Easter weekend was pretty cool, after the revelation of the Friday leading to the photos of my wife from two posts ago, plus her Birthday on the Saturday and shooting Sarah on the Monday, it was quite busy!
Sunday was no different as more than fifteen of us got together at Carla and Binho’s house for a good ol’ Brazilian Barbecue! The meat had been marinating all night, and it tasted amazing! Also worked out pretty cheap... a tonne of meat and only £4 per head!
Well, I’ll have to post some of the shots of the BBQ itself at some point, but midway through the afternoon (as in midway between lunch and lighting the BBQ again for supper...) we got some photos of those who had hung around after the first round of eating. We where practising this manual lighting trick we had just picked up so that we had it down well for when Sarah graced our presence on Monday - thankfully it came quite naturally so no problem! Full manual flash and exposure for most of this. A few are natural light... but not many I do find it quite amusing how some of these photos look like we set up a garden within a studio which we certainly did not! Definitely something I will be watching though, I do need to check what look I am going for... I certainly don’t want somebody’s wedding looking like it was staged...
First up Jonas and Rejane whom you have of course seen before. Re is newly pregnant with her second child (some eleven years after her first one) so we made sure we got some shots of the growing belly!



Next up was Sylvie with her gorgeous little daughter Bia. They are new to the area, but Sylvie and her husband (who was working unfortunately) where Groomsman and Bridesmaid at Jonas and Re’s wedding!



Carla and Binho (the hosts for the day) always look great in photos... these photos just need a little more treatment too




And finally put it back to full TTL flash and exposure before handing the camera’s over to Re and Carla so me and the missus can get at least a few shots together which is something we do miss.



Whilst Re was showing the others some of the photos she took, I took the opportunity to demonstrate how all of these shots had been done. Pretty simple right? By this point I was 1/125sec, f/4 ISO 100 and something like 1/4 on the flash.


Right... that’s it for now. Few more nibbles for shoots so hopefully we should have more new stuff for you coming up soon too...
Take care all! Read More...

Right... its been a couple of weeks since I have blogged but it has been pretty busy for the pair of us and we have some interesting photos to show and more to come over the next couple of weeks...
To start with we where in Milton Keynes last Friday as we had my Granddad’s funeral. I was there with my Dad, one of my Uncles and my cousin carrying the coffin into and out of the church. It is pretty tough, but with somebody like Papa (which is how all of us grandchildren always knew him) its hard to be too sad... although we will miss him greatly he has left so much behind in terms of his love and influence. I will post some of the photos from the reception another time, but while we where there we went for a walk with my Uncle and Aunt near to the home my Grandparents where in. Spring is such a great time of the year, and despite the mixture of weather during the day, everything was just so beautiful.






I grabbed some nice informal shots of my Uncle and Aunt as well as my cousin as well:



My cousin sporting his Hillsong hoody which is the church he goes to.
Cátia was just breathing deeply in the gorgeous early evening sun we had in glimpses.

I love this time of year, and with the whole family together it was just so beautiful. I will write more about the great man that Papa was (and in many ways still is) when I put some of those photos up, but it really didn’t feel like a funeral at all. The fondness and love displayed and felt by all made it feel more like a wedding or something like that.

He will truly be greatly missed.

I am going to be doing an interesting shoot tomorrow which hopefully I will be able to post before I am back to work on Tuesday... this one should turn out beautifully... and that’s not mentioning the Barbecue on Sunday!

Well... I have to go prepare for tomorrow’s shoot, and eat something, but I will have a couple of good posts for you over the next few days, so keep your ears to the ground... Read More...

Right, been an interesting couple of weeks and only now am I able to get around to explaining it. I do unfortunately mean ‘able’ as my Macbook Pro has gone to rest with the fishes so to speak. The day we where off to see my Granddad it just wouldn’t start, so as we where going to meet my Mum and sister in Milton Keynes city centre, we popped into the Apple store first. Basically, from a cold start, it doesn’t even go to the famous mac ‘chime’ (for those who don’t know what that sounds like cos you are still struggling along with some Windows based, its the same sound Wall-E makes when he is done charging his solar cells up). The very helpful genius went through several possibilities and came to the conclusion that motherboard itself was to blame which meant a repair of more than I wished to spend. It being out of the warranty it was going to cost me heftily, and as I possibly had a photo shoot that Sunday, I needed a computer of some sorts, so on the way out of the store, I picked up a 20” iMac. And boy am I chuffed! I haven’t lost any files (I will have to explain my backup system as some point) but the offline version of this site which works with Rapidweaver was the only thing I hadn’t copied over, so it has taken me a week to get the MBP open to pull out the HDD which means I am now back to normal.
Thanks for prayers for my Granddad - he is past the immediate danger although of course he is ultimately still very sick.
Onto some photography for today then. Firstly onto my favourite muse: my wife! These where taken just after she got back from Brazil as she was really chuffed with her nails which she had had done just before she came back here and the pyjamas I had given her for Valentine’s day. These where very simply done with just the flash bounced off the ceiling in our living room, and in the first one I was also holding in my left hand a 9” Nikon branded reflector under her chin.



The next three where inspired by some of the latest video tutorials from Squeeze the Lime with regards to the engagements sessions. These where taken near the section of Canal near my house as we had gone out to feed the ducks. We went exploring off a little bit and found another way out of the area back to ‘civilisation’ but with a nice bit of fencing and a few cool trees around to add interest to the photos.



These where all fairly quick edits, I think I can play with them a bit more, so this post might get updated at some point, but I am pretty happy with them. There seems to be a pretty good chance of us moving closer to Coate Water in a couple of months, which will be nice for even more outside work.
Unfortunately, the shoot I was hoping to have last Sunday fell through. Firstly a guy offered to do it for free, then he couldn’t so it looked like I might be back on, but then he was able to do it again before they marked me for definite. I didn’t mind the messing around so much as I minded what I was replaced with. The guy apparently had ‘all his own gear’ including studio lights. Having seen the photos on my mates Facebook page I feel really bad. I had plans for great artistic photos, whereas this guy just stood a single strobe about a metre to his side, I would have to guess with a reflective brolly from the harsher light and type of shadow cast. The poses just don’t seem to have much life except one which my friend tells me was actually a happy accident caused by them and not the photographer. I know I could have done so much more for them for the pittance I was charging them (being for a friend and with my still limited portfolio) than what they received. I wouldn’t have minded if I had been replaced by a better photographer, perhaps a more experienced one or something like that, but I feel really sorry for them with the fact that their adverts are being made with these very bland photos.
Nevermind, we have a couple of family/couples type shoots we are sorting out terms on, so you can expect some other new stuff to fill out my portfolio - and who knows what else we might have! Read More...

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:
Feel free to add me if you want, I do let people know more about what I am up to on my facebook account than on my blog that is for sure!
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...