Smiling Bride

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.

Black & Whites with lots of Grain

Last night I was messing around with a technique I had seen using soft focus and digital noise to try and replicate an old photography style probably similar to Holga type photos. It relied heavily on the image being slightly out of focus, converted to black and white and a lot of grain added.

Grain is the film equivalent of noise in digital and a lot of the purists say it can't be replicated, where as noise is a pretty horrible by product of shooting at high ISOs, grain can add another element to the photo. I originally though it would be better to use a high ISO (say, 3200) and try and add grain digitally. However the noise is a little uneven and seems to almost create bands on the image, especially if you increased the noise further by increasing the exposure in Lightroom.

With this image, and yes it was taken quite quickly with little compositional thought, I did use a high ISO and wide aperture and tried not to focus on anything in particular. I then used silver efex (a photoshop plugin) to do the conversion and add the grain. It is very user friendly and can add a wide variety of grain effects. I went a little overboard on this example perhaps but I think it could be used quite effectivly in future, possibly for those wedding shots that are good but let down slightly as they aren't quite tack sharp. This was taken at ISO3200, f/2, 1/1000 at 50mm.