Feb 2009
Life has certainly got its ups and downs...
Sorry people! I know I have been pretty dodgy at updating but things have been getting pretty nutty around here.
Firstly... my wife is back!!! Yay! She arrived back on 14th February which she has yet to burn into her memory as being Valentine’s Day which made all my surprises all the better. If it wasn’t for the fact she arrived back here nicely flued up we would have been off to a masked dinner that evening which would have looked great on digital, but alas it was not to be! Having seen the photo’s of my friends who did go, I don’t think it was going to be all that good, but hey, it would have been nice.
Secondly, as you see we are now functioning as a company. I am ordering our business cards and today bought a receipt book. I have also ordered another light stand, brolly and batteries for flash. We might have a job coming up within the next week or so which is quite exciting for me in artistic terms - it will be beautiful if it comes through!
Unfortunately, the third part of my news is pretty sad: My Dad’s Dad, known to one and all as Papa is extremely sick. Any of you who are that way inclined please keep him and the family in your prayers. We will be going to stay with my parents from Thursday morning to see him, so we will have to see what God has in plan for him.
Well... trying to end on a lighter note this is the single photo I took whilst waiting for our coach sipping hot chocolate in Terminal 5. I took this one, looked at the screen and decided I didn’t need to take anymore. It was actually fairly gloomy inside, so this is up at ISO 1600 on the D40x, hence the grain, but I love the texture of it.
Read More...
Firstly... my wife is back!!! Yay! She arrived back on 14th February which she has yet to burn into her memory as being Valentine’s Day which made all my surprises all the better. If it wasn’t for the fact she arrived back here nicely flued up we would have been off to a masked dinner that evening which would have looked great on digital, but alas it was not to be! Having seen the photo’s of my friends who did go, I don’t think it was going to be all that good, but hey, it would have been nice.
Secondly, as you see we are now functioning as a company. I am ordering our business cards and today bought a receipt book. I have also ordered another light stand, brolly and batteries for flash. We might have a job coming up within the next week or so which is quite exciting for me in artistic terms - it will be beautiful if it comes through!
Unfortunately, the third part of my news is pretty sad: My Dad’s Dad, known to one and all as Papa is extremely sick. Any of you who are that way inclined please keep him and the family in your prayers. We will be going to stay with my parents from Thursday morning to see him, so we will have to see what God has in plan for him.
Well... trying to end on a lighter note this is the single photo I took whilst waiting for our coach sipping hot chocolate in Terminal 5. I took this one, looked at the screen and decided I didn’t need to take anymore. It was actually fairly gloomy inside, so this is up at ISO 1600 on the D40x, hence the grain, but I love the texture of it.
Read More... |
Up once more...
11/02/09 21:14 Filed in: General
Right, had some difficulties with my internet connection last night, but all back up and running again now and have finally be able to upload the newly layed out site... Still need to modify the homepage although I want a much better photo of my wife and I to stick on it...
She arrives in the UK on Saturday morning, and it’s going to be a day to remember! Photos will follow on the blog, and I am sure you will be interested in what we have lined up for you over the coming weeks!
Take care! Read More...
She arrives in the UK on Saturday morning, and it’s going to be a day to remember! Photos will follow on the blog, and I am sure you will be interested in what we have lined up for you over the coming weeks!
Take care! Read More...
Moving the Blog
09/02/09 20:37 Filed in: General
Hi Everyone.... just a quick note to make sure you update your bookmarks and/or RSS readers later this evening once I have moved the site around a bit. I am going to tidy things up - simplify the site a bit and make the whole thing more user friendly. Once I have done this, there shouldn’t be anymore changes unless I start getting some really heavy traffic on the site and my provider complains!
See you when the ball is over! Read More...
See you when the ball is over! Read More...
Chestnuts roastin' on an open fire...
Well... as you are all very much aware... it’s been snowing in the UK!
