Archive for the ‘All Articles’ Category
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!
My New Zealand holiday photos had been sitting around on my hard drive for about six months already, all the while I’ve been intending to get around to putting a photobook together. Well, this week Sonia and I told ourselves enough was enough and we spent a few nights after work picking our best shots, signing up to blurb and using their software to create ourselves a little memento of our trip.
I originally wanted to design the book using Adobe InDesign so the reason we used Blurb is that it was the only book-printing company that we could find who would print from your own PDFs. However once I signed up and had a little look at their own layout software I really couldn’t believe how easy and flexible it was, so we ended up just using that! Now the only real drawback of using Blurbs software is that you don’t have a PDF file of your book which you could share about the web and all that good stuff. They do however make a “preview” available which you can share on facebook, embed into web sites and email to friends etc (as above). I just had to make the preview display all pages (as opposed to actually being a partial preview) and embed some html into this page.
It’s all pretty cool stuff and we can’t wait to get our book in the post (all the way from America no less!).
Well it’s taken me long enough to get there, but I finally found a new wordpress design that gives me the look and feel that I have been striving for for some time, but is also easy enough for me to make the odd hack here and there to tweak things to my liking. Things are likely to be pushed and pulled around for a little while, so please bear with me whilst I iron out any creases.
And just for fun as this is a photography blog, here is a completely unrelated but somewhat pleasant photo of my girlfriend Sonia’s camera laying around in the grass at Sydney’s Palm Beach…
