Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Posts tagged wakefield
Lake in Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Apr 23rd
Not really a lake as such, those thinking it is Buttermere in the middle of West Yorkshire may be disappointed, but it’s still quite nice to stroll around. Anyway Pugney’s sailing club in Wakefield is usually where I go if I need a reflected sky shot and as it’s only a few miles from where I live I can get there quickly if the sky looks interesting. There are actually quite a few swans there as well so it has a lot of potential, photographically. When I was setting this shot up a lone swan came close to the rock in the shot (about 3 feet away) but my shutter speed at the time was too slow to freeze the movement but if I’d have been a bit quicker it would have been award winning, it’s I’d have been even quicker I’d have used my new gold reflector, that was quite close by, to light the swan up. In fact I’m going to go back and try for that exact shot very soon.
Landscape Photography of A Lake in Wakefield, West Yorkshire at Sunset
Anyway back to the (swan-less) image. Shots like this always work well low to the water so you generally get a bit wet, your tripod and camera strap usually get dunked too but as long as you can keep the camera safe no harm is done. This one needed a little foreground inerest, the previously mentioned swan would have been great but a rock would suffice. This was taken at 20mm, f/8, ISO500 for 30 Seconds. Yes it was a long exposure, I have ordered a more accurately colour balanced 10 stop filter from Lee which I will hopefully soon have but the HiTech version worked fine, once the magenta was removed in lightroom. There is a little lens flare coming from the centre of the image but I quite liked it in this version so I kept it in. The sky in the end didn’t go as red and impressive as I’d planned and the swan didn’t stick around but next time maybe…
Glass Floor Portrait Photography
Mar 26th
Portrait Photography in Wakefield
I had a family portrait photography shoot recently and I wanted to try a technique I’d done a while back. My previous ‘glass floor’ shot had been done with 2 children (I had used my niece and nephew as guinea pigs) and I really liked the result but wanted to do it with a family group so when I had a call asking for a family portrait photo that was ‘intersting’ and ‘a little different’ this sprang to mind.
Amazing wedding centrepiece decoration at Oulton Hall
Feb 17th
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
Brides Skin Retouching and Smoothing in Wedding Photography
Feb 3rd
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.
Welcome To My Blog
Dec 22nd
Hi, thanks for visiting my blog. I am a wedding photographer based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire and this is where I keep people informed with what I’m doing, or have been doing recently. I try and offer a few tips on how I get some of the shots but I also encourage feedback, so if you want to leave a comment or a question, please do, I’ll try and reply asap, unless it’s spam and then I ignore it, and rightly so!
Thanks again for stopping by, hope you like my work.
A Sunrise in the Snow
Dec 22nd
Sunrise in the Snow
I was up early this morning and could see we would be in for a decent sunrise so I donned just about all the clothes I own to keep warm and set off to a nearby field. I got there in good time but the shot I originally planned wasn’t going to work, it was more of a sun set location so I went over a small bank so the land would be lit up as soon as the sun peaked over the hills. As a side note, I also found quite a substantial bee farm, about 20 hives, luckily with it being -10 degrees there were none about. I used the tracks and the fence/hedge for foreground intrest and as leading lines towards the dramatic sunrise. I had my 3 stop ND grad on to balance the exposure and thats about it. I had underexposed the shot slightly to get the saturated colours, generally you should overexpose snow scenes to get the snow white as opposed to grey but in this case the sky was the main subject and I knew I could bring up the land a little with the graduated filter in Lightroom. This shot was taken at ISO100, f/16, 1/3 sec at 16mm.
Landscapes out at Nostell
Nov 9th
Trees in a Field at sunset near Nostell, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Tree in a Field at sunset near Nostell, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
I sometimes use Flickr maps for a bit of inspiration as to where to go if I’m a bit undecided and it looked like we may have a decent sunset so today it sent me to Ackworth which is near Nostell Priory just outside Wakefield. I could see (from google maps) there was a good size field with a few lone trees so off I went. The sunset wasn’t the best in the end, a thick layer of cloud just above the horizon stopped it really lighting up the clouds but as the saying goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it! Got a couple worth posting, both taken at f/16 and ISO100 around 25mm and 1/10 sec. I had the circular polariser on along with my Lee ND grad.
Newmillerdam in Autumn
Oct 20th
Newmillerdam near Wakefield in Autumn with tree leaves starting to turn
The light was looking nice yesterday, which might be the last nice day for a while looking at the reports, so I decided to potter down to Newmillerdam. This is a country park not far from where I live and for some reason I never quite get what I want when I go. I was actually after a sunlight through the trees type shot but the autumn colours on the far bank looked a better bet. The thick ND filter slowed the water down and sent the colours haywire, I didn’t pull the reds back too far as they suited the subject. I struggled a little for foreground interest, I finally decided on the tree roots breaking the surface might act as a leading line toward the building (a boathouse I think, there is a cafe in it actually) and the trees. The exposure was 15 seconds so there was a little movement in the leaves to the bottom right but I thought I could let it go. The rest of the settings were ISO200, 19mm at f/8.