As a sort of related note I am going to put my non-work related shoots onto my facebook account rather than into my portfolio as below:
I say sort of related because of the photo’s I have put up there of yesterday afternoon when a few of us went over to Lydiard Park to enjoy the snow, and I of course took my camera. Having been working all week at my day job (one problem with walking to work: not being able to get the car out of the drive isn’t an excuse to have a day off) I haven’t actually had any chance to get some photos in the snow - so I figured I would make up for it!
Tech wise, I went out with the 50mm f/1.8 attached to my D80. I started using my SB-600 a bit, but the photos looked wrong even on the playback window, so I put that back in the bag. Normally some fill light is very useful especially in the pretty hard sun we had yesterday, but I suppose that the reflections coming from the snow made the light much softer. I did however get a bit bored with the 50mm and switched to a lens I haven’t used in a very long time: my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 G. I haven’t really used that lens much since possibly summer ’07 - in fact I forgot it at my Dad’s house where it stayed whilst I was in Saudi. I almost didn’t take it with me, thinking it would be a waste of time, but I am so glad I did take it as almost all of the photos I liked from yesterday where taken with it.
As a general statement I have been getting in a lot closer with my camera recently, letting my wife stand back and pick off photos with her 55-200m VR, and this was the first time in quite a while I have been doing the same.
The main reason for this post however is to show you some before and after shots with some post-processing hints and tips. Within five minutes of putting these photos onto my facebook account yesterday evening I had a good friend asking how I make my photos look like that, so here goes. Credit is due of course to the wonderful guys over at Squeeze the Lime who with their screencast on Friday’s post (watch the video here) pointed me to the ‘Sugar & Spice Sepia’ Lightroom development preset, and through that site many more presets which came in very handy for these photos from yesterdays fun and frollics in the snow.
OK then... first up this nice shot straight out of the camera (well... except of course for the cropping... and the © mark...) of Gabbi about to drop a massive pile of snow on her Dad’s head:
The colours don’t really have a lot of kick with the exception of the pink lens flare (due to the sun hazing out the image more than anything), so this one I treated with a preset called ‘PH Cold Desire’ which you can find on the same site as the Sepia one I mentioned above. The final result looks like this:
Bascially, this preset adds a fairly heavy ‘S’ to the curves, pushes the blacks further into black, brings up the blues (which is why it is called ‘cold’ ) and then adding a vignette. I was pretty happy with this one without any tweaking at all beyond this simple preset, so I left it just like that.
This shot was actually one of the first shots taken of the day, and was with the 50mm lens and the flash at arms length to my left.
After that point I dropped the 50mm for the 70-300mm. The following one of another friend of mine was taken at 70mm, f/4 1/160s exposure.
As you can see, a nice enough picture, just not very exciting with the brighter colours of the kiddy stuff drawing your eye either to the right or to the bottom left. So the first thing I did was to kill the colour, and the ‘Sugar & Spice Sepia’ preset mentioned above turned out to do the job perfectly...
Well... almost... Now with Jerry’s face without any lighting at all, he still disappears into the photo with only his teeth drawing attention. So I used a simple exposure compensation brush, fairly large in size, to bring up the highlights on his face and on the fur of his hood which makes for a much more contrasty look. For me at least the fur makes a much nicer job of framing his face, with the much warmer highlights of the folds of his coat giving depth to an otherwise flat photo which gives me my finished product below:
The last one I want to show you is a photo taken of me by Gabbi at the end of the day. The sun had already set by this time, but it being the middle of winter - it was still quite light and continued like this for another hour or so before it actually got dark. The light was great, with no shadows being cast anywhere - I couldn’t have done that artificially if I had tried which goes to show that God is a far better lighting specialist than any of us give Him credit for. This below is straight out of the camera. It took a little while to get it as I was teaching Gabbi how to select focus points and use the camera, but she is doing very well. You may remember her from other shoots (including her birthday party) and she is very interested in photography which means it is quite handy her whole family are such good friends with my wife and I! 95mm, f/4.2, 1/60s @ ISO 360 (Auto ISO keeping the shutter at a min of 60 which is what I tend to leave it on unless I have good reason to change).
