Let The Games Begin

As part of my course unit I had to create a montage, the theme was a triathlon poster. I found this quite a bit of a challenge incorporating three elements that are so different. The hardest part was to blend the swimmer into the image and then knowing where to place the runner and cyclist. This was my outcome, in theory I would have been happier if I could have made the swimmer into a silhouette like the runner and cyclist but it didn't look right. Despite that I'm still happy with my outcome.   

Street Photography

As part of my photography project I had to include some street photography, so I decided I wanted to do a fashion shoot with an urban twist. These are some of my older work but still a good example of street photography. I had taken these photos in a car park and as I was using natural light to take these photos I had the challenge of working out how I was going to get my photos well lite without having to use a longer shutter setting. I had worked out that if I went to the location early in the morning with my model then the sun would rise letting lots of light through the open gaps.
I did some experimenting with the settings for each photo so I'll put the setting I used under the photos below.

6.3mm

1/80

f/3.8

ISO 400

6.3mm

1/80

f/3.8

ISO 400

5mm

1/60

f/3.4

ISO 800

4.3mm

1/60

f/3.1

ISO 250

7.8mm

1/60

f/4

ISO 640

My photos were taken on my Fuji bridge, handheld as that was the only camera I had at the time and I didn't own a tripod. Hope you like them :)

Question of the day: Do you prefer fashion or urban photography??

Could This Be Magic??

I smell another late weekly challenge, well this challenge was closely related to levitation; magic. I used the same technique as my levitation photos, I came to realise for this task that photographing magic isn't as easy as I thought it would be. I thought of lots of creative magical looking images in my head but with limited resources it was hard to do what I wanted.

Here's 3 of my favourite magic images.

Question of the day: What creative ideas would you have used for magic photography??

Just Falling Through A Different Universe

So as part of my weekly challenges I was set the task to create a levitation image. This was something I was pretty excited to do, so I thought I'd make a tutorial of how I did it.
So to start with I took my images (it's best to take your photos with a tripod to keep the camera in the same place), one background image and one image with the subject in. For each time the camera moves you have to re-take the background image, this is because you want the background to match the photo that with be sitting on top.

So these are my starting two images that I will be editing.

I started by opening both images in photoshop, drag the subject image over the background.

Next you need to click on the easer. 

And start rubbing out the excess you don't need.

Don't forget, to make it look more realistic rub out the shadow too otherwise the effect of the levitation doesn't look as real.

This is my final image, it looks like my model has just come out from a different universe. 

Here's another two that I did. Hope you found this helpful and enjoyed as much as I did. 

Pseudo-HDR

As part of my weekly challenges at uni I was told to photograph HDR (High Dynamic Range). This has definitely proven to be a challenge for me therefore I have taken a cheat way of creating HDR (this technique is also known as Pseudo-HDR). The difference between the two is Pseuedo-HDR is created using a single frame whereas HDR is a combination of 3 frames: 1 regular exposed image, 1 over exposed and 1 under exposed. While I work on getting HDR done properly I will give you a little tutorial on how I achieved the Pseudo-HDR.

Starting point: this is the image I will be using. It is just a normal exposed image I took while on holiday last year.

So to start off I made a duplication of my image. To do this I right clicked on the background image. You can name the layer whatever you see fit, I decided to keep my layer as just 'background copy'.

Once you have made the duplication click on the drop down box, then go down the list and click on 'Overlay'. I circled them off in the image above.

This is the effect given by the overlay. Once that is done duplicate the background image again (I have circled it off). Again you can name the layer whatever you like, I kept mine as it was.

Your second duplicated image will appear in the middle of your layers list, you'll want to drag it up so it's at the top of the list. I've done this because I wanted that layer to sit on top of the other two layers.

Now that the second duplicated image is on top of the layers, click on the drop down box again, but this time select 'Linear Burn'. 

At first the image will appear rather dark, this is where you can play with the opacity and fullness of the image. I have circled both 'Opacity' and 'Fill' bars which if you give it a bit of a play you can bring back the details of the dark areas. 

End result, after doing some tweaking I had pulled the opacity to 44% and kept the fill to 100%. 

I was happy with how the building came out but because the sky was so clear I couldn't really get much of a HDR effect in there. It would have worked better if there was a grey sky or more clouds, but like I said I did find this one a big challenge but I'm hoping to learn how to do it properly so I can redo this and try again.

Hope you found this useful, but if anyone knows how HDR works I'm more then happy to receive some tips. 

Is It Just Me Or Does This Make You Hungry??

Last year I posted a blog about attempting to photograph food photography, I found that the photos weren't my favourites and I said I wanted to try photographing food again. Recently in my weekly challenges at uni we had been given the task to photograph food which was a prefect time to try attempt food photography. I decided I wanted to take a different approach to photographing food; to gain ideas I knew I needed to do a little bit of research. While researching for a different project I found Dannielle Evans, a typographer who uses food within her work. 

This is my attempt at food typography ...

I thought my fruit salad photo was the most creative as I used a mixture of whole fruits and some chopped up fruits, all the colours of the fruit complimented the colours of a tropical fruit salad. My personal favourite photo though would be the waffles, despite not being as strong of a photo as the fruit salad I personally like the layout of the waffles and the fact I successfully managed to write in waffle mix.
Here's some behind the scenes photos ...

