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.

2 Minutes of Sky

Last post 24th March! If I knew what the date was I'd be shocked, I know we're close to some religous shebang that has something to do with chocolate and bank holidays. Anyway I went out the other night as the light was looking pretty good so I arrived and set up and the light went straight to hell so I thought I'd do a few more long exposures. I did a few at 10 minutes but didn't like the results, this one was exposed for 120 seconds, f/16, ISO100 16mm, and if these setting seem familiar it's because I was taking photos of a tree and they are the only settings I allow for tree photos :) Not much else about it really, the 10 stop gives off a little magenta hue for long exposures but if you shoot RAW you can have a little diddle with the white balance when you get home. I quite like how the outer leaves were blurred but the stable branches stayed sharp, gives it a etheral quality. Have a good weekend everyone.

Another Long Exposure Landscape

This is another one from the same shoot as my last post, the weather hasn’t been the best lately but I think it’s brightening up now so I will hopefully get out this week. Not vastly different from the shot I previously posted, this one is in portrait as I wanted to include a little more sky.
It was taken at ISO100, 21mm, f/8 30 seconds. I zoomed in a touch as I tend to get a little vignetting at 16mm when using a lot of filters. The flat water again comes from the 10 stop filter allowing for a 30 second exposure. I always try to shoot at ISO100 and had to use f/8 as that was the longest speed without going into bulb mode, I could have done 1 minute at f11 or 2 minutes at f16 plus, if I’d have gone to ISO50, this would have taken me to 4 minutes. Unfortunately I was getting hungry and the car park was closing!

Long Exposure Sunset

I was out taking this at a local water sports lake and I had a couple of points I thought might be useful to remember for this blog but have forgotten them! I think I'll have to get a ball head for my tripod at some stage, I have a three way head at present and they can be a little cumbersome, especially when composing a shot a few inches above the water. To make things even worse I had to look through the view finder upside down, not the most accurate way of getting the horizon level. This was taken with the 10 Stop filter that I'm using a fair bit lately. As these are so dense (in terms of light transmission) you have to compose and focus with the filter off the camera and then slide it into the holder, although I find it easier to take the filter and the holder off and just snap it on for the shot. I also had a graduated filter to prevent the sky from blowing out, very easy when including the sun. A good idea if you are using these long exposure filters is to get your exposure right without it on then just add 10 stops of light So say 30 clicks of increasing your shutter speed, or if you get to 30 seconds and don't want to go into bulb mode but have only done 6 stops (18 clicks if your camera goes in 1/3 stop increments), open up the aperture 4 stops (12 clicks). It seems a little difficult to get your head round but once you do it'll make things a whole lot easier and you'll always use full manual, for landscapes anyway. This was taken at ISO100 19mm, f/14 for 30 seconds. There is a little lens flare to illustrate my last point, ALWAYS clean your lens and any filters between the camera and subject, be it UV filters, ND filters or Grads, any dust when shooting into the sun will refract it and make the shot only good for blog tutorials or healing brush practice!

Trees and Masts

I had a feeling we'd get a decent sunset this evening but I couldn't have been more wrong, a mite disappointing to say the least!
It was pretty windy up near Emley Moor Mast so I took the opportunity to get my 10 stop filter out and see if I could get a bit of cloud movement, notice the complete lack of interesting sunset in the background, that's breaking the rules for ya! The mast one was taken at f/5.6 ISO100 19mm 30 seconds.
The tree was taken about an hour earlier, I was using the fence as a leading line and side lighting from the low sun. You wouldn't believe it if I told you but when I was approaching there was a big mean looking cloud behind the tree that would have made a decent shot but alas it vanished and left me with a fairly plain blue sky.
The important lesson is not every outing is successful and this is why it's so rewarding to eventually 'get' a shot, I'm told golf is similar but I don't believe it for a second.

The Glass Floor

I was doing some studio portrait shots yesterday and thought I'd have a go at this technique I saw a while ago. It's easy enough to do and gives a decent effect. You don't need to be a genius to figure out how it's done, probably not a great idea if are photographing subjects with skirts on, or Scots in kilts for that matter. This was taken at 45mm 1/125, (studio flash) f/8 ISO125, I increased the ISO by 1/3 because they were a little underexposed and I couldn't be bothered getting up to increase the flash power by a 1/3. A quick Q&A for you, I could have also opened up the aperture to 7.1 instead of the ISO increase. Remember when lighting with just flash the shutter speed is irrelevant as long as it's under the cameras x-sync (usually around 1/200th).

You guessed it, a tree...at sunrise!