Anyway... whilst a very nice photo in its own right which with perhaps a small push of the colours would be great, I wanted something a bit more dramatic. So out comes the preset ‘x-warm+storm’ which is also available from the same site above (for free as all of them are). It seems to push almost every slider in Lightroom upwards (with the exception of contrast which believe it or not is dropped a bit). You can also clearly see how terrible it makes this shot look!
So first thing to do to tame the whole thing is turn the exposure slider waaaay back down again. I had to drop it by nearly a whole stop to get the highlights back into something resembling control.
At this point the darker parts of the picture where back where I wanted them, so I then pushed the highlight recovery up to around 70% which brings back the detail in the sky and the right side of my face. This is one of the best portraits ever of me (although my wife has gotten a couple of beauties in the past) which is now proudly adorning my facebook profile.
I hope that has shed some light on digital post processing for some of you... I am very thankful for the weekends culmination of that video from Squeeze the Lime with great snow and good friends... Life is good... and its going to get even better because finally this coming Saturday my wife arrives back in the UK!!! Yay! We will start marketing properly now and try and get some real shoots on here which I am really looking forward to. Still planning on changing the site around a bit, probably moving the blog onto blogger and possibly my portfolio onto flickr (or perhaps picassa depending) to take strain off my site and keep my hosting charges down as I expect traffic to start picking up now. None of this should effect the site if you are reading through a web browser, but if you are reading the blog through RSS I will make sure I let you know before any changes do happen.
Well... expect big things so make sure you keep coming back to the site as we will have some cool stuff coming up - I am waiting to see if I will have a shoot week after next for a group in Swindon who want some formal portraits as well as action portraits which promises to be fun, and will give me the chance to show you some more complex lighting setups. Stay tuned - Good Night and Good Luck! Read More...
As a sort of related note I am going to put my non-work related shoots onto my facebook account rather than into my portfolio as below:
I say sort of related because of the photo’s I have put up there of yesterday afternoon when a few of us went over to Lydiard Park to enjoy the snow, and I of course took my camera. Having been working all week at my day job (one problem with walking to work: not being able to get the car out of the drive isn’t an excuse to have a day off) I haven’t actually had any chance to get some photos in the snow - so I figured I would make up for it!
Tech wise, I went out with the 50mm f/1.8 attached to my D80. I started using my SB-600 a bit, but the photos looked wrong even on the playback window, so I put that back in the bag. Normally some fill light is very useful especially in the pretty hard sun we had yesterday, but I suppose that the reflections coming from the snow made the light much softer. I did however get a bit bored with the 50mm and switched to a lens I haven’t used in a very long time: my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 G. I haven’t really used that lens much since possibly summer ’07 - in fact I forgot it at my Dad’s house where it stayed whilst I was in Saudi. I almost didn’t take it with me, thinking it would be a waste of time, but I am so glad I did take it as almost all of the photos I liked from yesterday where taken with it.
As a general statement I have been getting in a lot closer with my camera recently, letting my wife stand back and pick off photos with her 55-200m VR, and this was the first time in quite a while I have been doing the same.
The main reason for this post however is to show you some before and after shots with some post-processing hints and tips. Within five minutes of putting these photos onto my facebook account yesterday evening I had a good friend asking how I make my photos look like that, so here goes. Credit is due of course to the wonderful guys over at Squeeze the Lime who with their screencast on Friday’s post (watch the video here) pointed me to the ‘Sugar & Spice Sepia’ Lightroom development preset, and through that site many more presets which came in very handy for these photos from yesterdays fun and frollics in the snow.
