Apr

Arches Of The Palace

I hope this post finds you all well at this very challenging time.

March was an incredibly busy month with me out shooting nearly every day for a new travel accommodation company. Of course, this came to a sudden halt with the travel restriction came into place which was definitely needed.I must admit I’ve not been bored. I’ve used my time in my home office to take some advanced training courses to add to my existing skills and do some other things that seem to have been pushed to the back of the to-do list.

This week I completed the lifestyle image below titled Arches Of The Palace.
The models Emma & Nathan were captured back in chilly November outside my studio and the background is Rhodes in slightly warmer weather!
Thanks to good planning and care the retouching came together both seamlessly and in good time.

Apr

Receipt Bank Animated Still

Back in November, I was commissioned by my client Receipt Bank to capture several of its clients in their workplaces.
The final images were destined to be printed into large promotional pieces and I’ll be publishing theses as soon as I can.
When I’m on an assignment I’m always looking beyond the brief anticipating other ideas while I’m at a location.
This was one of those occasions when the guy and the amazing location was too good not to capture other options after of course, I had captured what my client wanted.
The final image below is a still image that I have animated in After Effects which can be used for short social media content.
For clients, it gives extra value by offering video production services that allows the repurposing existing images and extending their budgets further.

View More Animated Stills

[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq-vxwwjMrA”]

Jan

Lifestyle Photoshoot, Walk Before Dinner

About a month ago I published a blog post titled A Perfect Moment – Capturing A Lifestyle Photoshoot called Greek Summer In Grey November Link Here
Walk Before Dinner is another image from that same shoot captured in chilly November.
I captured this background for use as a Lifestyle shot well over a year but for one reason or another I never have.
The background is of St Pauls Bay below Lyndos village Rhodes Greece.
It was created from approx 27 individual frames mostly to allow me a more flattering perspective and to keep the Chapel below and the Temple above from getting lost completely in the image.

The technical aspects of capturing Nathan & Emma was much simpler than in The Perfect Moment image.
For starters the lighting in this image was soft rather than directional which previously required matching with the direction and quality of the background.
Creating images without the models feet showing that otherwise need realistic shadows created is also much simpler hence why many people based composites are 3/4 not full lengths.

I rarely time these things but the final composite not including the background creation took approx 6 to 8 hours to complete.

Dec

Commercial Lifestyle Photographer, A Perfect Moment – Capturing A Greek Summer In Grey November

Commercial Lifestyle Photographer, A Perfect Moment

I’m going to state the obvious..winter is never an ideal time of year for a commercial lifestyle photographer to shoot summer lifestyle in the U.K!
Unfortunately, that was exactly what was required on one chilly November morning with two brave Welsh models Emma James and Nathan Scola.

The backgrounds for this shoot were all captured in the warmer months of August in Greece and required my models to be dressed for the summer.
To make the composite work seamlessly I required many elements to work together including natural light even if it was the grey type!

Commercial lifestyle photography can be tough but Nathan and Emma were true professionals and used their vivid imaginations to bring the greek summer into the shots despite the biting November cold. I’ll be sharing more from this shoot in the next few weeks.

Jun

A nine Image aerial composite

A Nine Image Aerial Image Retouching Composite

To add extra resolution to the camera resolution of my DJI Phantom 4 Pro I decided to capture this aerial scene in nine individual frames.

Some high-end retouching was then applied to the frames and then colour graded.

I could never image capturing images from the air years ago let alone being able to capture separate perfectly registered frames.

Aerial-landscape-burrow-hill-south-somerset

May

Venice Beach Patrol 1992

The last few days I’ve been busy in my archives digging through my travel photography portfolio. and also old car work.
These were shot predominately when I was retained to shoot cover cars for Top Marques magazine in circa 2007.

Within the keyword search popped up this image from my travel and photography trip in the states way back in 1992.
The photography location is Venice Beach in Los Angeles where I finished my 3-month photo trip before flying home.

