Top 5 Inspirational Photographers and artists

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Business, Photography

Tags

Adobe, architecture, BBC, bridal, Fashion, illustration, London, off camera flash, photo manipulation, Photograph, Photographer, photography, Photoshop, style, trainer, training

As a photographer and digital artist I am always using the web to seek out other photographers and artists, sometimes to network, others just to look at amazing work and sometimes purely for inspiration.

We all need people and things to inspire us in our daily lives, it is how we grow as people and it is how we grow as professionals, without inspiration there is only stagnation and with stagnation there is self doubt.

As my photography and digital artistry has progressed my list of inspirational photographers & artists has grown and I’d like to share with you my top five inspirational photographers & artists (in no particular order)

1) Damien Lovegrove

Damien learned his trade as a cameraman and lighting director during 14 years at the BBC, working on programmes such as the Clothes Show, Top of the Pops and Casualty. Days off from filming were often spent taking photographs for a variety of top name clients including Peugeot, Motorola, and Adidas.

Anyone who has met Damien can’t fail to be inspired and motivated by his enthusiasm for his second career. So much so that once you get him started on a subject it’s hard to shut him up…

Fifteen years on, Damien has become one of the foremost photographers and trainers in the industry. A published writer and regular columnist, Damien has travelled the globe shooting and sharing his knowledge and expertise.

Lovegrove Consulting

Lovegrove Photography

2) Glyn Dewis

Glyn Dewis is a Photographer, Retoucher, Trainer and Photoshop World Instructor currently based just outside of Oxford in the UK.

Working both Nationally and Internationally his main area of work sees him shooting Promotional and Commercial material for Industry Professionals, Physique Athletes, Musicians, Bands and Up and Coming Actors.

An Adobe Community Professional, he teaches Workshops and 1-1 Coaching specifically covering all aspects of Adobe® Photoshop® from the Basics through to Advanced Retouching Techniques, and is also available for National and International Speaking/Talks, Seminars and Workshops on both Photography & Photoshop.

Glyn Dewis

3) Dave Kai Piper

Dave is a photographer specialising in Couture Fashion, Lingerie, Evening-wear, Bespoke Bridal & Millinery Fashions. Dave is based in London & Bristol and he also writes an entertaining and informative Blog

DKP Photography

4) Julia Boggio

The award-winning and internationally renowned photographer Julia Boggio established her studio in London in 2005. Her aim then – as it still is today – was to create a unique photography studio that would enable everyone to enjoy the sort of high-end fashion shoot experience normally associated with style magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair.

From the moment you arrive at her studio you’ll feel like you’re at one of the top fashion studios in Paris or Milan, and about to be photographed for one of the world’s top glossy magazines. Her work – especially her now famous Vintage Boudoir photoshoots – has established Julia as one of the country’s leading portrait photographers, and her photographs are used in exhibitions and magazines worldwide. She is also a popular columnist for Photo Pro magazine and is regularly interviewed for other photography and lifestyle magazines.

Julia Boggio Studios

5) Neil Van Niekerk

Neil is a Photographer, trainer and author based in New Jersey in the USA. Best known perhaps for his amazing “Tangents” blog where he not only showcases his amazing work, but also provides useful insight into why and how he took them.

Tangents

Best – Colin

Creating Composite Images – Part 3

16 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photoshop

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Adobe Photoshop, art, Compositing, Computer-generated imagery, Graphics, Photograph, Shadow, Visual art

Evening

This is my third and final post in the series on compositing images using Adobe Photoshop – the first post can be read here , and the second post here

My two previous posts have centred around creating fairly simple composites, a background image and two foreground images composited together to create a simple yet believable fantasy image.

For my last post though I will focus on showing how I created a complex composite image, using a mixture of real photographs, computer generated images and complex brushes.

Here is the final fantasy image – The Midnight Hour – with Jessica Truscott

What looks a fairly simple and believable image started out as four actual photographs (Model and birds) five computer generated images (background, mansion, skeleton, skull and zombie) and three photoshop brushes, the moon, the mist and the sparkles in the models right hand.

Here are the images in separation

By far the biggest challenge when compositing images – aside from getting the lighting and the colour between all images correct, is the loss of the shadow on the ground when you cut the image out. We all create shadows on the ground and a shadow in an image is what creates depth and realism.

Creating a ‘realistic shadow’ underneath a person can be time consuming at best – nigh on impossible at worst. Many well known photoshop photo manipulators actually refrain from showing the feet of a cut out in the final image for this very reason.

In almost all of my fantasy images I DO show the feet, but I use mist, fog, or other tricks to blur and disguise the fact that there is not a correct shadow in place.

If you take the mist away from the final image both the model and the house are clearly cutout – but put the mist back in and not only do you have realistic atmosphere but the mist also conveniently hides and blurs the areas that have no shadow when they SHOULD have shadow – and you end up with a convincing fantasy composite image.

I hope you have enjoyed my short series on compositing images and have learnt a little bit to give it a try yourself

best – Colin

iPhoneography – Part 2

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in iPhoneography

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

App Store, art, Glaze, Hipstamatic, iPhone, iPhoneography, Photograph, red brick wall, Shopping, Smartphone, technology, Visual Arts, wrought iron gates

Morning

Since being bitten by the iPhoneography bug and falling in love with “Hipstamatic” I have been filling up my camera roll pretty frequently. But whilst I’ve been having a lot of fun doing so I started to want more – as a photographer and artist I felt that I should be creating art that would not look out of place on my living room wall.

