Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
photoshop
Yamaha XVS 1300 Midnight Star
Mar 16th
Motorbike Photography
I had quite a few shoots over the weekend so I unwound a little by taking some photos, strange I know! I’ve noticed from some of my web traffic that the motorbike photography gets quite a lot of visitors, not surprisingly looking for the Yamaha XVS 1300 midnight star, it would be handy if they were getting married but I suspect they see the photo and are drawn in expecting a top notch review of the bike and are probably a little disappointed when all they get are a few camera techniques. If you are one of these visitors, no review needed, you should just go and get one of these, I love mine!
Formal Wedding Photography Photoshop Alteration
Feb 2nd
I get asked about my editing process by wedding clients quite a lot and how much photoshop work do I do with my images. I do quite a lot of skin smoothing, which I plan on posting about soon, but there are times when a client sends me back an image and asks if I could just change this or that. As I give unedited (throw away) shots to the clients as well as the ones I choose to process, I often say if there are images in the throw away pile that you would like something done to, just let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I must stress this doesn’t happen very often as clients are happy with the edits.
After Photoshop Alteration - Wakefield Wedding Photographer - Gents to the right have been moved in
Before Photoshop Alteration - Wakefield Wedding Photographer
With formal wedding photographs I tend to get through them quite quickly so I can concentrate on the informal side which, in my opinion is where the great images are to be captured. I also tell the bride and groom if they want a quick shot with uncle bob (or any other guests for that matter) just shout and I’ll get some no problem. In this shot the grand parents had missed the formal shots so we grabbed some just before the wedding breakfast. This version ended up in the throw away pile but the groom liked it but asked if I could possibly move his grandad to be closer in. It isn’t a very complicated procedure in photoshop and he, or his grandparents, were happy with the result.
Vitruvian Danbo
Dec 18th
Vitruvian Danbo
Another quick post from the warm indoors. It’s quite snowy at the moment so will soon be able to get out for some winterscapes but it’s not quite settled yet so I’ve done another Danbo shot. This one was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. I took the Danbo shot on a clean(ish) back ground and cut him out in Photoshop, it would have been a lot easier to shoot him on a white background and not have to worry about cutting him out but as he has fairly straight edges and a lack of fuzzy hair, the pen tool in Photoshop worked fine. I used one of the shots of the original vitruvian man and just cloned him out and overlayed the Danbo, tweaking the blend mode, opacity and any curves adjustments. I think I did a little colour adjustment to make them match up a little better.
Smiling Bride
Apr 14th
It’s wedding season again! We got this one a couple of weeks ago at a great wedding in North Yorkshire. I’m currently experimenting with textured overlays as they can give quite interesting effects. You can build up a library of photos of interesting texture, be it brick walls, wooden tables etc. and try overlaying them in photoshop. All you have to do is paste the texture onto a new layer and set the blending mode to overlay (I start with overlay but some of the other ones give different results) Reducing the opacity and masking areas also helps. These can be a bit hit and miss but it’s just a bit different from the selective colouring we see quite a lot of. The image itself was taken at ISO200, 200mm, f/2.8 at 1/1250.
The black and white I’ve posted was a follow on from the technique I was working on a while back taking a slightly out of focus image and adding a little film grain to get a retro reportage style shot that would otherwise have been binned. This would also work with a lomo or cross processed style of processing. This was taken at ISO200, 78mm, f/2.8, 1/200. For the grain I use silver efex or alien skin’s exposure, which also has coloured film effects.Photoshop Actions
Jul 29th
I’ve recently been using a lot of actions in photoshop and came across this site called PanosFX. He has loads of free photoshop actions to try, I used an action called ‘the big picture’ on a photo I took of a poppy field a while back. It takes a few moments to run the action as it needs to cut out bits and create drop shadows and that sort of thing but once it’s done it gives quite a nice effect. There are other actions to try but I thought I’d post this as it is one of my favs.Another Portrait
Jul 17th
Hey folks, I thought I’d put this one up of one of my nieces who was over recently, I did a bunch of photos of her and her brother in the studio, both were very photogenic. I liked this image because of her eyes.I’ve been experimenting with some photoshop actions as I find them a little more effective that lightroom presets, I can’t quite put my finger on why. Actions, like presets, are recorded steps you can apply to several images very quickly and they are a great labour saving method. There are plenty available on the web, some are free and some are, well…not.