Unfortunately, the lab back here in the UK actually cocked up the processing leaving many rolls with major colour and tonal issues and pretty much unusable.

Thankfully decades after capturing the image and with my knowledge of image retouching many frames are now repairable.

Apr

Stills Based Motion And Video Production Services A Perfect Fit.

Video Production Services can involve much more than just video footage.

Many years ago (circa 2008) I had my own photography training site and community where I would video, present and film photoshoots and the post-production work to form an A-Z of a complete shoot.

After a few years, I decided to close the site and concentrate solely on assignment work once again. For a while, I felt I had in some ways wasted several years of my time and energy but as I have since learnt nothing goes to waste.
Some of the things that I would have never had photographed in my day to day professional life or techniques used in post-production have since proved of huge benefit to me.

The biggest benefit though was the skills I had to develop in capturing the video like the tutorials on the site were all video-based content.
Over the years these skills have enabled me to not only increase my earnings but led me to explore other Video Production Services work.

At heart, my first love will always be still photography but more and more I can see the big benefit to clients to be able to offer motion work alongside capturing stills and even repurposing stills into 2.5 d Parallax movies to provide even more content within their budgets.

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/256236312″ width=”1600″ height=”720″]

Another area has Ive been commissioned to work in is blending video with stills which are often referred to as Cinegraphs.
This campaign was captured for client Mimecast shown on digital billboards at airports all over the U.S.A and here in the U.K

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/192046243″ width=”1600″ height=”720″]

More recently I’ve been shooting some video combined with Time-Lapse work which I feel is a perfect fit to my photographic style.

[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/331172665″ width=”1600″ height=”720″]

Stills based motion offers an engaging alternative to purely shooting video although as with all things requires a learning curve to get the best from it.

Other samples of stills based work such as stop motion can be viewed Here

Mar

Rich Tea Deer !

A few years ago I was commissioned to create a campaign image for a private school by Ice House Design in Bath.
The brief required that I did some animal photography and a Photo Composite a stag onto the sports field of the school.

I have to admit I often love the challenge of sourcing the elements needed for composite work but have to admit I thought finding a stag would be a tall order.
In fact, after a short time searching I found South West Deer Rescue Centre located within 20 minutes of the studio.

The centre was a charity run by a lovely chap called Mike and after a brief chat on the phone and a visit for a recee he introduced me to Rubus who was to be my model.
The shoot day went like clockwork and week later I had completed the retouching and delivered the job.

A week or so later I returned to the sanctuary as I wanted to photograph Mike feeding the deer their favourite snack Rich Tea biscuits!

Mar

Moving Mountains, Travel Photography Portfolio The Gumbet Windmills

I’d been told about this spot and the windmills many times while visiting my holiday home in Turkey.
Eventually, during one trip, I decided it was time that I grabbed my gear and checked this local landmark out and combine a little travel and landscape photography

It was a beautiful hot evening and the light was just starting to dip behind the mountains and I was keen to add the image to my travel photography portfolio.
I have to be honest after all the hype I was a little disappointed with the location when I arrived.

There were several windmills on the edge of the hillside and due to the shape of the hill I had to be closer to the windmills than I would have preferred.
This meant that the beautiful mountains and bay below were extremely obstructed by some of the windmills and the contour of the hillside.
At around this time, I was producing lots of video tutorials for a training site I owned.

I decided I would take the opportunity to use some clever photographic and post-production techniques to create a more pleasing view and also create a video of how I achieved this for the sites members.
After some careful thought, I decided that if I moved the sea and mountains up higher into the scene and did some clean up ( remove a ropy looking windmill )this would produce a panoramic scene I knew would look stunning in the evening light.
So not an image that the purists would enjoy but one that satisfied my experience of the place even if I had to move mountains to achieve it!

Mar

Centaur

I captured and retouched this for the pure fun of it and because Ive loved the Greek myths since I was a kid.
This image involved a lot of transplanting of hair for the horse and adding a beard and longer hair on my model as it would be ridiculous to have a clean shaven centaur with short gelled hair!

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