Tag Archives: Photoshop

Top 5 Inspirational Photographers and artists

30 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in Business, Photography

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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 2

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Photoshop

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Afternoon

Following on from my last post about compositing images, here, I’d like to show you how I created my “Snow Queen” image – quite apt considering the current British weather.

I had been looking at shooting a particular image to go with the composite I had in mind, however circumstances always conspired against either the shoot or the look I had in mind. I was doing some housekeeping in my shoot library and I came across an image that was marked as “throw away”. The image was part of a beach bridal shoot back in December and it didn’t quite cut the mustard.

However, the pose and hand placement were exactly what I was looking for for my snow queen idea.

This is the finished “Snow Queen” fantasy image with the lovely Miss Laura Mai

snow queen finished

This particular creation was (relatively) simple as I was using only a single background image. The following show the three main articles that went into making this composite.

snow queen composite

 

I explained in my previous post that the secret to successful compositing is getting the right perspective (with focal length of lenses) and lighting that matches foreground and background.

The other ingredient for successful images is matching colour between foreground and background images. Now while there are a number of ways to achieve this, this is the method I use. In Photoshop duplicate your background layer and move it to the top of the layer stack. With the duplicate layer still selected, go to the menu bar and select Filter>Blur>Average. Set the blend mode to “Colour” and then lower the opacity to around 20-25% – you may want to ad a layer mask to mask of the background – but that’s it, a simple trick that will match the colour of your foreground image to your background.

This image in total took around two hours to complete – there are only 17 layers in this image and the file size (unflattened) is 130MB.

The sparkles, wings, snow and staff were all added to the image for added realism and finally a small amount of mist was added to the lower part of the image to soften it up.

in my next post on Compositing images I’ll show you how I created a more complex fantasy image

Best – Colin

Creating Composite Images – Part 1

18 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Photoshop

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Morning

I have spent a lot of time recently creating fantasy composite images for a new venture of mine. I have not blogged about them only posted them on my Facebook page. A lot of my Facebook fans have asked how they were created – and whilst I’m not going to write a full blown tutorial on compositing images I felt I could put something together that shows how the images are created and how much work goes into creating them.

The key to creating believable composite images is in choosing the correct images for the composite. All the images should have have been shot with the same focal length of lens, to ensure perspective is consistent have the same depth of field and the lighting should be the same across the images. Colour is very important too – and in my next blog post I’ll share a top tip for ensuring consistent colour between background and foreground images.

The most important piece of the puzzle though is lighting. Light can come from any and everywhere in life, there can be soft shadows, hard shadows or no shadows at all and even a mixture of them all – a composite images will look totally fake if the light and the shadows to not match between background and foreground images.

Ideally you should go out and shoot your subject with a composite in mind – that way you can shoot the subject in a way that will fit in with your composite backgrounds. For instance, if you have already chosen your background images and they have directional lighting with soft shadows – you can light your subject to fit in with that.

Some people prefer to shoot the primary subject in a studio setting, so they have total control over the lighting – this is not necessarily a bad thing, but shooting outside can sometimes give you a quality of light that can never be replicated in a studio. My personal preference is neither, I use studio subjects as well as outdoor subjects.

Background stock images can be sourced from a variety of places, if you shoot landscapes or architecture you will probably already have some great images that can be used for compositing – but if not you can spend a serious amount of time searching places like Deviant Art, or iStockphoto or any of the other microstock websites out there. Some stock you may have to pay a few pounds for, others are free, its up to you to decide on what’s best for you – but there are plenty of amazing stock images out there.

Right – enough of the pre-amble. This is an image of the lovely Gemma, daughter of my favourite Bridal Wear supplier.

Gemma in magical forrest

Gemma in magical forest

This is a composite of two background images, the forest trees, the flowers in the foreground and Gemma. Gemma was actually shot in a studio environment for this shot.

This is the composite image BEFORE any work has begun.

Before

Gemma was backlit in the studio and you can see the beautiful light on her hair – this fits in ok with the final image as although the background trees are misty – they are brighter than the foreground – adding a shaft of light in with a photoshop technique adds realism to the lighting on Gemmas’ hair.

In total, this image took around four hours to create, there are 117 individual layers in Photoshop and the unflattened file size is 270 MB. The butterflies, shafts of light and sparkles are all created in Photoshop, using pre-made brushes. Butterflies were coloured and transformed to different sizes for realism.

Finally I coloured the image an overall violet to match the foreground flowers and keep up the overall fantasy woodland theme.

In my next post I’ll show you how I created a fantasy snow queen complete with horses.

Best – Colin

 

Back to Basics – one light setup

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Business, Lighting, Photography

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Morning

All photographers need light, be it daylight, sunlight, flashlight, or even moon light, we all need light, because without light there is only darkness.

