Pete Barnes - Wedding Photographer

Yorkshire Dales Three Peaks Walk Photography

Pete Barnes — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:11:56 +0000

We did the three peaks walk in the Yorkshire dales at the weekend, which is a 26 mile all day walking affair over 3 of the peaks in the dales, (Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough) and had some of the best landscapes Yorkshire has to offer. I had seen a similar photography idea that I wanted to try during the walk, it basically involved taking a photo every minute or so for about 12 hours, it got quite tedious after about 15 minutes, especially going up the hills and finding 3 feet of frozen snow on the tops but it was worth it in the end and the weather was pretty stunning too.

I also managed to get a couple of usable landscape photographs at some points that I have used at the start of the video to set the scene, I’ll put these up in a post soon.

There was a bit of a break in the photography during the ascent of the third peak due to it being covered in a frozen snow, a guy we met earlier had been up it with a friend the day before and he had fallen 40 feet, we heard of this guy again as he had been in the pub at the bottom so I don’t think he was too badly injured. A few people had turned back saying you needed ice axes and crampons to get up it so we thought it best to maybe put the cameras away for 10 minutes.

The walk usually takes 10-12 hours but we had to take a little longer due to the photography and the conditions so it became too dark for photos at about 2 miles from the end. Unfortunately we then lost the path (as it was pitch black) and ended up at an abandoned farm which was pretty scary but managed to get back ok. I always feel these are the experiences you remember best on days out like this and all in all we had a great day, bit sore the morning after mind!

Landscape Photography Competitions, who needs them

Pete Barnes — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:18:22 +0000

Sunrise through the Branches

Hi folks, one of my traditional landscape photography from the Wakefield region posts today. I’m having to post a couple of my B-sides from earlier this year when we had all the snow. I found it during after a bit of an unforced photo library reorganisation, the less said about that the better! It wasn’t my favorite shot of the morning but I thought I’d put it up, if anything to remind people what a sunrise looks like as it seems so long since we’ve seen a decent one (although it was a nice day yesterday). The details were ISO100, f/16, 1/8 at 32mm and if I recall correctly I’ll have had my Neutral density grad on. Even though I have used a silhouetted tree and branch to frame the sky I still wanted the snowy field behind to be visible, so I still used a grad, otherwise everything but the sky would be black. I polished it up a little in lightroom as I tend to do with shots with all my landscape photography with quite a high dynamic range.

Why the unrelated title you say? Well I’m getting to that. About the same time this was taken I thought I’d put a few of my images in for a Landscape photography, not something I normally do, probably due in part to a spirit crushingly high fear of failure, but as I suspect I was probably buoyed up by the Christmas period and thought why not? Needless to say I didn’t win, hence the lack of “Yay I won a landscape photography competition” posts recently. At this point I would like to point out that this may come across as a bit of a bitter sounding, sore loser type rant, which could well be partly true, but only very slightly. It really isn’t meant to come across like that.

Anyway I was looking at this one remembering how cold it was and how early I’d got up and trudged to this location, told you it might sound bitter. I then took a look at some of the photos shortlisted for this competition, I’m not going to say which competition it was or post any other photographers shots as they aren’t here to defend their work. One of the judges was one of my favorite landscape photographers (hence the reason for entering) and I thought, they’ll know a good landscape photo when they see it.

A Cold Morning

Imagine my surprise when I see 2 of the 4 shortlisted landscapes were indoor! I think one may have been a photo of a skirting board another favorite being a half submerged car taken pretty much on the stroke of midday, golden hours or what! So I thought what is the point of waiting for the ideal conditions, getting up at some stupid time to go out and really use the light to compose a shot with some emotion, when you can just snap an abandoned shopping trolley in a canal, maybe even stay in bed and create a landscape photo from there! A few days later I read an article about how people really are taking mediocre shots and calling them art, and whats worse is half the judges agree with them!

The point is, to answer my question, the early mornings and the bad conditions and the trudging around in a field are what make the photo worth while when you get one, and it really is great when everything seems to fall into place and you come away with a great photo. If anything getting nothing a few times makes it even sweeter when you come away with something half decent. At the very least you’ve got out and exercised your mind and body, beats Eastenders! And if some judge doesn’t agree and thinks a bloke sunbathing constitutes a landscape photo that’s their opinion, so what, least my nan likes them!

Modelling with my coloured backgrounds

Pete Barnes — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:46:38 +0000

I’ve recently got some coloured gels for my studio lights as I wanted to do something a little different than the white background studio photography shots. The background is just grey but if you put a gel in front of the background light you can turn it any colour you like and as the colour of the background can really alter the mood of a photo, they are very handy to have. The lighting was a little more sophisticated than my usual lifestyle portraits so we couldn’t do a lot of moving about but as I was just doing test shots it was no big deal. So with the help of a very photogenic friend I did a few test shots and was quite happy with how they came out. Although she isn’t a model, she is very comfortable in front of the camera, I knew this as I covered her wedding last year (she was the bride going over the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey). It’s always easy to work with people who are very natural when they are having the photo taken, be it in the studio or out and about. I might look at doing some time for print shots with models looking to build up their portfolios as it’s mutually beneficial, but that’s probably a bit down the road.

Model portrait photography with colourful backgrounds

Lighting wise I used a beauty lighting setup where there was a large softbox overhead providing top down lighting and a large triflector in front and below bouncing back up to the models face, there was also two lights to the left and right behind the model providing a little hair and rim lighting, these were small speedlights. The forth light was my background light with the coloured gels, the tone of the background depended on the power of the background light, if I wanted a light, hi key tone I put it up quite high, if I wanted a darker more saturated tone I lowered it, this gave me a good range with each colour. The shots were taken with a 70-200 lens at f/11, ISO 100. Thanks for looking guys.

