Yesterday I had the pleasure of photographing the wedding of Megan & Alex Power. The service was at Wotten church followed by a reception at Denbies Vineyard. It was a beautiful country wedding with Alex and his best men suitably dressed in their tweeds.
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What a fabulous wedding this was and were delighted to be asked to photograph it. Both Theresa & Mike got ready at the hotel and the weather was superb with not a cloud in the sky.
Barnett Hill Hotel is a favourite venue of ours and is truly a beautiful location. The grounds are stunning particularly at this time of year. Theresa looked stunning and Mike and the groomsman all looked very dapper. Theresa’s daughter gave a speech which was really lovely and brought most of the guests to tears.
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I was recently asked if I would like to photograph a local band by the name of Isles at Jagz in Ascot.
Never having tried live music photography before I jumped at the chance. I took my Canon 1D MK1V with me rather than the 5D as I knew that I would need to use high ISO, particularly as I would be shooting with available light. I threw a number of lens into the bag, a 50mm f1.4, 85mm f1.8, 24-105mm f4 and a 70-200mm f2.8 but stupidly I forgot my wide angle 16-35mm f2.8 which was a big mistake.
I liked the idea of giving a retro feel to the shoot and wanted to try some funky angles and treatments to the finished images. All the images were finished using Lightroom 3 and I have used a number of their preset treatments like antique light. I think if I had had the wide angle lens I could have got more extreme perspective. Oh well next time maybe.
Any feedback greatly appreciated.
I had been thinking about buying an iPad for some time however I did not think that I could justify the expense, however after a lot of deliberation I decided that if I could use it in my wedding photography then I would buy one. So whilst in New York recently I was lured into the Apple store on 5th Avenue.
On arriving home I then discovered that I also needed a camera kit to enable me to download the images from my camera card. So off I went again to the Apple store in Coventry Garden. Imagine my shock when the assistant informed me that the camera kit only supported SD cards and NOT compact flash cards which are what my camera’s use.
Now I had a IPad that I couldn’t use for the purpose that I wanted it.
So I googled and found an independent company in Hong Kong that sold a compact flash card interface for the iPad 2, (http://store.micgadget.com/card-readers/280-ipad-2-cf-card-camera-connection-kit.html) for the princely sum of $29.90!
Once I received the gadget I plugged it in shoved in a CF card and was surprised to see it just work! Don’t you just love Apple.
Ok so now I had images on the iPad but how would I edit them?
I searched around knowing that there was nothing like Photoshop or Lightroom but came across a program called Photogene. I decided that I could afford the sum of £2.49 but also thought that at that price it wouldn’t be any good. How wrong can you be!!! I was really surprised by what you can do with the software. It has curves adjustment, great sharpening and a whole host of adjustments and presets that make image editing fun and simple.
Anyway the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here is an image that I took recently in the garden of a honey bee collecting nectar. I imported it and edited and sharpened it exclusively in Photgene. So what do you think?
For the photo nerds out there I took this on my Canon 1D mk 1V with a 24-105 F4L zoom lens and a 15mm extension tube. I had the camera set to high speed shooting and auto focus.
Sunday saw the trial run of the London/Surrey road race. My wife and I decided to take the dogs for a walk to to see the riders come through. The course runs about a mile from where we live.
Having never seen this type of thing before it was a really amazing sight, Over a hundred riders sped past at high speed along with an unbelievable amount of back up cars, police and ambulances.
To take the shots I crouched down low right at the kerbside. As the pack came through I was nearly blown over by the amount of wind that the pack created.
Now looking forward to July next year when its for real.
I have walked past this scene many times but never had my camera with me. Now I carry my Canon G12 with me all the times so as I was passing and took this. I like the way Big Ben sits within the wheel. I processed the image using Guy Gowans HDR technique (www.guygowan.com)
Who are you looking at?
Treated myself to a new lens which I really need for my wedding work, at least thats what I am telling myself. I particularly like the very shallow depth of field you get with this type of lens and the lovely bokeh, So I tested it out on the cat yesterday evening.
Walking through the city this week with my new G12 in my pocket I noticed the difference of old & new architecture. So I took a few frames. That night I had been watching a tutorial on HDR by a chap called Guy Gowan. I am a member of Guys site (www.guygowan.com) and have to say I am a big fan of his. Anyway to get back to the point I thought I would try out his method of HDR. Its really trying to get the image as you actually saw it and not like some of the garish images that you get from a lot of dedicated HDR software. Basically it’s all done in Photoshop and from only one exposure using layers. I feel that it does really represent the scene that I saw. Interested to know what you all think?
I recently spent a pleasant Saturday afternoon at a friends studio working with a new model to me called Jody. Our aim was to do some tradition high key shots with her dressed in her martial arts gear as well as some very moody low key head & shoulders portraits.
The high key shots were using 4 ceiling mounted lights, 2 Bowens 500’s at 45 degrees to the model using softbox’s and 2 interfit’s fitted with spill kills for the background.
For the low key portraits we switched off the studio flash and instead switched to a 5 light fluorescent cool continuous head. This is the first time I have used one and I really like control it gives you with very little effort. One thing I did notice (although this may have been due to the close proximity of the head) that you get much larger catch lights in the eye’s.
Jody was a joy to work with and certainly will be used by me again.
Welcome to the start of my blog. Hopefully you will see some images that you like and interesting discussions. Please feel free to comment.