endless lines and endless line items on the credit card statement. With the constant reminders to consume, it's easy to lose sight of the reason for the season. Buying gifts for a photographer can be a blessing or a curse. Many photographers, like myself, have very specific demands of our equipment and with all the random professional photographers and companies hocking their wares, it's easy to buy something pretty useless (and expensive) for us. I'll refrain from naming specifics since one man's garbage is another one's treasure. The blessing is that our very craft lends itself to some simple, inexpensive but valuable gifts:

• Provide the photographer in your life an hour of your time to model. We have tons of projects in our heads but between watching kids and paying the bills, it can be difficult to find creative time.
• Watch the kids for an hour so they can go out and photograph the sunset, the sunrise or the diaper pale (hey one man's trash is another man's "art"). This is one can either be called a gift or a sacrifice depending on your perspective.
• Shoot your photographer. Um, let me clarify that. Don't kill them, just take some pictures of them. Funny thing about photographers is we hardly have any photos of ourselves and they actually can be quite handy should we ever forget what we look like.

If you want to go on a spending splurge you can always create a coupon book for your photographer with all of the above and more. The funny thing of course is that Christmas is all about the ultimate free gift that everyone gets and no one has to do anything for. Blessings and Holiday cheer to all!

Baby Photography Tip: I've found myself horsing around a lot with Photoshop recently as part of a concerted effort to understand all the ins and outs of this most obtuse software package. While capturing memories on my camera is the utmost priority, the fact is that Photoshop, done well, makes for really dramatic images. It is also a lot like raising children where the basics of eating, feeding and sleeping are well understood but peel back the onion and you want to cry. Nonetheless, there are a bunch of actions and effects I'm standardizing on as part of a makeover going into the new year of which this photo demonstrates an extensive use of layers, curves and automation via actions/scripts. Believe it or not, I used to write software so it's fun to tinker with the latter and it helps keep labor costs and therefore prices reasonable for my clients.

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Cydney Caley Leigh Emily Annie Maude