Goldfinger Girl

I'm putting this one up as I have a nude assignment coming up so I had to brush up on my techniques. The reluctant model needed a little persuading to let me put this photo up but it's tastefully done and thought it would be good for illustrating the technique, she agreed. This was taken on full manual mode at ISO100 1/200 sec f/8 at 48mm.

This was shot in a studio with a light either side of her but you can use any photo with a bit of variation in the shadows. As with most fine art nudes the photo was taken in colour but converted to black and white during processing. The effect used to get the shiny metallic look on the skin is called the Sabatier effect. Good old wiki has an entry about it here. As with a lot of old school techniques this can be replicated digitally but also is easy to over cook and time should be taken to get the effect just right.
Once you have your desaturated (B&W) photo add a curves adjustment layer in photoshop. A box will appear with a line running from the bottom left to top right. To the left of this there is a pencil, click this to draw your own curve, then starting at the top left of the box draw a smooth W shape. This will undoubtedly give you a very odd looking photo, if you then click on the points adjuster (icon next to the pencil on the left) you can then move the curve at each point, I remove a few points here by dragging them out of the window, you only need 5 or 6. Then it is a case of adjusting them until you get the desired effect. I'll repeat this can be very hit and miss but thats the beauty of digitally editing.

Retouching Portraits

I haven't added many portrait examples so here's one I was processing last night. The thing that struck me about this shot was the size of the girl's eyes and how the catch lights really add a sense of depth to them. I was also practising some air brushing techniques to make the skin really flawless, but still maintaining the dimple. There are thousands or retouching techniques out there but I'll give a quick run through of what I did.
Firstly I removed any obvious spots and marks, very quick using either the spot healer in photoshop or the spot remove tool in lightroom. The next part takes the longest, I use the healing brush, always on a new layer (ctrl J to duplicate the original layer) and sample from really clear bits of skin and repeatedly go over any blotchy parts. I then duplicate this layer and do some dodging in the eyes, on the whites and the irides (plural for iris apparently, I never knew that). Anyway after brightening the eyes a touch I then ran a surface blur filter (under filter, blur) with about 15 for radius and pixels, the result of this will look very odd so you must then reduce the opacity of that blurred layer to get back the detail in from the layer below. To selectivity sharpen areas ie the eyes and the lips just add a layer mask and paint in black (or grey) over the parts you don't need smoothing out. That's pretty much it for retouching, the key is usually less is more, you can always measure your progress by alt clicking on the eye next to the background layer this will reveal your original photo only.

Running a Bath

This was just a quick abstract I took last night whilst the bath was running, I've manipulated the colours in lightroom and added a radial gradient in photoshop, thats the greenish curve. It was all fairly experimental, but I was in a bathroom with no windows!

Whitby Boat

It's been a while since my last post so I'll try to get back on track with some shots from the east coast. This one was taken in the small harbour village of Staithes, about 5 minutes north of Whitby. It was a fairly overcast day and I had done a lot of landscapes that morning so I was more concentrating on shots with no horizons in them. As the tide was way out I got near the boats to try and get some detailed shots, the lighting is not the most dramatic so I added a vignette in photoshop and pushed up the reds slightly. The exif info shows how low the light was, ISO 800, f2.8 1/60 sec at 24mm. As I'd been lugging the tripod round all morning I'd left it in the car so the aperture had to be wide open and the ISO quite high to get a decent shutter speed to handhold, I get nervous with anything under 1/50, although I read about a guy who claims to be able to handhold at 1/10 in a helicopter and still get sharp photos! Anyway in this instance I think the wide aperture just nicely blurs the top and bottom of the shot.

Un Disastro de Electricidad

This is a photograph of one of those plasma lamps that, without being overly technical, use electricity. If interested you can learn all about them here. They make great photographic subjects and can edited to produce very abstract results. They are fairly easy to photograph however you do have to be on full manual and in a dark room. Shutter speeds can run to many seconds but this gives a very different result to the one seen here. This image was exposed for 0.6 sec at f/8.0 at ISO400. The shutter was about as slow as I could go to keep the beams defined. You can get a wide range of results, just keep reviewing them after changing any settings.

Fountains Abbey

This was taken at fountains abbey in North Yorkshire. There was a bit of a druid gathering going on (or people on a druid experience, whatever one of those is) you can just see them at the bottom of the frame but as the shutter speed was 13 seconds they are very blurred but it gave me an idea about processing this to try and get a mystic effect. It's basically another split toning image with the shadows set to blue and the highlights to green. I also added a slight diffuse glow in photoshop along with a little dodging and burning on the roof.
The exif data for this one was ISO 100, f/11 for 13 sec at 27mm, I am starting to look at ultra wide lenses now (10-22mm range) as this would have helped for the great interiors (and exteriors) at fountains abbey.

Altertates to Fireworks & Bonfires

I was going to put a tutorial on how to shoot fireworks but there really are thousands on the web, which all say put camera on manual focus and focus to infinity, ISO to 100, set aperture between f8 & f11 and just vary your shutter speed between 1 and 10 seconds. Position the camera roughly where the rockets are exploding and you'll get some great shots especially if you an use a cable release. A good alternative to firework shots usually missed on bonfire night is the fire itself. As with fireworks you need to be in full manual mode but the aim is to get quick shutter speeds to try to freeze the fire, so you may need to up your ISO a little.

This is a shot I got last night, I thought it had quite a menacing quality. This was taken at f/6.3 for 1/250 sec at ISO 400. There are still a few more nights of reckless pyromania so get out and see what you can get.