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??

Going For Vintage

Recently I've been going through some of my old work and old techniques when I found this little gem of a photo. Once again the media make girls had done some work (crafting vintage beard wigs) that they wanted to get photographed. Well considering that these beards were meant to be from the 1800's I thought why not try and make this photo look more vintage to suit the image more. 

This is the original image, unedited 

This is a stencil I found off the internet which I used to overlay my photo

It was free and copyright free as well

This is my final image, after reverting the photo into black and white 

then erasing the edges to give a rough look I placed the overlay on top and blended it in 

 Overall I am rather happy with how this came out,

 though I think I might go back and place little white

lines into the photo to look like scratches.

That will add the aged roughed up finish to the photo.

The Weird And Wonderful

At my university the photography department work closely with the media make up department. This is brilliant for both departments as I get to photograph some amazing work as well as giving useful photos to the make up artists to use in their sketchbooks. Before Christmas the media make up girls had an assessment which I had the honor of photographing for them, each model has a different theme so I've labelled them for you (some are more obvious then others). Below are some of my favourite ones, hope you like them. 

Circus 

Royalty 

Butterflies 

Fossils 

Medusa  

Flowers 

Question of the day: Which is your favourite photo??
And, how long do you think it took the girls to create these wonderful masterpieces??

From The Set Up To The Lens

So as you may or may not have seen I did a smoke photo shoot. In this blog I will go through the set up I used to create my smoke photos. First things first, setting up the studio. 

Below shows my basic set up, I pinned some black paper to the wall and some more black paper to the sideboard (to prevent too much light bouncing back). Placing some white card to the side of the flash gun to direct the light in one place.

To set up the smoke I placed an incense stick between a paper clip, balancing it on the top of a bottle and lit it up. 

Next I set up my camera setting, for this shoot my settings were 

1/160

F/9

ISO 100

Once I had picked out my setting I focused my lens and switched my lens to manual (just because I didn't want to keep re-focusing the camera as it wastes time) this kind of shoot usually would work best if you used a tripod, though I shot mine without one. If you don't use a tripod it just means you have to try and not move the camera around too much.

I had noticed that some of my photos gave the smoke a blue tint, this was not edited in and I didn't intend for it t happen. Though I am rather happy with how those photos turned out, my guess was that my camera caught the flash in the photo turning the smoke blue. I'm not sure why it happened but I did notice that every time the camera pointed slightly toward the flash gun the smoke came out blue in the photos.