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??

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. 

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?? 

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.

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.

Behold The Bokeh

Before Christmas I was set a task in my uni class to take some Bokeh photography (For those who don't know what Bokeh is, it's where you taken out of focus shots, usually of light). I thought with the Christmas tree having so many different coloured flashing lights, what could have been better timing!! So before the Christmas tree gets packed up, I tried to get some good shots. I've never done Bokeh before so it was a bit of a shot in the dark, it's definitely something like I'd like to try again. But with that being said I'm still quite proud with how some of my images came out, I've got some of my photos below, how you enjoy :)