As promised last week, another theory post for you. This one is about part of a new philosophy I have been kind of working on, which is also a large part because of the situation in which I am being placed. It seems with my day job there will be a lot of travelling for me to do over the coming months which could be a lot of fun for my portrait work, which it seems is going to become a principle part of our business. One thing I do need to do is expand my current portrait portfolio beyond where it is now as I am really not happy with it. Whilst there are some good photos in there, they are missing something and don’t fit in with the vision I have. I am planning to redo my portfolio pages to be more representative of my select work rather than a series of books covering the different shoots I have done. That will also allow me to include some of the odd photos which currently don’t have a whole page to themselves as there are only a couple of photos from a particular shoot (such as the Boudoir stuff or other test shoots my wife and I have done with each other.
This got me thinking a lot about where we need to invest our money as previously I had a fairly fixed view of our capital outlay on equipment and such based upon Wedding Photography being our primary business. As we don’t work Saturdays for religious reasons, it seems we are not going to be able to concentrate in that direction yet. So with out portrait photography, what should we be looking to do? I have been looking at ways to simplify my gear requirements and in doing so have come to some interesting conclusions.
Nowadays, most of the time I leave the house for anything other than work, I carry with me my little Lowepro Topload Camera Bag . I had bought the bag for my Nikon D40x with its 18-55mm and was pleasantly surprised that it also worked with the 55-200mm lens. Much better than either of those however is the setup it currently carries. I carry my D80 with the 50mm f/1.8 lens attached. I was very happy to discover that my SB-600 flash will fit perfectly on top of that and still close. In the front pocket I will carry my gels, the foot that comes with the SB-600 so I can stand it anywhere and a 12” Zebra/White reflector that came free with my flash. With that little kit, I am able to take some fairly advanced photos without much effort. Take for example the below photo taken a few days ago:

This shot of spring has a lot of interest. The Snowdrops pushing their way up through the mulch of the forest floor. The morning light wafting in front camera right, the richness of the green. It all looks very idyllic. Except of course that it was taken in a tiny strip of trees not far from my house with a busy road not 20 yards from my right shoulder and that splash of sunlight came on a Saturday afternoon on a cloudy day. So how did I do it? Simple, I sat my SB-600 on its little foot way off camera right and triggered it at 1/64th power (in fact, I had to move the flash back to retain the low depth of field and still have some ambient light mixed in) which gives the kick of light you see so clearly.
So, how has this affected me and what am I going to be changing?
Firstly, I am looking to cram as much as I possibly can into as small a space as possible. I will have the car to hold thing like a light stand, but I don't want to carry much about with me. I want to have just one bag that will cover my needs for my day job and for my photography so I can always have anything of value about my person at all times without looking like a pack mule. This means some kind of field bag (originally used by Botanists) and I really like the look of the Duluth Trading Company Fire Hose Field Bag which I will try to get shipped over here to Swindon as soon as I can.
Now, work related stuff that will need to go with me everywhere will consist of a legal pad, pens and with any luck an iPad. I will need a small organiser to fit my receipts and the like in, but other than that, there should be nothing else to carry in the bag.
So that leaves me with quite a bit of space for photographic kit - but not enough for a full blown photojournalists tool kit. So what am I planning on then?
Firstly, the camera. After coming across the blog of Laurence Kim and then a few weeks later David Hobby posting a review on the same subject, I am almost 100% sure I will go for a Canon G11. Full manual control and a hot shoe for the size of a chunky pocket camera? Do I need to ask for anything else? Oh yeah... sweet sync speed allowing me to overpower the sun with a normal flash. Great for doing funky portraits even in the middle of the day. So that brings the question of triggering... as I currently use Nikon's CLS system, I am going to need something else. At a guess, I am going to go with the Cactus Triggers from Gadget Infinity. These are cheap and fairly reliable which is good enough for me. At a later date when I go for some big flash I imagine I will either go with either Elinchrom's Skyport or Pocket Wizards but am not sure on that yet.
I already own one SB600, and I am going to need a second light fairly soon if I am going to move to the Canon. Especially as the depth of field will be greater meaning I am going to have to use light and contrast to separate the model from the background in a portrait rather than being able to blur the background. I am going to have to see whether I can afford to go for a second SB600 which would be my preferred option or whether I will go for a Vivitar style thing (Gadget Infinity actually make a clone of the now out of production Vivitar).
How to hold the light in place without a lightstand then? Well, I am trying to decide between two Manfrotto parts, the 175F Justin Clamp or the Super Clamp. Both will do the job of clamping my flash to absolutely anything very well indeed.
Modifiers? Well, the Speedlight Pro Kit looks very nice indeed and isn't all that expensive, so I feel I will lean towards those in the beginning. They even have a beauty dish now which I do really want to play with.
As far as Light Stands to keep in the car, I think I am going to want something pretty heavy duty and will almost certainly buy a boom for it. That way I can easily put something above the model, even if they are jumping or moving. A couple of brollies will easily fit in the car alongside those.
So that's the gear... now about the philosophy.
As I will be travelling anyway, I will be in hotels fairly regularly. With the help of Facebook, Twitter (not yet setup on that, but I would do before trying this) and sites like Model Mayhem, I could find models/subjects in the area where I will be staying. That means, I can finish my day job and then spend time with a model taking photos in various parts of the country (and possibly the world of course...). I already have many friends in different places so can play around with different types of shoot as well. This will give me the chance to spend more time shooting, learning, experimenting and building a really strong portfolio to allow me to take bigger and better paid jobs as time goes on. Best of all - I can do this for fun and that is really what my photography is supposed to be about - me doing what I love! I have many photos in my current portfolio I am not happy with, nor in fact did I enjoy taking and that is the biggest thing I want to change. As I mentioned in my last post I am supposed to be having a Maternity shoot this weekend, which is one I am looking forward to, and as I am borrowing a second SB600 I want to try for some nice hard light + fill shots which will give my ring light a change to actually be used and then some work with my strip boxes. 