Aged, distressed look
Jun 29th
I have been working on aging or distressing some photos recently and thought I would post this example. There are some good presets in lightroom for an antique look but these rely on usually lowering the saturation of a photo, adding a brownish tone and a vignette. It is a reasonable effect but to take it a step further you need texture. This image has 3 textures layered in various blend modes to give a decent aged effect. I also reduced the saturation with a Hue/Sat adjustment layer. The textures can be anything from old brickwork, woods or metals. The texture used in this one was from an old wall with decaying plaster.Astro Photography
May 12th
I haven’t done a great deal of astro photography, largely due to a lack in focal length but as it was a relatively clear evening I decided to slap on the 100-400 and a 1.4x tele extender and see what I got. The tele extenders increase your focal length by either 1.4x or 2x, but you loose a stop of light with the 1.4 and 2 stops with the 2x, with this type of photo I wasn’t too worried as I wanted to be at about f11 to start with. You also have to manually focus with the TX’s, again shooting a moon this isn’t too much of a problem. A tripod is essential as is either a cable release or using the cameras 10 second timer and I’ve just remembered mirror lock up, in this example I forgot about mirror lock up but if you have it under your custom functions use it as it reduces shake further. I started to appreciate that the moon is traveling at over 2000 mph and it soon moves from your viewfinder so you need to keep adjusting. When it comes to processing I found the histogram to be quite narrow so you need to stretch it a little either using levels in CS3 or the blacks and exposure sliders in Lightroom (or the tone curve) this results in more contrast. I also had to crop in quite a bit, this can be solved by attaching you camera to a telescope 
I took this around sunset so the sky was still quite blue but I converted to mono and dropped the blues right down. The info for this was f/11, ISO100, 560mm, 1/200sec.Panoramic Photography
Feb 18th
I took this one a few months back up in Whitby (the abbey was behind me in this shot). There are a few important points to remember when getting panoramic photos.
- Always shoot in portrait mode, this gives more height to the finished shot.
- Set your tripod level with the horizon, some tripods have a spirit level on them if not you can get hotshoe mounted ones for a few quid.
- Shoot in manual keeping your aperture, shutterspeed, iso, focal length, focus point and white balance the same for each shot. Meter from where the middle of your panorama will be, if you meter from the sunny side everything else will be underexposed, if you meter from a relatively dark area you risk over exposing the brighter bits.
- Keep an overlap of about 30%, so if you are panning from left to right look for a feature, such as a tree that is about a third of the way in from the right then when you pan your tripod right, frame so that tree is on the left of the shot. That sounds more complicated than it is.
If you get these basics right you should have a good set of say 4-8 photos that can be stitched using CS3. Photoshop has a really good automatic stitching program (file – automate – photomerge) there are other programs such at PTGui that do a good job too. This panoramic was taken at f/16, 1/4 sec, 43mm at ISO100 I had an 0.9ND grad filter to balance the sky. The file has been drastically reduced so it has a smaller size.
More Mono Mayhem
Feb 14th
I was out shooting with a photo buddy yesterday in the peak district national park. The weather was glorious and I tried to pump up the colours further by pretty much using my polariser on every shot and trying to shoot perpendicular to the sun. I knew I would be converting the majority of my shots to mono as I thought the bright sunlight wasn’t moody enough for my landscapes.
There hasn’t been a great deal of processing with these 2 images, I converted them in Lightroom, took them into CS3 where I added an unsharp mask for contrast (settings: Amount 35, Radius 200 & Threshold 1) and a Black & White adjustment layer. I think mono images are quite striking and you don’t need to shoot during the golden hours.