Hey folks, I wasn't in the best frame of mind for photos this morning so it became more like a what not to do on a photo outing and if you can still come away with something half way decent you are doing ok. (Remember, it's what not to do, and I did them all!)

1. Set off with no plan of what you intend to shoot.
2. Take the bare minimum in terms of equipment, filters and polarisers just take up space and you won't need them.
3. Leave yourself no time to get to where you wish to take photos.
4. Walk the least distance possible but through bogs that only 50,000 horse power tractors can get through, if possible wear brand new Italian motorcycle boots, oh and clean jeans!
5. Don't worry about checking what ISO you were using last time, it'll probably be a nice noise free 100 anyway.
6. Take a haphazard, almost child like approach to crossing muddy puddles, with equipment depreciation these days you can always just get a brand new camera should it come off the tripod as you skip over the half lit puddles.
7. Spend no time thinking about composition, you'll just over complicate things, is a straight horizon really that important?

This is the result, I'm amazed I managed to remember to take the lens cap off! I got away with being a little lax this time because I was familiar with the surroundings and the equipment. The timing of the shot is critical, shots 10 minutes either side of this one would be moved to deleted pretty much as soon as I got them on the computer. For anyone still following this was a HDR so the shutter varied from 5 secs to about 1/25. ISO was 100 (I do check this without thinking now, despite the above point 5) Keeping ISO's low is extra important when doing HDR stuff, f/16 and 16mm.

I'm adding another shot to this post as I think I prefer it to the HDR look, I'll probably change my mind back as soon as I post it!

1 Strobe, Choose your background

Hi folks, I've been playing with my pocket wizards again just experimenting with exposures with one flash off camera and some light coming in from the window. This was quite a quick setup in the living room with no clear backgrounds, I have done a shot to demonstrate what was in the background (a couch!). I didn't have any willing subjects so I had to use my wii guitar.

I think ambient exposure was about 1/100 at 2.8 ISO400. From this I can now choose if the background can be blown out white or Black, obviously for a white background there also needs to be something lighting your subject or you would get a silhouette, in this case the light came from the window.

So to blow out the background I had my flash pointed at the ceiling at 1/4 power, my camera set to 2.8 ISO400, 1/200sec, the window light exposed the guitar and the flash blew out the background.

Now to make the background black I had to eliminate all ambient light so I set my camera to 1/200 (I couldn't go any quicker as this is the 5D's x-sync speed) ISO100 and f16. The drop in ISO and aperture would also reduce the effect of the flash. The flash was now lighting the guitar, it was still at 1/4 power but I set the zoom (on the flash) to 85mm to reduce the spread and had it coming in from about 45 degrees to the right, this was important as I didn't want any spill onto the background, not to mention the horrible sharp shadow it would have produced. Instead of increasing or decreasing the power of the flash I just changed the distance between flash and subject and thats about it. I did a very minor tweak in lightroom to ensure the blacks were black and the whites were white but nothing else.

Aged, distressed look

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.

Graduated Filters For Landscapes

Hi Folks, I've just been testing some new neutral density graduated filters and thought the comparison might make a good post for those considering buying some grads. I would say if you do a lot of landscape work, these things are essential. You can use HDR but it's extra work and results can be very hit and miss. Grads are basically rectangular bits of plastic that have a clear end and a shaded end. The shaded end is to compensate for the brightness of the sky, your brain does this automatically but cameras aren't that smart. You then expose for the land and if you have the right filter the sky should also expose properly instead of being 'blown out'. You can get 1, 2 & 3 stop filters, 3 being the darkest, and the one I used in this example. You normally have to buy a holder and an adapter ring to screw into the front of your lens. A firm called Cokin make reasonable filters, holders can be bought fairly cheaply off ebay. I actually started with hitech filters and would recommend them. Anyway these two photos were both taken using the same exposure, ISO100 f11 1/60 16mm (I wasn't going for an award winning shot so comments on composition etc aren't necessary) They are merely to show the effect of using grads.

Before
After

Octuplets

This bunch came in for a shoot the other day but the studio wasn't big enough so we had to improvise and get some informal shots. I have no idea why they were all dressed the same.

This is another rainy day project that you can do if you have nothing else on. It's a simple enough technique if you have a tripod. All you have to do is take each image without changing any exposure or focus settings, in fact leave everything on manual. Use a good size aperture, this was f/11 so everything stays reasonably sharp. Then in photoshop put each photo on it's own layer and just add a mask to the top layer so the next layer shows through, then join the top two layers and repeat until everyone is on the same layer. I added some effects in lightroom as the colour version was a bit plain. I'm not overly enthusiastic about this but its great for all the narcissists out there, Robbie Williams (remember him?) loves the effect, sing when you're winning album cover.