Montage
I saw some shots on a wedding forum that looked really cool, like a collage of pictures that were essentially the same picture but with slight variations. I’d thought I’d use some old pictures of Rachael playing fallout and try my hand at it. I converted them into black and white and imported them all into Photoshop, I made each picture portrait and free transformed them as individual layers. I found it quite relaxing and fun to find shots that relate to each other. These were otherwise redundant pictures but make a pretty good piece all together.I might try some more…..
Out of focus, but still good?
I’ve been a member of a photography forum for a few months now and on this forum they have a critique section. I look at the “people” critique quite a lot. I want to learn more and think I learn a lot from listening to them. Particularly when it comes to portrait pictures and how to get the focus on the eyes. i never realised how important it was until someone pointed it out. I do find that they tend to stick to the rules, a lot of the older members are very into rules of thirds and correct whitebalance, they can never just say it’s a good shot.
I know that if I were to post this picture on there it wouldn’t go down well, they would say it’s out of focus and the exposure is causing detail to be blown out, but despite all of that I like this picture.
I like it a lot. It makes me want to go back through my pictures and take another look at all of the ones I dismissed just because the focus was slightly off or the lighting could have been better.
I wonder how many people who follow the rules miss out on pictures because they don’t tick a few boxes.
Macro-o-Rama
I love Macro, there i said it. I always have, I love the tiny details that can get overlooked in the big picture. I used to take a lot of Macro pictures on an old point and shoot ( it had a dedicated macro setting) but SLR cameras are different beasts. I thought I would have to buy a macro lens and they aren’t cheap. I scowered Ebay and came across a cheap converter for wide angle and macro…£12! We snapped it up. Rachael has been using it more for uni work but I thought I would have a dabble with it.
Here are some results, I think it’ll be good for product photography and when we build our lightbox it’ll be better.
Poster Images
We’ve completed a couple of the poster images for AMT Productions. I personally hate photoshop and would happily throw it onto the nearest motorway, but Rachael has been very patient and tried to teach me some basics.
I decided to try what I thought were the easiest ones. Lord Of The Rings and Clerks….simples…or not.
The actual Posters will be made by the AMT team but we wanted to get the images as close to the inspirational ones as possible. The Lord of The Rings was problematic due to the original positioning of the hand and the colour tone. Rach taught me how to cut out the arm and move it and also how to burn and fade the shadows.
Clerks is a very iconic poster to people of a certain generation and although we couldn’t get the angle quite right (height issues, even with a stepladder and a chap of over 6 foot tall!) I think we caught it quite well. I had to convert to black and white then cut out all of the actors and place onto a white background. As you can see i seem to have mastered the cut out tooly thingy, but I can’t get rid of the pesky shadows…maybe another lesson is in order.
Studio Shoot
We’ve been working with AMT again. This time in an actual studio!
They had a very good idea of what they wanted, they came to us with around 10 posters for famous films and wanted them recreating using the cast of their new webseries Ramblers. This presented us with difficulties, the main one being that a lot of the posters were heavily photoshopped, which meant that we had to spend a while dissecting them and taking numerous shots for one poster.
We are currently still working on the posters, but they also wanted various shots for their ramblers site including headshots and sponsor shots.
Lock and Key Photography 