Recently my wife and I went to an intimate concert held in Oxford by a Brazilian singer named Leonardo Gonçalves who happens to be old friends with the Pastor of the Portuguese Language Adventist Church in Oxford. When he came over to visit on the way back from Switzerland he gave a small concert. I have his current CD and really love his music, as does my wife, so we where both excited about being there to see him perform up close.
I took my normal camera bag which I take everywhere when I don’t know what is going to happen which consists of my D80, my 18-55, in this case I decided on my 55-200 rather than my 70-300, my 50mm f/1.8 and my flash with one light stand and two brollies (one shoot though, one silver) plus the normal load of small things, like the StoFen, gels etc. Quite portable and not much bother to carry around. Upon arriving, I did my normal thing for interiors which is pull out my 50mm f/1.8 on Aperture priority and have a go. The results were quite pleasing, although nothing special at all. I was almost resigned to just ‘recording’ the event rather than creating any art, when I remembered an article from David Hobby over at Strobist where he explains how to light a gym with two speedlights, which I modified to suit the locale (and the single speedlight in my camera bag). I set up the flash stage left, in front of where he would be singing from, pointed up to the far vaulted ceiling some eight metres away and further backstage which was conveniently white and controlled the power using Nikon’s CLS from the back of the camera. With this setup, the live portraits from the concert had a lot more punch in them with the double effect of hard light coming from stage left and soft fill bouncing off the ceiling coming from stage right. Add in some ambient as well and I can control the contrast with the flick of my shutter dial. So when it comes to live portraits, this setup allowed me complete freedom to move around and get different angles at different distances keeping exposure completely consistent in full manual mode. This shot was ISO 800, 200mm, f/5.6 at 1/100s and I believe the flash was on 1/2 power:

As you can see, the harsh light coming from behind him, camera right and the nice wash coming from over my left shoulder filling in his face. To get this level of contrast and therefore interest in this portrait without the flash would have been impossible. A couple of other people where there with newer and flashier cameras than me with better lenses than the 55-200mm VR however when afterwards comparing our shots, it was clear that the photos I got were much more than just a recording of what happened but a moment of true art which is something I am always striving for. It is amazing what can be done with a little light - David Hobby has really created something amazing with the Strobist movement and I have really integrated these simple tools into my portrait repertoire. Now, whether natural light, reflectors or small flash, I am flexible to solve the problems that come up. With any luck I will be able to add big lights into that mix later this year as well... but that really depends on what jobs we get and whether we will need to overpower the sun much in our portrait work, or end up doing much more studio style stuff like I did with our first Boudoir Session and like I will be doing this coming weekend for a Maternity Session.
During his set though he introduced his wife of nine months, Daniela Araujo, which was a real surprise as I had never heard of her, but she sang a couple of really emotional songs that I really loved. She is releasing her first CD this summer which I will definitely get hold as soon as it comes out. You can hear some of her music on her MySpace page.
She really put herself into her songs, and the simplicity of the backing tracks added on top of the emotion she displayed really came over beautifully. The following photo was during an instrumental section of the first song as she was meditating on the music (same EXIF as above):