For the sugar and spice photo shoot I had some help setting up, as you can see above there is my lovely assistant with the stressful task of writing in sugar ... I later had the fun task of writing with fruit and waffles, obviously I had to eat all the evidence (not that I'm complaining)
Question of the day: Which of the final three photos do you like the most??

The Photography Show

So yesterday I went to The Photography Show in Birmingham NEC, I had a whale of a time and there was plently to see/ do. Fortunately for me one of my weekly tasks in uni was to recreate an iconic photo, I was rather lucky to stumble across a Marilyn Monroe look-alike throughout the day at the Hasslebland stand and just had to snap up a great opportunity. Here are some of my photos ...

I decided to keep my photos in colour as I thought the photos looked beautiful with that splash of colour thought I might play around with the photos and experiment with them in black and white. 

Question of the day: Did you go to the Photography Show this year?? 

If you did what day did you go and did you go intending to buy anything?? 

The Liebster Award

Thank you to Dannielle Hunt for my nomination for the Liebster Award - here are my answers to the questions ...

1. Why did you start blogging?
I started blogging as part of my uni course, but decided to keep it as I found blogging rather enjoyable. 

2. Best and worst trait about yourself?
I've never really considered myself to have a best trait but if I do I haven't found it yet. I however could write a list for my worst traits, but I'll just keep it to the most obvious, my confidence. 

3. Where is your favourite place you've been to in the whole world?
I haven't been to many places, or at least a favourite hasn't sprung to mind but I don't mind where I am as long as I have my family (I know, it sounds so lame but it's true).

4. Who inspires you?
My nan, she was the kind of woman who took a lot of crap and would just let it slide as she just wanted to keep the peace. She was the most respectful woman I know, she knew when you let things slide and knew when to fight back. She was so strong minded and calm, I never really understood how she did it, she truly inspires me. 

5. What would be the first thing you bought if you won the lottery?
The first thing I'd do with a lottery winning would probably be to pay off all my moms bills, then I'd buy a house or use the money to start up a business.

6. Favourite song. Ever??
My favourite song changes all the time but at the moment my favourite song is "Moving On"- Asking Alexandria

7. What is your biggest problem/challenge when it comes to blogging?
Trying to make my blog interesting enough for people to enjoy reading, and getting viewers to actually read my blog is hard. 

8. Best photograph you've ever taken and why?

I have a lot of favourite photos so pinning it down to just one is extremely hard. I took this photo a couple of years ago but I'm still proud of it nevertheless, I suppose the reason why I'm so proud of it was because I couldn't get hold of a studio to take my photos in so I had to make one. All I had was a garage lamp and a black bed sheet yet you wouldn't have guessed it by looking at the image. Admittedly the image does have a slight yellow tint to it but I preferred that for this photo. To me because of how I achieved the image, I felt like this was one of my best images.

9. What was your dream job as a child?
As a child I loved animals so I grew up wanting to be a vet, it wasn't until a couple people knocked my dreams down and gave me a reality check when I realised that I might need to look into doing something else.

10. Cat or dog?
Dog. I own two cats but I'm definitely more of a dog person.

11. Where do you hope to see yourself in 25 years?
Alive and healthy would be nice, but where ever my camera takes me. 



My questions are:

1. What are your top 3 favourite movies??
2. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be??
3. What is your biggest pet hate??
4. How did you start blogging??
5. What is the craziest thing on your bucket list??
6. Do you prefer sports or books??
7. What was your most favourite school memory??
8. Sweet or savoury??
9. Name a time you laughed so hard it hurt??
10. Top 2 favourite clothing brands??
11. Do you prefer the sun or the rain??

I nominate:

1. Hanna
2. Pamela
3. Treandy
4. Hivenn
5. Carli
6. LOLALZ
7. Deborah
8. Kay
9. Roisin
10. Hannah
11. Jacklyn

The rules are:

If you are interested or didn't know before just like me the rules are:

• Answer all the questions given by the nominator

• Nominate 11 other bloggers who have less than 200 followers

• Notify all the bloggers you nominate

• Made 11 new questions for your nominees to answer

Let It Snow

So in my uni course I get weekly photo tasks that I'm actually a little bit behind in, but one of my weekly tasks was to photograph temperature. Fortunately in that week there was one night that snowed, which I had to snap up that opportunity. One of my favourite photos would be the last photo, I liked the concept of having snow on and around the little chimney, as the chimney is meant to symbolise warmth because you'd use a chimney to start a fire and warm yourself up. Admittedly it might seem like the most obvious thing to photograph but trying to photograph temperature or come up with an idea for how you could photograph temperature is actually rather hard. Which leads me to my question of the day:

If you had to photograph temperature, how would you go about generating an idea and/ or what would you photograph?? 

Making A Splash

 Last week I put up a triptych of 3 splash photos I had taken, so this week I thought I'd edit my favourites and put them up. As I didn't have access to a studio when I took these photos I had to improvise and make do with what I had, this made it a little more difficult to set up the shoot. The best way to set up a studio for a moving object would be to have a strong light on the subject (this is something I didn't have access to or owned in my house). I stuck my camera on a continuous shutter which if you have enough light on the subject works brilliantly. You could use flash but the results wouldn't be as effective, you'd get one brightly lit photo and the others would come out rather dark. I plan to try this out again as I wasn't fully happy with my results but with that being said, here is my attempt of splash photography making best of what I had.