my glass eye

eliza doolittle's drumkit

Sat, 14 May 2011 10:38 +0100

I did some behind-the-scenes on Eliza Doolittle's makeover with Caroline Barnes for Max Factor a couple of months ago and some of my shots are now 'in the wild' so I thought it was time to post something from the shoot here. The idea was Eliza got her makeover using some of the products in the Colour Effect range she is promoting, and then performed a mini-gig for invited cosmetic industry and PR people. I thought the drumkit made for a strong image and snapped it before the gig got going. No processing whatsoever on this.

If you'd like to check out some of my other shots from the day, I have a gallery of approved shots here.

lily and the ducks

Wed, 11 May 2011 10:00 +0100

This is from a set of photos I took of a colleague's sister-in-law's children last year - they were very sweet and very easy to photograph, as we just headed out to the park and let them run around while I found shots. In fact, there's another shot from this set on my blog over here (which rather shamefully was posted in December last year but is only about a dozen shots back in the timeline - I have become very lazy at posting here recently!).

The original photo featured horrible greeny yellow water and an overall yellow tone which I corrected significantly in Photoshop. I also duplicated the background, applied level 4 Gaussian blur and set it to Soft Light with reduced opacity to give the picture that sense of glow which I think suits the subject matter. You have to be careful with that effect, it's easy to overblow it.

darren bransford, actor

Tue, 10 May 2011 10:00 +0100

One last shot from the Grasshopping website photoshoot, this time of the terribly photogenic Darren Bransford. I'd worked with Darren very briefly before, on Psychosis a couple of years ago, so it was nice to have some less fraught time with him to shoot his portrait (movie sets are not calm, peaceful places!). There's a full set of my favourite photos of Darren on my new website.

harry

Mon, 09 May 2011 10:00 +0100

Breaking away for a day from the Grasshopping photos, here's one from a couple of years ago of a colleague's son, Harry. I did portraits of both his boys that day, and they eventually made their way into a lovely calendar for their mum that Christmas.

sandrine rigaux, actress

Sun, 08 May 2011 10:00 +0100

Another shot from the photoshoot for Grasshopping. This is a lovely French actress called Sandrine Rigaux. Her character in the film is rather feisty and in the improv scenes we ran during the day for my camera she delivered quite a few hefty slaps to certain male characters. But really she's a pussycat.

elizabeth boag, actress

Sat, 07 May 2011 10:48 +0100

Last year I was asked to take some portraits of actors who were working on a movie called Grasshopping. The movie is to be largely improv-based and they wanted to build a website showcasing the project and the talent involved. I've recently been rebuilding my own website and wanted to add a few new portraits to the portfolio so I brushed up some of my favourites from the photoshoot and will post them here over the next couple of days.

This is Elizabeth Boag, a lovely actress who photographs extremely well.

hipstamatic at a glance

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 21:22 +0100

I saw there were some new lenses and films for Hipstamatic, the iPhone photo app that everyone in the world should really be sick of by now but somehow aren't... ;)

Apparently there are a few other lenses that I haven't got, called Melodie and Salvador 84, but these were all I could see in the 'Hipstamart' when I looked today in the UK. If you're interested in a bigger one with the names of the actual films and lenses, it's up at Flickr.

red mysterium x

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:24 +0100

With just two weeks to go until Adam Deacon's Anuvahood opens in UK cinemas, here's a shot behind the scenes of their RED Mysterium X camera perched over a scene taking place about 30 feet below, on location at an estate off Ladbroke Grove.

Processed with a B&W layer set to Soft Light, a cross-processed style curve, a couple of Curve layers to slightly separate the background from the foreground, some desaturation of the red and yellow hues, and a vignette. Also, I did this and posted it within 25 minutes, just to see if I could.

You might also notice I've added Tweet and Like buttons below. I'm interested to see if the Fascebook button in particular brings the friends of existing visitors to the site, so if you like a shot please feel free to share it.

Thanks for visiting!

london from a rooftop

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:15 +0100

I made a bunch of squared 'fake lomo' images from my collection of London rooftop shots. I was trying to find individual shots that I liked enough to post on their own but found that each was a little 'meh' like that, so I roughed them up with my 'my plastic eye' Photoshop action and put a collage together. I was going to do two sets of three but couldn't find two equally well balanced sets of three. They work better as all six, it's like an alternative London tourist postcard.

If you're interested in replicating the look, 'my plastic eye' is available as a free download by clicking clicking here.

For more information about the action, have a read of my blog post about it.

mini-EAT

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:15 +0100

I took this from the roof of the Saint Georges Hotel in London. I'm not really that pleased with it as a fake tiltshift. One of the problems I have with fake tiltshift, or fake miniatures, is that the area in focus would be the street and the foreground buildings would be very soft, including that one on the left there. But the fake tiltshift method requires you to use the Gradient tool to create a strip of 'in focus'. Well, that strip only works when it doesn't cross areas that technically should be out of focus. So it's an alluring illusion but if you look at it for too long when it's used on an unsuitable picture (like this one!) it's an illusion that is quickly shattered.

I also think I should have had much less in focus, and made everything else much more out of focus, but I spent half an hour on this last night and so I'm posting it.