I love her expression, and indeed she has a face that moves all over the place with her emotions throughout the songs.
I really enjoyed seeing both of them and look forward to new CDs from both of them soon.
Coming up I have an interesting article on why you should always have your camera with you, and in fact how to go beyond your simple camera phone to taking photos worthwhile. My day job might be up for some changes soon which could mean I will me travelling a lot which will change the way I am doing things quite a lot as I will explain.
I also have some interesting shoots coming up, including a Maternity Session coming very shortly, and some voluntary work with some community groups in Swindon involving more portraits which I can’t wait for.
So plenty to look forward too... sign up on RSS or keep coming back manually, but don’t miss out!

Well, I have been looking into all the different options for stuff I need to include in my kit and trying to work out where to spend what little money I have. For the time being, we are in desperate need of a couple more lenses (specifically the 35mm and 85mm f/1.8 lenses) and so can’t afford to experiment in terms of lighting mods which are becoming more and more important to us for our non-wedding style stuff.

One thing I have wanted to play with for a while to see how it would fit into our shooting style is a Ring Flash. They are not cheap by any means and I don’t have any friends who have one that I could play with so I had to look elsewhere. I found a heap of resources on Strobist which is true about almost anything to do with flash, and so I took all the info from the different DIY versions and came up with my own version of it:

This was before I started and was so sure of how to do it. Little did I know how tricky this one would be! What you see is two Tesco’s Microwave splatter protection things to put on plates in the microwave and a mixing jug. That cost a total of about £4 and I could do it for £2 now I know how to do it. The trickiest bit was cutting a hole in the microwave thingy as it was very brittle. Also ignore the Pritt PVA glue there... you need something that will actually dry between the foil and the plastic.
Basically, cut both ends off the mixing jug, ensuring it will fit over your lenses. Stick a cardboard disc to the thicker end of this. To the microwave thingy you cut a corresponding hole in the middle and one on the edge to snugly take your flash.
Paint the outside black for looks and once that is dry, use glue (in my case 3M spray mounting glue) to put the foil on shiny side out. Use a cloth to smooth it down and buff it up. Then you can put the two pieces together and try and glue some smaller bits over the seam.
You can see the finished product here:

I have yet to manage much in the way of amazing photography with it, I am waiting for some decent sunshine (perhaps by about June?) to try using it for fill as I think that is where it will end up most used. One I was particularly happy with though was this one I grabbed at a party, but I don’t know how much of that is down to me and how much down to her being cute:

I can’t see myself buying one of these anytime soon, but I know I have not yet put it through its paces and can’t pass judgement on it yet. I will let you know if I come to any conclusion on it at some point.

If you look back at the photos from the Boudoir shoot I did with my wife a few weeks ago, you might be forgiven for thinking that the back wall is lit by some kind of room light, i.e. the main ceiling light. In fact the room was pretty dark throughout the shoot and the light you see on the back wall is the spill coming from the shoot through umbrella. With the kit I currently have, that is going to cause me problems every time I work in a confined space, which is most of the Winter... So the solution? Strip Boxes! So armed with more Google acquired knowledge I set to work on my own version and came up with the following:

This took a single A1 sheet of Black Mount Board I picked up for £1.99. Basically, it measured 15cm up each side and along each end and the overall length was determined by the size of the board. The inside is covered in foil halfway up sides, which being a total of 30cm width means you can do that with a single sheet of foil straight off the roll!. This 14cm leftover strip made the 3.5cm strips along the edge and I use an offcut to double up the thickness where the flash is mounted (again just with a snug fit). The diffusion material is common wax paper (baking sheet) which conveniently also comes in 30cm rolls so it is taped under the front flaps (for aesthetic reasons only) making it easy to replace should it get ripped:

To start with I wanted to see if it would work without he diffusion material the trouble being (as you can see below) that a lot of the light goes out the far end (particularly the other end to the flash) as below:

However with the diffusion material added, you get the light thrown forward much better with the wall off to the left being much less lit which is ideal:

Although I did try it out on the wife, she doesn’t want me putting shots of her in an old sweatshirt with no make-up on the net, so you will have to make do with this curvy figure:

Again, this is without the diffusion material, and the below is with the diffusion material which makes a much better photo (same settings on both):

I have made two of these and am looking forward to giving them a go on a model soon... as I mentioned in my previous post, I have some great people lined up and we are still looking for more!

Take care...

Ladies, Gentlemen, Photographers and others...

I must apologise for the delay, life has been a bit problematic of late which may or may not be good in the long term for my photography, but I really don't want to dwell on that!

I have some great photos from a Christening we did recently which have come out beautifully and are now awaiting the clients approval before posting, so keep your eyes out for those hopefully in the middle of next week.

The day after the Christening I took part in an amazing course hosted by Callum Winton whereby he invited the larger than life Bert Stephani. I have mentioned Bert before on my Facebook page for his work with Squeeze the Lime and we spent two days with him in a portrait lighting seminar. We had a great group from all over the UK down in Richmond, London for the workshop and we all had a great time.

The first day involved Bert going through some theory and running a couple of setups picked at random by the class. The below photo is Bert with model Prabha Shiyani and Callum holding the Umbrella overhead. Bert was on a really cold White Balance, and using a lot of CTO on the flash to make it look like night. Don't ask about the horses head... You can see Bert's shot here.



Day two was much more practical with us running around Richmond Park in groups whilst Bert strolled around between the groups with his 5D and 50mm f/1.4 (for his 50/50 personal project you can read about on his blog) giving sage advice and direction as needed.

Assignment 1 was lighting a model with natural and using flash to liven up the background. After a few tips from the master I ended up with some photos of fellow photographer Graham Binns who was our model in this one. Simple setup really with a handheld flash agains the back wall. This is under a railway bridge which is why we have such a cool textured background.



Just as I was happy with this however Nick Crispini (one of the professional models we had for the day) walked over, and what could I do but have another go? Hence the below:





Assignment 2 was the other way around... a naturally lit background with a lit subject. After having seen him change his shirt for the above shot, I knew this one would just work. Light is a flash bounced into the white side of my Sunbounce Mini. The light looks great over his body... but then... how could I take a bad photo when he was looking like that?


There where another few shoots in between but I ended up being more grip or model than photographer for those... only one of any interest was of fellow photographer Matt Franklin which is only of interest because I used a fold flat soft box with my SB-600. First time I have ever used a softbox and although I really don't like this photo, I now know that I don't want to buy one yet, but can understand what I would need one for. Its just as well really having seen Joe McNally using one and thinking I needed one to become as good as him. Now I see it won't be much to use to my work until I have at least another couple of lights which I think I would need to be able to use it well:



To end up the day, Bert used the two models for a final shoot each, the most interesting of this was again with Nick who wanted something a bit darker for his portfolio. Bert used natural light on his face in the middle of a tunnel so light coming in from both sides. He used a Sunbounce (with me holding it for most of the shoot) camera right to block off some of the light coming in from that side which was a bit stronger. Add a gridded light on the back wall and some white balance playing and you get his final shot as you can see here. The photo below is after someone else took over the role of light stand holding the Sunbounce.



It was a really cool day and you can see more from the others who were there here.

A real Thank You to Callum, Bert, Nick, Prabha and Emma the make-up artist we had on the day as between you and the rest of my fellow Seminarees, I had a really great time and learned a lot!

More to come...