Model Pose

Pete Barnes — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:04:16 +0000

Another non wedding photography post today, It seems my only willing models at the moment are bits of fruit and, well, models. This strange old figurine looked to be striking an interesting pose and as I had the camera out I thought I’d try and get an interesting shot.

Photograph of a Figurine and a shadow on a blue background

I’m very big on coloured backdrops at the moment, I know for studio photography portraits the white out, high key look is still popular but as this was a hobby shot I thought I’d use a bit of colour. I have altered the colour in Lightroom, the original backdrop was a bit of a deep, dentist room green look which didn’t do the shot any favours. The great thing about the target slider on the HSL panel in lightroom is you can just set it to hue and click and drag the mouse left or right and it adjusts the hue you targeted, in this case I moved it over to blue and then adjusted the luminence slider up a little, I was going for a sky blue but this slightly darker tone seemed to work well.

Anyway back to the shot. I loved the pose of the figurine and it’s always good to try and remember interesting poses you’ve seen when working with real models just in case you need something a little different. Shadows on walls are generally avoided, especially sharp, harsh ones such as here, this is why it’s always a good idea to bounce a flash of a wall or ceiling as opposed to straight on flash but in this case I thought I’d include it. Having the flash just off to camera left also allowed me to position the shadow wherever I wanted, simply by moving the flash. Nothing else really to it, I used my ST-E2 to trigger my flash and the camera was set to 1/200, f/2, 50mm ISO100. Thanks for reading folks.

Protected: 20/02/10 Family Portrait Shoot

Pete Barnes — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:54:27 +0000

Fine Art Banana

Pete Barnes — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:32:17 +0000

It’s one of those non portrait or wedding photography posts today which I do from time to time, especially when it’s not wedding season, so if you are a bride looking for a wedding photographer this post may not be of great interest, unless you like off camera flash and/or fine art photos of bananas.

Fine Art Banana

The main reason I’m posting today is I have just received my wireless flash transmitter, the ST-E2 and I was having a quick play round with it. I have had a bunch of pocket wizards for some time now so I’ve done quite a bit of off camera flash stuff but I find they aren’t the quickest things to set up which isn’t ideal for things like wedding photography. The good thing about the ST-E2 is you an just pop it on the camera and set your flashes as slaves and away you go. You don’t have the sort of range you get with the pocket wizards but if you are just taking photos in a room (eg a bride getting ready) these seem to work great. If you have a couple of flashes you can also change the lighting ratios remotely which is pretty cool.

A good understanding of how to use flash both in automatic mode and manual are very important and after a bit of reading around the best way to develop this to just get out your flash(es) and practice. Still life photography is a great way to practice, if you can light something a little bit differently you can make something as plain as a bit of fruit look quite interesting. That’s pretty much all I have done with this shot of a banana from earlier today. I had 2 flashes either side of the banana triggered with the ST-E2, one was direct and one bounced off a nearby wall. My camera was in manual mode but the flashes were in ETTL, one of the main advantages the ST-E2 has over pocket wizards is it’s ability to talk to the camera with the complex infrared bursts just before an exposure. I processed it in black and white with siver efex pro to add a bit of film grain just to give a bit of a fine art feel to the end photograph. So far I am happy with the ST-E2 and hopefully it will give me a few more options when wedding season rolls round.

Amazing wedding centrepiece decoration at Oulton Hall

Pete Barnes — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:29:03 +0000

Amazing wedding decoration at Oulton Hall, Wakefield

We covered a wedding at Oulton Hall just outside Wakefield last year and got these shots of what, in my opinion, were some of the most amazing centrepiece decorations for the tables I have ever seen. As wedding photographers we get a bit of a sneak preview of where the guests will be eating to photograph some of the details such as cakes, favours, name labels etc.

Now Oulton Hall is a really fantastic venue with a real wealth of photographic opportunities both inside and out but when the doors opened to this room I was literally speechless. Each table had a fairly large tree in the middle with loads of cool fairy lights, flowers and butterflies hanging from it. As they were all twisted and gnarly it really had an enchanted Forrest feel to it, I loved it. Anyway just thought I’d put it up on the site if any brides out there were looking for decoration inspiration!

Amazing wedding decoration at Oulton Hall, Wakefield

Protected: 08/02/10 Portrait Shoot

Pete Barnes — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:42:32 +0000

Protected: 06/02/10 Family Portrait Shoot

Pete Barnes — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:31:03 +0000

Brides Skin Retouching and Smoothing in Wedding Photography

Pete Barnes — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:14:19 +0000

I have to start out by saying wedding make-up artists do a fantastic job and this is in no way a comment on their skills, all of the brides I have had the pleasure of photographing really have looked amazing without exception. A bride should look her very best on her biggest day and leave it to the wedding photographers to capture the details for them to remember. There are always 2 photographers covering all the angles, in photography terms. We take photos from large wide, 150+ people group shots to the slightest change in emotion on the happy couples faces and for this we sometimes need to be zoomed in, way in!

Wakefield Wedding Photographer before Skin Retouching

Wakefield Wedding Photographer after Skin Retouching

We all know about the levels of photoshop retouching super models go through even after hours of make-up procedure. Unfortunately in the high definition age we live in, cameras pick up every detail, good or bad and my job as a wedding photographer is to highlight the good bits and mask or hide the bad. I am of the opinion a bride wants to look her very best on her wedding day and as photographers, we are employed to use our wedding photography skills to produce the very best images. This is why I do a certain amount of retouching of the brides skin in photoshop. It is also worth noting that it is easy to go overboard with skin smoothing and if done incorrectly you will end up with a plastic, botox-to-hell, psycho-doll-type look, and nobody wants that.

This is a typical example of the type of skin retouching I do, not too much but enough to really make the skin glow.