Marketing Material

Hey folks, not posted for a while, it's pretty quiet at the moment although I have been accepted to an exhibition in Skipton called art in the pen. It's an art exhibition in a livestock pen, I think it's pretty trendy, it was started in 2006 and has been growing pretty steadily, you never know it could be my cavern club! It's here if you want a look. I've done a bit of business type stuff recently that I don't usually go into on my blog but I am doing today as I haven't been out with the camera recently. These are the layout for my trifolios, they are cards that fold in on themselves so they can stand freely and just give people a chance to see some of my work. They are easy enough to design if you know your way around photoshop. I get them printed by my pro lab called Loxley Colour. Just got to drop them in at some local shops now.

Aston Martin at a Wedding

Just a quick one from a recent wedding, this one was a pretty quick snap of the couple and the car, and a superb car it is too, they had taken it for a spin between the church and the reception. I knew I had the shot I wanted straight away but I could have probably done the formals and the couple shots solely around the car but in the end we had to drag ourselves away. It was taken at f/4, 1/2000, ISO400 at 24mm, if I was doing just the car I would have had a grad filter to really deepen the clouds, maybe even have tinted them red like top gear! No time for such things at a weddings though.

Fearless

I'm having a few issues with the blogging side of things today so if I don't post this time I'm going to give it up as a bad job!

This is the last of my wedding posts from this wedding, I've done a couple as I was a bit low on wedding posts but after this I'm going to get back to some landscape stuff.

I was pretty nervous shooting this part of the wedding, the river was quite wide so there was quite a lot of stepping stones, it didn't help matters that one guy who went turned back as he didn't like the look of one of the stones. I was also aware of a number of spectators filming it on their mobiles and commentating on it as if they knew they'd be sending it to you've been framed! Luckily it went off without a problem and I got a lot of keepers. I had to clone out quite a few people on the banks but it's easy enough with Lightrooms spot removal and photoshop for the more tricky parts.

More of the traditional stuff

Not too traditional mind, I try and avoid the getting in the wedding car shots whenever possible. As mentioned previously, I did have a lot of time with this couple as they are close friends so as a result I have quite a few to post, I might put a slideshow up at some point too.

These are more the traditional black and whites which I really love. The shadows are slightly warmer than a straight black and white and a decent vignette also help the image along.
I won't go into the exif data other than to say I was at a higher ISO than I should have been in bright outdoor conditions but only 400 so not really noticeable. It's never a good idea to step out of a dim church into the sun and start papping everyone at ISO3200!

Different style of wedding photography

I'm still playing with photos from a recent wedding, I have done a load of black and white conversions which I really like but now I'm doing some cross processing and more texture overlays. Cross processing is another throw back to film days where people would use different types of developer for different film producing high contrast stuff with odd hues. It was often quite unpredictable and yielded great results as often as bad ones. With digital the randomness of the process isn't really replicated but it is a technique that can work better on some shots than others. Museums tend to be quite big on cross processing and lomography, usually of bicycles or old cafes. Not for everyone but I quite like some of the results. I've also done some border overlays to complete the look.

The Bride and The Veil

We had a great wedding at the weekend and I have a number of shots to process but I thought I'd post this one. The wedding was at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire, it was a fantastic location and the weather was great. The couple are good friends of ours so it was a bit of a bus man's holiday but they were up for anything in terms of photography which is always good, you'll see what I mean if I post some shots of them walking on the stepping stones on a pretty wide river. There was a light wind so every time the gust picked up I tried to get a flowing shot of the veil, this being an example. I did a little HDR work to really bring out some detail in the veil back of the dress but not a great deal. The shot was converted to mono with silver efex so it has some authentic film grain too. The shot was taken at ISO400, F4, 1/4000 at 35mm (all the fours!)

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.

Pre Wedding Portraits

I had a pre wedding meeting yesterday with a couple we are covering in a few weeks and I thought I might use some off camera flash, I've been reading a lot of strobist, if you haven't been it's worth a look for techniques and inspiration. Anyway as the sun had pretty much dipped over the horizon I wanted to do something with the sunset, but not have the couple as silhouettes, so in full manual I metered for the sky and got f5.6 at 1/160 sec (ISO100) I had a flash to the left through an umbrella and it was just a case of changing the flash power (I ended up at about 1/4 power with an old SB28, I know, a Nikon!) I could have darkened the sky by simply adjusting the shutter speed. I tweaked the shot in lightroom, I originally added a textured layer in photoshop but decided it made the photo look like it was on a backdrop so I binned it. I was going to do a mono conversion but decided it wasn't necessary

Weddings

Hi Everyone. Seems like ages since my last post, I've been a bit busy with wedditing (Weddings followed by editing) I could do with getting up to the lakes, the weather has been really changeable but it makes for some great landscapes, as long as you don't get soaked to the skin! Anyway this was from a recent wedding, I decided to do a little HDR on the dress with a black and white conversion which I thought looked quite cool. I used Dynamic Photo for the HDR and then CS3 for the BW conversion. I really liked the sky in the mono conversion.

Confetti

This was one from a recent wedding that I quite liked, sometimes the autofocus can lock on to the confetti but as long as you max out the frames per second for a while you usually get one or two. You can always try a different composition for the confetti shots as the couple and the guests are usually more than willing to do it again if you suggest it, the vicars normally line you up in the cross hairs from the bell tower though!
This one was done at ISO200 f/3.5 1/2000 sec at 27mm, processed in Lightroom to add the sepia tone, the vignette and the 3D effect.

Wedding Photography

Another one of those shots to display my range, I've put this one up because I'm using it for a couple of wedding photography ads that I hope to put out and some more business cards for me to check when I forget my mobile number. I really like this one, it was done fairly late in the day, everyone was relaxed and the light was good. The Exif data is 140mm at f5.6 for 1/200 still at ISO 100. I'm sure all the enthusiasts know but just a reminder, a new version of photoshop lightroom (1.2) came out a week or so ago, you can get it here. Have a great weekend.