my glass eye

frosted

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:00 +0100

This is just a shot of some frosted glass in the bathroom where we were staying in Scotland, framed to get a bit of colour from outside coming through. Theres also a fair bit of condensation on there to add some interest, but the real trick here was to pump the colour way up using that Vibrancy slider in CS4. I quite like that new adjustment as it's subtler than the Saturation control, but still very effective. In many ways it could be a one-stop shop for most casual users of the software.

blue glass

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00 +0100

I was taking photos of some of the lovely glass where we were staying and had a few perfectly centred top-down shots of this blue glass but I thought this off-centre shot was more interesting. When I was cropping it I cropped off-centre as well, to carry on the theme.

The white surround was actually a painted white wooden ledge and wasn't pure white in the original shot, but sort of off-white and covered in wood texture and shadows. When I increased the brightness with a curve it didn't blow all of that out so I ended up painting around the glass itself with a white brush in the end.

oasis in the ice

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:00 +0100

In the grounds of the castle we always visit when we're up in Scotland is a lovely little pond which often freezes over in winter. You can just make out the soft silhouette of a duck waddling around on the ice in the background of this shot, while the beautiful swan holds the fort in pretty much the only defrosted patch.

I guess this swan gets a lot of visitors because it's pretty cool with someone getting really close with a camera. I'm always ready to get the hell out of the way in case it suddenly has an attack of vanity, because swans can take your face off. I've heard.

sheep and wire

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:00 +0100

Ah, barbed wire. It's such a cliche to pop some barbed wire foreground and a contrasting view behind in soft focus. I know I've done it before, probably several times. You know what? I don't care, I really like it! I might even have another one to put up in a few days... ;)

see through droplets

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:00 +0100

Something a little abstract today. Every morning when we woke up the window in our bedroom was pretty heavily covered in condensation - it was very cold outside! This is a view of the mountains and sky from said window, through the beads of water.

I always shrink my photos for displaying on this site (although I don't use Save For Web because it strips out the EXIF that this info panel needs) and usually I get them below 200kb. Not this one - at quality 8 it was almost 600kb. Even at quality 6 it was well over 200kb but I didn't want to go any lower than that, so sorry if it took a while to load for you!

some pretty cool wood

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:00 +0100

I recommend taking detours from your usual journeys once in a while! We usually go walking the same routes when we're up in Scotland but this time got off the beaten path in every sense and found some nice scenes to take photos of. I won't pretend this is anything spectacular, it's just a bit of wood. I really liked the shape and texture, though, and the light was doing nice things reflecting off the nearby stream/river.

I've desaturated using a B&W adjustment layer and punched up the contrast. Then I increased the vibrancy and saturation using the Vibrancy layer in CS4. I know, I know, why desaturate and then resaturate? Well, each was done using a different technique so the resaturation doesn't simply cancel out the desaturation, but resaturates what muted colours remain, and I like the effect it had on the greens.

Cheers for visiting!

a car with a view

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:28 +0100

Just got back from a trip to Scotland, where I got some nice shots that I'll post over the next week.

This one is in the hills north of Stirling and was taken from inside a moving car through the window, using the D700's B&W mode and tweaked in Photoshop. I used a couple of Curves layers to inject a little more contrast into localised areas such as the house on the left and the mountains behind, while not blowing out the highlights and sky too much.

A variety of different styles of shot coming up - a couple of quite abstract shots and some standard scenic stuff. I likey. Hope you do too.

Cheers for visiting!

will's shadow

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:32 +0100

I took this on Saturday afternoon while shooting headshots with an actor called Will de Meo. We met when I did the portraits for a film currently in pre-production called Grasshopping last year. We'd been trying to sort out a day to do his headshots for a couple of months and finally our diaries coincided yesterday. He wanted some outdoors shots so I took him to a secluded public garden in the Bishops Park area of Putney. It was bloody cold, so I'll have to do a little Photoshop on his red nose, but we got some nice shots. I was lighting with a couple of flashes, although in the end we settled for one flash with a Lumiquest Softbox III as the key light, and backlit by the bright winter sun.

He also wanted a couple of less headshot-ish looks for his website so we grabbed a few others and this is one of my favourites. It was originally a much warmer shot, brought over to CS4 from Capture NX2, but I decided I preferred the colder, slightly green-tinged look that this version has.

valmike and the sugar puff monster

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:27 +0100

It's been another lengthy break from posting. So many other things to do these days! Anyway, here's one I'd forgotten I even had ready to go, of an actor I've worked with a couple of times now, Valmike Rampersad. He was working on a film called Grasshopping, an independent feature that's sort of on hold at the moment while they get their funding in place. They wanted to get a website up and needed portraits of all the actors in character, so I got a call to come down and shoot them one afternoon in South London. It's a really nice script - well, it's not so much a script as a series of scene outlines, and the cast improvise the dialogue. Check out their website here. All the portraits are by yours truly!

mark vincent, actor

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:00 +0100

The last in this trio of images connected to Ryan Haysom films, this is Mark Vincent playing the character of Darren in Last Days, in which we follow three survivors of a zombie apocalypse through North London. Mark was also in Ryan's first short, LV16, which is available on YouTube but it's pretty violent so probably not a good one for work or kids!

Despite the ridiculous amount of deadly violence Ryan throws his way, he's a very nice guy to work with and is of course blessed with being terribly photogenic. He makes getting attacked by rabid infected test subjects and a plague of the undead look terrifying and sexy.

We were shooting in a park near Highgate station and this was in the mouth of a huge empty brick tunnel that was gated up. There was a lovely strong daylight filtering through trees and ivy dangling from the bricks overhead but to get a decent shutter speed for the detail on this tight shot I had to underexpose and lift at least a stop in Capture NX2, then ran a Dfine filter in Photoshop.

Thanks for reading!