A tall order with just a smartphone and no fancy lenses.

But over the holiday period I decided to go out specifically with the intention of capturing some images that, metaphorically speaking, would look good on my living room wall.

I was pretty happy with my resulting set of images, as photographs, but not as wall art, for that I needed a little bit of post processing to be done, but in the spirit of creating art using just my smartphone I downloaded a smart little (free) app from the app store called, Glaze.

This app turns your photos into actual paintings – pretty apt for what I wanted to do – with a little experimenting some pretty cool results can be achieved. After playing around with different settings and varying degrees of strength I opted for these.

Just a VW

Man in a red jacket

Wrought Iron Gates

Parking Bay outside Halfords

Red brick wall with ladder

Of course, you actually have to go out and take an image first, and not every image works and some images work better than others

but….

Would I have them hanging on my wall in the lounge – definitely

Is it art – absolutely

Best – Colin

iPhoneography (colincrowdey.com)

Facebook – to share or not to share.

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by Colin Crowdey in General, Photography

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blogging, business, content consumption, Facebook, facebook friends, Facebook Timeline, FB, IPad, iPhone, Online Communities, photo sharing, Photograph, photography, photos, social media, Social network, social networking, technology, Uploading and downloading

Morning,

Facebook is big, no, Facebook is HUGE, there are 7 billion people in the world and as of September 2012 there were 1 billion active Facebook accounts!

A staggering 44% of all Internet users are Facebook users and there are 600 million mobile Facebook users.

Facebook is hugely popular for sharing photos, in fact there are reports that we upload 300 million photos a day, every day and some figures are available to suggest that Facebook hosts nearly 230 billion of our photos – truly mind staggering figures.

It’s very easy to see from these figures that content we upload can be seen by a huge amount of people around the world. This can be fantastic for getting content seen by the masses, we are becoming a content consumption society, with our iPads & iPhones we constantly crave content, consuming with an insatiable appetite.

But problems can arise when content is posted that specifically elicits opinions from the masses. A good example if this happened recently, a clothing designer took a photograph of a model wearing one of his new designs, he immediately uploaded the photo to his Facebook timeline and asked for opinions on the photo. As expected there were tens of responses from his Facebook friends all saying things like, “wow, great photo”. But then someone shared that post with a person outside his circle of friends (Facebook security is overly complicated – but that’s another post)

Very soon the post generated slightly less favourable comments – nothing too disparaging – just constructive criticism. As is the way Facebook works I saw this post on another timeline, the picture was of a very well known model, and the clothes looked great on her, but the overall photo could have been significantly improved.

Within 30 minutes of the first “negative post” there were dozens of truly horrible comments made, mostly, believe it or not, by the original poster, the clothing supplier, in response to the negative comments. I watched the thread descend into vitriol and abuse and I finally reported the Facebook user when death threats were made.

The post was swiftly taken down by Facebook and I heard the clothing supplier server a three day Facebook ban.

The point of this story is that art, all forms of art, be it music, paintings, photos etc is very subjective, just because you think it is fantastic, does not mean everyone will think it’s fantastic. With a billion Facebook users you can bet there will be some that don’t like your art. The masses are not qualified to give objective opinion, if you want or need objective opinion find and join one of the many Facebook groups that suits your particular art form.

Best – Colin

iPhoneography

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by Colin Crowdey in Photography

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

App Store, Apple, camera, camera function, Digital single-lens reflex camera, film types, gadgets, glyn evans, Hipstamatic, iPhone, iPhoneography, mobile, Photograph, technology

Afternoon

iPhoneography – taking photos with your iPhone – right?

A brief history lesson first – back in November 2008 a fellow called Glyn Evans launched a Blog onto the unsuspecting world, called iPhoneography.com. Glyn’s Blog bought the phrase iPhoneography to the masses, more so because Apple has Patent rights on the term iPhone and to date have not pursued him for infringement – thus implying tacit approval.

iPhoneography has become very big business these days. With the explosion of the App store there are literally thousands of Apps for the iPhone and many are specifically related to the Camera function of the phone.

Like most people with an iPhone, I have downloaded my fair share of “Apps” for the camera, I have the usual HDR Apps & Camera Plus, along with the almost mandatory Instagram App, but yesterday I downloaded an App I had only been made aware of via an advert in an online magazine, and its called Hipstamatic.

Hipstamatic uses the iPhone’s camera function to enable you to shoot square photographs, to which it applies a number of software filters to make the images look as though they were taken with an antique film camera. You can then choose among a number of effects which are presented in the application as simulated lenses, films and flashes.

Its a pretty cool App to play with, you can change lenses and film types with just a swipe of your finger to give you hundreds of different possibilities when shooting – but does it cut the mustard?

One of the great things I learnt pretty quickly is that rather than having to change lenses and film types between shots (which could get very time consuming) you can enable a “shake to randomise” feature. Just shake your iPhone and you will get a random selection of lens and film type. I looked pretty daft shaking my phone vigorously every few minutes!!

Here are twenty of the best, different subjects, different lens/film combinations.

Would I recommend Hipstamatic? You bet

Would I have taken any of these photos if I had been using my DSLR? Nope

Is it art? I think so 🙂