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. 

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?? 

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??

Retouching Photos

 Recently I have been working on improving my skills on Photoshop, so on of the first things I worked on was retouching photos. Starting with this old photo (This is not a photo I've taken personally, but it looked rather old and tatter which was perfect for what I needed) there are many ways you can go about with editing a photo and taking things out, it takes a lot of time and patience. The main tools I used were the Spot Healing tool and the clone stamp tool, where you use the data and colour information around you to correct little blemishes. Below left is the image before and to the right of that image is the corrections I made to the photo.