OK then... first up this nice shot straight out of the camera (well... except of course for the cropping... and the © mark...) of Gabbi about to drop a massive pile of snow on her Dad’s head:
The colours don’t really have a lot of kick with the exception of the pink lens flare (due to the sun hazing out the image more than anything), so this one I treated with a preset called ‘PH Cold Desire’ which you can find on the same site as the Sepia one I mentioned above. The final result looks like this:
Bascially, this preset adds a fairly heavy ‘S’ to the curves, pushes the blacks further into black, brings up the blues (which is why it is called ‘cold’ ) and then adding a vignette. I was pretty happy with this one without any tweaking at all beyond this simple preset, so I left it just like that.
This shot was actually one of the first shots taken of the day, and was with the 50mm lens and the flash at arms length to my left.
After that point I dropped the 50mm for the 70-300mm. The following one of another friend of mine was taken at 70mm, f/4 1/160s exposure.
As you can see, a nice enough picture, just not very exciting with the brighter colours of the kiddy stuff drawing your eye either to the right or to the bottom left. So the first thing I did was to kill the colour, and the ‘Sugar & Spice Sepia’ preset mentioned above turned out to do the job perfectly...
Well... almost... Now with Jerry’s face without any lighting at all, he still disappears into the photo with only his teeth drawing attention. So I used a simple exposure compensation brush, fairly large in size, to bring up the highlights on his face and on the fur of his hood which makes for a much more contrasty look. For me at least the fur makes a much nicer job of framing his face, with the much warmer highlights of the folds of his coat giving depth to an otherwise flat photo which gives me my finished product below:
The last one I want to show you is a photo taken of me by Gabbi at the end of the day. The sun had already set by this time, but it being the middle of winter - it was still quite light and continued like this for another hour or so before it actually got dark. The light was great, with no shadows being cast anywhere - I couldn’t have done that artificially if I had tried which goes to show that God is a far better lighting specialist than any of us give Him credit for. This below is straight out of the camera. It took a little while to get it as I was teaching Gabbi how to select focus points and use the camera, but she is doing very well. You may remember her from other shoots (including her birthday party) and she is very interested in photography which means it is quite handy her whole family are such good friends with my wife and I! 95mm, f/4.2, 1/60s @ ISO 360 (Auto ISO keeping the shutter at a min of 60 which is what I tend to leave it on unless I have good reason to change).
Anyway... whilst a very nice photo in its own right which with perhaps a small push of the colours would be great, I wanted something a bit more dramatic. So out comes the preset ‘x-warm+storm’ which is also available from the same site above (for free as all of them are). It seems to push almost every slider in Lightroom upwards (with the exception of contrast which believe it or not is dropped a bit). You can also clearly see how terrible it makes this shot look!
So first thing to do to tame the whole thing is turn the exposure slider waaaay back down again. I had to drop it by nearly a whole stop to get the highlights back into something resembling control.
At this point the darker parts of the picture where back where I wanted them, so I then pushed the highlight recovery up to around 70% which brings back the detail in the sky and the right side of my face. This is one of the best portraits ever of me (although my wife has gotten a couple of beauties in the past) which is now proudly adorning my facebook profile.
I hope that has shed some light on digital post processing for some of you... I am very thankful for the weekends culmination of that video from Squeeze the Lime with great snow and good friends... Life is good... and its going to get even better because finally this coming Saturday my wife arrives back in the UK!!! Yay! We will start marketing properly now and try and get some real shoots on here which I am really looking forward to. Still planning on changing the site around a bit, probably moving the blog onto blogger and possibly my portfolio onto flickr (or perhaps picassa depending) to take strain off my site and keep my hosting charges down as I expect traffic to start picking up now. None of this should effect the site if you are reading through a web browser, but if you are reading the blog through RSS I will make sure I let you know before any changes do happen.
Well... expect big things so make sure you keep coming back to the site as we will have some cool stuff coming up - I am waiting to see if I will have a shoot week after next for a group in Swindon who want some formal portraits as well as action portraits which promises to be fun, and will give me the chance to show you some more complex lighting setups. Stay tuned - Good Night and Good Luck! Read More...