I had another fun portfolio shoot this weekend with Samara who I met through the Model Mayhem website, we spent an hour or so of a glorious spring morning shooting in Hyde Park where even under a cloudless sky you can find plenty of shade under the canopy of trees.
I was keeping it simple with a one-flash setup, but as I was without Sonia this week to help out I had to abandon the shoot-through umbrella for some shots when the wind got up a little but the images ended up being a little more diverse because of it.
Samara was great to work with, super friendly and very comfortable infront of the lens and she has a great knack for flipping from an intense model pose to a great natural smile with ease. Hit this link to be whisked away to Samara’s Model Mayhem profile!
Here are some of my favourite photos from the shoot:
I tried playing around with backlighting for this last photo and was successful in creating the washed out low-contrasty look that I was going for by shooting wide open into the sun. The flash provided fill to prevent Samara being a silhouette and the sun created a nice rim light. I then overexposed the background and added a warm gradient in photoshop to create the final picture.
Until next time… Have fun!
I met up with a wonderful model Julia this past weekend for a photo shoot in Newtown. We met through the Model Mayhem website and after a few conversations felt that we both had something to offer each other on a TFP basis as we are both at a similar stage in our respective modelling and photographic path. Julia’s a big fan of vintage 50’s and the pinup image, so she offered to go for that kind of style with her make-up, hair and outfits, whilst I had the relatively easy job of making sure the camera recorded how great she looked.
We spent a couple of hours meandering through some of Newtown’s back alleyways and various other locations, setting up with a simple 1-flash umbrella shoot-through rig whenever we found a scene that took our fancy. Sonia was helping out with the light whilst Kyle provided wardrobe assistance for Julia and the four of us worked together on putting a number of the shots together so it really felt like a collaborative effort and worked out well.
Julia was great fun to photograph and made it easy for me to settle into my first real model shoot. If you’re thinking about getting in touch, you can find her on Model Mayhem here.
In the mean time, check out some of the shots we made below and hit the gallery at the bottom of the page for a bunch more!
Hey there!
I am an avid user of Adobe Lightroom and use almost exclusively it to process all of my images, but something I just never got around to learning was how to create and use my own presets.
There are a number of different types of presets, such as metadata presets, export presets and print presets, but today I want to mention develop presets and more specifically to share some that I have created for making black and white photos. Up until recently my opinion of presets was along the lines of “why would I want to use identical settings when so few photo’s are the same?”
That was until I caught this video on world-renowned Lightroom good-guy Matt Kloskowski’s web site Lightroom Killer Tips – http://lightroomkillertips.com/2010/video-anatomy-of-a-preset/
In this video Matt talks about how you can be selective in which settings you actually save as a preset and how they are most powerful when used only as a baseline for continued editing. For example, most photo’s will require different exposure adjustments from each other, but you still might want to apply the same saturation or curve to create a particular look to them (be warned I’m paraphrasing here!)
So I have been working on some basic presets which can be used in conjunction with each other to build up an effect, from which you can then apply further unique settings to once the overall look and feel of the image has been established.
There are 4 presets in this Zip file which I would love you to download and try out for yourself… There is a baseline black and white conversion preset used best on portraits, which concentrates on lightening skin tones and adding a bit of overall contrast, then there are three Split Toning presets which can be applied after the base B&W preset and all give a slightly different feel to a portrait.
SteveArnoldPhoto- Tinted B&W presets <– download link
And here is a sample of what these look like when applied to a photo:
The original image with no presets applied
Now with the baseline Black and White preset applied
Black and White preset with the Warm preset applied on top
Now B&W plus my green/pink split tone preset
Finally, B&W plus my blue/yellow split toned preset
So now you know what i’ve been up to this past few days – please feel free to download and use my presets as they are, or play around with them and if you are like I was a few days ago, just use them to help understand what exactly is involved in creating your own. I really would reccommend you hit that link earlier in the post to the lightroom killer tips video about the anatomy of a preset as it was enough for me to start really thinking about how presets can become a useful part of my workflow.
