Archive for January, 2010
Same session. Before.
I like the idea and the pose but the sky is just an interruption and the image lacks crispiness.
Here’s the after.
A bit more of a ’70s album cover look. Some people might be offended by this type of shoot taking place in a graveyard. It wasn’t the intention to offend anyone. I’ve always been fascinated by them. They are timeless places. This one in Forest Row, Sussex, is a pretty good example.
I’ve been told to put my before and after images in that order so here is the before first.
It isn’t particularly exciting. But I’d been imagining the end result for about a week before we did the shoot which, I might add, took place this very morning at about 7:15 AM. An outrageous time to be up and about let alone after having got up, splashed some water, got dressed, then driven to pick up Aled, then driven to the site. I was amazed at how easy I found it even without coffee.
I like the pose, the expression and the light. The face is a bit burnt out and the background lacks detail in some places and has too much in others. It also lacks the essential rock star punch for an image of this sort.
So after a little processing, actually quite a bit and I didn’t note all the details, we come to this.
Way more than I’d normally use but I think it works in this context. What say you?
I saw the news about the new Apple iPad and instantly thought it would be an amazing device for showing my portfolio. I have actually gotten work as a result of showing some portfolio pics on my Sony Ericsson w580i and that has a pretty small screen. The iPad is just a little bit smaller than a 10×8 print!
I love Apple design but have yet to buy a single product from them. This is quite likely to be the first even though it lacks several features I would have liked. As Scott Kelby says, “It isn’t what it does it is HOW it does it”. Jeff Revell has a good post on it too. In fact these two are the best I’ve seen so far.
It took around 29 attempts to get the pose right. I bashed my shin on the chair several times in the rush to get into position. I’m happier with it than I thought I would be.
Here’s the almost straight out of camera. Actually it went through Camera Raw first and was then cropped a little. But you can clearly see what was done in the processing.
Above is the finished result and it took a bit of work. It started with simple removal of dirt marks on the background and general cleanup. There were curves, colour balance and saturation adjustments. Lots of dodging and burning. Noise removal after the crop and a final high pass filter to add more pop. I’m quite happy with the result but it also shows how a little on axis fill would have saved some work in post.
Below is the straight out of camera image.
David Hobby of Strobist has been banging on about “on axis fill” for a while and I finally remembered I wanted to play with the idea a little when I was in a situation that might warrant it. That situation came up last Saturday when I was looking at my sleeping son Josh.
Last Saturday was a cold January day in London and we were comfortably warm and inside at the time. There was no sun to be seen. But I thought I would try and create some sunlight and use on axis fill to balance it with. “On axis” is a fancy way of saying that the fill light was coming from pretty much the same point of view as the lens. I was in fact using the on camera flash.
I was also using an SB-24 as the “direct sunlight”. This was gridded and snooted and placed a few yards away at camera right and was pointing at his face. I don’t remember the power setting but it was probably around 1/4.
I wanted to shoot with a fairly open lens which was set at f5.6 and I established the exposure for that aperture was 1/25sec at iso 200. Then I just shot away adjusting the on camera fill flash from -2
up to plus 2
and several stages in between. The difference in mood is striking. In the end I prefered the first setting (top picture) in this situation. The degree of fine tuning possible is really good and I am very happy with this first experiment. I used the same technique in the earlier post on Alex though I wasn’t going for a naturally lit looking shot there.
I’m just done with the processing on the above image of Alex. I like it. I hope he does too.
Below you can see the image as it appeared straight out of camera. So rather than describe everything I did in the processing I’ll let the two images speak for themselves.
I knew what I wanted the final result to look like and I also knew that I would need to remove a bunch of distracting detail from the original. The result is pretty close to what I had in mind. I don’t mind using photoshop to get the result I wanted but it would have been faster if he had just changed his clothes in the first place.
More than half a lifetime ago I attended an art college where I studied photography. Now things may have gotten better since then but I somehow doubt it. Most of the students, myself included, were at college to avoid work and for the social life of a student. Hey what is youth for?
In my two years I was shown a dazzling array of techniques but was not required nor even inclined to master any of them. read on
Danny worked really hard for hours to get a really good finish on this van. It took me about 20 minutes to get a good finish on him!
This was shot with the available light in a car park in East Grinstead, Sussex, and exposed for the skin tone of his upper arm. It was shot raw, as all my work is, to gain the greatest amount of image information in the file. That way I know there is lots more detail in the file that can be brought out in processing if need be.
It was first processed in camera raw. I raised the blacks and adjusted the overall tones. In Photoshop I used a plugin called Topaz Adjust to bring out the detail in the reflection. This adjustment was on it’s own layer so that I could mask off the areas of the image other than the red van. Then I adjusted the opacity of this layer to get the result you see above.
By request I’ve added the straight out of camera jpg with no processing at all other than resizing for the web.
Looks to me like he missed a bit.
I’m liking the idea of pictures that look like scenes from movies. This is the first in what I expect may become a long series.
If you’d like to appear or assist in one use the contact page to let me know. If you think the idea stinks or is cool let me know in the comments.
This image was shot in July 2008 and processed on the 1st of August that year. It was a memorable experience for me. My newly developed lighting skills were beginning to show good results and I finally had enough confidence in my lighting and camera setting abilities to actually start looking and paying attention to the subject in front of the lens.
Once into Photoshop I started looking to find more ways of directing the viewer’s attention at what I thought were the important details in the shot, mainly the eyes. So I de-saturated the leaves of the hedge behind the subject and made some other tweaks in the same direction.
This is another from the same session. Different treatment. The first one got the most votes but I kinda like this one too. I like the grittier look.
