Light­ing dia­gram for Waiting

This is one of my Film Noire ses­sions for 2010. A last minute ses­sion put together with Cat to take advan­tage of my sched­ule. The loca­tion for the ses­sion was in Dundee, and makes for a won­der­ful back­drop for this image. The ses­sion was what I call run and gun, basi­cally find a loca­tion and grab shots before mov­ing on to the next.
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This is an intro­duc­tion to the retouch­ing meth­ods I use within Pho­to­shop, don’t take this as gospel as my meth­ods and tech­niques do change as I explore the hid­den fea­tures of Pho­to­shop. Instead use these tuto­ri­als as a map towards your own styles and tech­niques. I use Masks and Chan­nels exten­sively to shape and mould the images and many of the tech­niques I use and will be show­ing are advanced in nature. How­ever don’t be dis­heart­ened as all tech­niques can be learnt with practice.

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This is a con­tentious area with debates rag­ing about what cam­era is best. How­ever this means that the larger view­point is ignored and the user should be look­ing at the cam­era sys­tem. The user needs to sit back and look at what kind of pho­tog­ra­phy they want to do (even the pos­si­bil­ity of doing) and review what offer­ings the man­u­fac­tur­ers have. For exam­ple the Nikon CLS sys­tem (the IR con­trol sys­tem for remote flashes) is gen­er­ally supe­rior than Canon’s mak­ing it eas­ier to use. Canon’s image sta­bil­i­sa­tion (IS) is far more mature and read­ily avail­able in its lens line up than Nikons VR (vibra­tion reduc­tion). This usu­ally trans­lates into Canon’s tele­photo lenses are a bet­ter choice for wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy where you have to deal with low light. Each sys­tem has it’s strengths and weak­ness and you need to weigh up what that means to you.

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The light­ing dia­gram for Autumn Collection

Autumn Col­lec­tion series of images was actu­ally sup­posed to be the Win­ter Col­lec­tion, shot in Jan­u­ary 2008 up in the Lecht area of Scot­land. How­ever due to con­di­tions in the area I planned to be using was snowed out and the bridge was miss­ing. So we had to find and use an alter­na­tive loca­tion, luck­ily I know the area and knew of some likely sus­pects. One of the car­di­nal rules of loca­tion pho­tog­ra­phy is always have a backup. Only in Scot­land can you go back­wards in the sea­sons from Win­ter to Autumn and it pays to plan accordingly!

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This is a quick post to let you know that the first of the retouch­ing tuto­ri­als is due to go up shortly. I’ve done some por­trait ses­sions recently specif­i­cally for Blue­print and I’m cur­rently pro­cess­ing these images for release.

Whilst I’ve not cov­ered some of the more tech­ni­cal aspects of Pho­to­shop this will be a good intro­duc­tion to how the Heal­ing Brush and also the Clone Stamp Tool can be lever­aged in a por­trait image.

That should be the motto of every pho­tog­ra­pher. No mat­ter how skilled, how aware or even how great you are at light­ing there is always some­thing you can learn espe­cially when you make mis­takes, and lets be hon­est if you’re not push­ing your skills every time you do a ses­sion you’re not mak­ing mis­takes. Mis­takes are how we evolve, but also we evolve to pre­vent mis­takes hap­pen­ing. This is called expe­ri­ence. Con­tinue reading »

Call it an epiphany of aware­ness (or, more likely, a side effect of insom­nia) but I decided to go back to the early days of my pho­tog­ra­phy. A time where all I had was a sin­gle lens for my new cam­era and learn­ing how to ‘see’ a scene. My project is as sim­ple as it’s com­plex. To view the world with a dig­i­tal cam­era with the lim­i­ta­tions of film. This is a jour­ney that I rec­om­mend every­one tak­ing to break away from your com­fort zone and learn to see the world with fresh eyes.

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Wel­come to the tra­vails of Colour Man­age­ment? No other words in pho­tog­ra­phy cause so much fear, mys­ti­cism and woe. It’s one of the few areas that has yet to be sim­pli­fied and is still very much a Dark Art. It’s a con­fus­ing quick­sand of tech­nol­ogy, sci­ence and exper­i­men­ta­tion. This arti­cle won’t go over the the­ory, as that would require sev­eral pages of mind bend­ing sci­ence. Instead I’ll give a once over of what are colour spaces and I’ll cover Colour Man­age­ment at a later date. This is not designed to be an tech­ni­cal arti­cle but a very brief intro­duc­tion to the var­i­ous spaces.

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Avant Garde: Bad Girl

Bad Girl was taken in 2009 as part of an assign­ment with Saks Hair and Beauty. I had been com­mis­sioned to pro­duce prints for the branch in Dundee. The Bad Girl image is taken from one of the Avant-garde ses­sions and is my per­sonal choice from the ses­sion rather than a client selec­tion. I love to work with like minded cre­ative peo­ple such as make up artists and hair styl­ists, it gives a edge to your images that you wouldn’t get oth­er­wise.
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The brush engine is one of the core tools of Pho­to­shop, there is very lit­tle you can do with­out using the Brush Tool. How­ever many pho­tog­ra­phers never broach the com­plex­i­ties or the pow­er­ful capa­bil­i­ties of Photoshop’s Brush Engine that lurks beneath the brush set­tings panel. It’s this dif­fer­ence that sep­a­rates those that have used Pho­to­shop from a cre­ative back­ground such as Graph­ics Design to those com­ing from a pho­to­graphic back­ground. Whilst this is a broad sweep­ing state­ment and that there are excep­tions the sim­ple fact is most pho­tog­ra­phers rarely explore the Brush Engine.

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