Cheers!
Lake Matheson is a photographers dream. Without any real evidence I am willing to wager that it is one of the top three most photographed locations in the whole of the country.
Famous for its perfect reflections of mount cook framed by the surrounding trees and vegetation it is THE picture postcard shot of New Zealand.
Located about a 10 minute drive from where we were staying in Fox Glacier, it is really easy to access. The lake itself can be circumnavigated by walking track in around an hour and there are a few lookout points along the way from which to take in some of the areas outstanding beauty.
We had a couple of opportunities to head out to the lake for sunset and on the particular occasion that these shots were taken it had remained clear-skied for most of the day but as was the pattern during our 3 days in Fox, the clouds started rolling in just when we wanted to grab some views of mount cook bathed in the light from the setting sun. However the whole scene was just so magical we were only slightly disappointed that the very tip of the mountain was hidden from view.
The conditions do have to be just right and we got very lucky with how still the air went which kept the lake nice and calm letting those reflections really come through. I later learned that one of the factors in how reflective a lake like this is, is how dark the water is. It seems counter-intuitive to me and I can’t re-produce the scientific reasons for it here, but rest assured that a dark and murky lake will give much better reflections than a clean and clear one.
The shot above is taken from the same lookout as the first, but is just zoomed in a bit to really fill the frame. You can see a few ripples in the water in this image which help to demonstrate that the reflections are not some camera trickery with long exposures to flatten the water out – it really was this calm!
This third shot was taken from a lookout slightly further along the track, which ascends slightly to a higher vantage point than the previous. I like how the trees in the top and bottom of the photo really frame the scene and how the angles and lines of the shoreline add a bit of dimension. The light changes so quickly and so this image is not quite as golden as the last two, but I’ll make up for that with the last photo now…
I took this last photo from the car park at Lake Matheson just as the sun disappeared over the distant hills. We were back to the campervan by this point as the sun had become too low in the sky to give us the light we wanted on our lake shots, even though it was still casting this warm haze across the landscape which was out of sight from our lake viewpoints. We were sat in the van, preparing to drive back to camp when all of a sudden it was like someone flipped on a lightswitch and this awesome glow just lit up the sky – I have never rushed to grab my camera so quick in all my life when I realised the scene that was unfolding infront of us. Anyway, I had time to shoot only a handful of frames before the switch was flipped again and the lights went out!
I hope you enjoyed these photos, they are some of my absolute favourite from our holiday so I thought I’d test placing them slightly larger on the page even though my sidebar may overlap depending on your screen resolution. I guess I need to work through that one, but for now I couldn’t resist the larger image format.
’til next time.
After spending last week putting our New Zealand photobook together I came to realise how many photo’s I still have left to share with the world, so after a 6 month break I’m returning to a NZ themed post. Milford Sound was the absolute highlight of our trip around the south island last xmas, not only for the fjords themselves, but also the famous drive there from the next closest town of Te Anau. The Milford road has it all, from grassy plains and crystal clear fresh water rivers in the shadows of majestic mountains to countless waterfalls descending down sheer rockfaces. We spent around 3 hours on the journey taking a little more time than the average trip, making the most of random stops along the way to soak in the scenery and we could have spent much longer, but enough of the words… Here are some of my favourite photos.
As you can see, we had pretty changable weather over the 2 days we spent in the area which unfortunately did not contain much sun. Mostly overcast, wind, rain but with some decent light breaking through the thick cloud cover now and again. However this did not dampen our enjoyment one bit – it would take something out of this world to take anything away from the wonderment of Milford Road and Milford Sound itself.
The only thing I really regret with these photos is not having included any objects that could portray a sense of scale to these scenes. As great as the scenery looks, my photos don’t really translate the grandeur of the mountains quite as well as I would have liked.
Thanks for reading, I hope you weren’t put off the images by the drivel I’ve been typing! If you’re reading this far then I guess I’ve done well enough!
Above are just a few photos to get you started – the gallery below contains these and a bunch more to be enjoyed in a larger resolution.