Hey everyone! Been a little while, but a really good month for me. Had a couple of great shoots which I will blog over the next couple of weeks hopefully (depending on the client more than anything else now) and keep getting more traffic through the site and more enquires. Google Ads are up as well so if you are searching for photographers whilst in the Swindon area you should see an advert for us which is starting to pull in some traffic.
Today is my birthday, so whilst enjoying the beautiful weather this afternoon we had a wonder through Coate Water’s Tree Collection. You might remember us at the entrance to it with Sarah and with Ransom and Mandy however this is the first time we have actually gone that bit further in to see what is down that path...
The biggest reason is my wife has never really used the off-camera flash, so today I took her through the basics of how to do that from scratch.
Before moving too far with the lesson, she rolled off this one as her first shot (after some experimentation to get the right exposure):



And it got better from there:





She then got a little bored so I had a play as well:









We are going to carry on practising off-camera flash as a personal project of ours this year, so I will set up a folder in our portfolio to keep track of what we have done.

Anyway.... two confirmed shoots over the next month and a bit and living in hope of a lot more! Take care, until next time!

Second post of the day is mostly because I wasn’t happy with the photos I got of Jerry last week for the Strobist competition. The cloudy skies didn’t give me the drama and chazzam that I had really wanted. Much as cloudy skies are great for normal purposes, like natural light or bouncing, they don’t add much drama and to add drama you need at least two light sources. This (for the time being) leaves me out of the picture.
Fast-forward to this weekend and the sun is shining... Then my wife (whilst on the phone to a friend) wanders in front of our patio door and I get the view of a cracking hair light coming from behind her. “Hold it right there!” says me...
After a little bit of playing with the settings (and the help of some props in the form of get-up my wife had bought for the Festa Juninha I swapped places with her and whilst she was using the camera one-handed still talking on the phone she got these:







Then she finished on the phone, we swapped back and I got these of her:









Now I for one was very happy with all of these and wished that I had been able to use that rim-light whilst shooting my entry for the Strobist competition. We didn’t win this one... but nevermind, there are still three more to get a chance at over the summer!

As far as tech goes, the setup looked like this:


So that’s the SB-600 camera right, sun providing rim light from behind and Sunbounce Mini on a stand to camera left. The Sunbounce was angled to pick up the flash rather than the sun.
D80 with 70-300mm G lens. Full manual (as always for my off-camera flash stuff, and as it never is for anything natural light)
ISO 100, f/4.2, 80mm, 1/200 sec. I think the flash was at 1/16, but it might have been 1/8

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Right, I have handed in my ‘effort’ for the first Strobist assignment this evening with the help of my good friend Jerry
You can find it here on my newly setup Flickr account.
This is a slightly bigger version of it:


This is how the setup was managed in the back garden of my new flat:


SB-600 up high set to 1/4 power, Sunbounce mini with my gorgeous VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand) holding that in place and lovely diffuse light coming from the overcast sky above. Flash was triggered using the CLS but that was on fully manual with the on-camera flash turned to zero.
ISO 100, 120mm focal length, F5, 1/100 second shutter, Auto WB.

Right... quick technique post for you based upon something I learnt only yesterday. I don’t know how I have managed to get by without this so far, but this opens up a lot for me. This tip came from Scott Kelby’s and Matt Kloskowski who run D-Town TV Episode 05. Great videos for anyone who uses Nikon, and this episode dropped one little hint about controlling flash from the pop-up of my D80. I have used it on many occasions, but I didn’t know you could set it to manual, I had all of them left on TTL. This meant that on many occasions I would end up with photos like this even running the camera on manual exposure:

I have often had issues with this, but after this first shot, I went to manual flash, messed around a little to get the right exposure, and found this:

Much better isn’t it? Watch the Scott Kelby vid to know how to turn it on and then sift through the Lighting 101 course on Strobist.com to find out how to use it. I am a very happy man.

As a little bit more info, the sun was creating beautiful colours this evening, so we ran out to a patch of grass near to our house and I got the chance to play with this new trick. I was using a 1/2 CTO Gel filter on the flash to warm it up getting closer to the sun which was most of the way down by this point. The actual setup was pretty basic, with the single SB-600 on a lightstand which was also doubling as a coat rack:

I just squatted down a little to get the dramatic sky above the line of houses behind Cátia.
These two photos are more finally treated and have been fully cleaned and whatever else. Nice enough birthday present for her? Well... she did also get the matching earrings and necklace:


Tomorrow we are at a BBQ which should be good, and we will try and get some cool shots of that, hopefully much more under control using the off-camera flash now with this new tip! I am looking forward to that, then a two part shoot with a very nice young lady on Monday will make this a photographic weekend to remember! Certainly great experience for me... 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...