I see photographers spending hours setting up 3, 4, 5, 6 or even more lights to light a single subject in a studio – fine if you are being commissioned to shoot a big brand commercial where you only have one opportunity to pull off the shot, but for normal paying clients it’s really NOT necessary.

Sometimes people over complicate things, you don’t really NEED to use multiple lights to get the best out of your subject. You might think that using a main light with a fill light and perhaps a hair light to separate them from the background is the way it should be done – and if you read most of the text books on studio lighting you will be right – but you don’t HAVE to do it that way.

If you know how to shape and modify light, and position the light correctly, you can create a stunningly simple image that your clients will love.

This image of Emily was taken with a single light, a single exposure and the only Photoshop work was to convert to mono, everything else is straight out of camera.

One Light

Have a think about how I shot this, with just a single light source.

With one light it is quite simple to add light modifiers to shape the light and add some drama to your image.

This picture of Holly was shot using a continuous light source off to my left and simply shot through a set of blinds strapped to a light stand. Careful positioning results in a pleasing composition, with the light striking the eyes and the mouth.

One light

So you see, it is quite easy to create beautiful and simple images that clients will love, with no more than a single light source and some light modifiers.

Best – Colin

 

 

Bride with a difference

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in Bridal Photography, Photography

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Afternoon

I don’t photograph weddings, but I do shoot a lot of women in wedding gowns. When I had my studio I was lucky enough to be on the same business park as Hazlewood Bridal Boutique our towns’ newest and best bridal boutique. It wasn’t long before I struck up a friendship with the owner, Jill, and we were soon collaborating on photo-shoots together.

We stopped shooting location based shoots when one of her best gowns became rather sodden during a shoot up at a stately home, you can read about that here

Since moving out of my studio I have been asked to shoot much more Bridal stuff, especially out on location and knowing Jill would baulk at the idea of loaning me a £2000 wedding gown for a shoot out on some disused building site of a location I decided to see what Ebay had to offer.

Ebay has a surprising amount of Bridal Wear stockists, mostly in the far east and China, but the good thing is they come with Chinese price tags too! So after stocking up on a number of these throw away bridal gowns I carried on taking booking for bridal shoots on location

The trouble is, there are only so many pictures of pretty girls in wedding gowns you can take, after a time they all blur into the same type and style of image. I did manage to shoot a lightly different shoot with a gown, see my previous post here, but what I really wanted was something that would be so different and so unusual as to be shocking.

So I came up with Corpse Bride, my own version not Tim Burtons – but there was a thought process behind this. I have access to a disused army base, it’s pretty run down, but it does have some pretty good shooting spaces. So my idea has this pretty girl in a wedding dress playing the violin in a derelict army base – but why is she there? She is actually a ghost and she is pining for her husband that was lost at war. He was stationed at the army base but on the eve of their wedding he was killed in action.

The bride, who (when she was alive) was a violinist and she has come back to the now derelict base to wait for her husband to return, but is destined to play the violin forever as a lost soul.

To turn that idea into reality I needed a fantastic model, a violin, and the skills of a SFX Make Up Artist (MUA).

After several months of planning and some set backs along the way, I secured one of my favourite models to work with, Lorena, a Spanish model who had the look, the hair and the confidence to pull this off. Our MUA for the day was Jodi, an excellent SFX MUA from Bristol.

Applying the SFX makeup to Lorena took more than four hours, four hours which she was sat on the second floor of an abandoned building, facing a hole in the wall (for light) and in the bitter cold

Lorena braving the cold to have her SFX make up applied by Jodi

As is usually the case with the English weather at this time of year, it started to rain and the skies got duller and greyer as the rain got harder. My carefully laid plans for the shoot were blown away as by the time the makeup had finished it was terribly dark outside and lashing down with rain.

Time to improvise.

Lorena towering menacingly over the photographer

Looking more menacing on the stairs

That’s not real blood in the background – honest!

 

Cowering in the corner

We had to curtail the shoot somewhat, it was deathly cold, the wind was blistering through the building and Lorena was covered in goosebumps. But we did one last shot, and with just a little bit of Photoshop magic it turned into this:-

Thunder & lightening, very very frightening !!

A little postscript to this story – Lorena decided to drive home still wearing the makeup, driving through Bristol city centre her car hit the red (on the petrol tank) and she did not have enough to get home – so she calmly drove to the nearest Shell Garage and filled up – still looking half dead!  🙂

best – Colin

 

 

 

The Camera Never Lies.

03 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in Photoshop

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Afternoon,

Thumb through any big glossy magazine today and you will see pictures of models and celebrities with flawless skin, beautiful hair and perfectly formed bodies. Now deep down we KNOW that they don’t REALLY look as perfect as that, but I bet many of you have associated that models’ looks with the product they just happen to be holding/using/wearing in the shot at the time.

Magazine marketeers are always looking at ways they can seduce the customer – you – into buying their product. And often they do this by using Photoshop to digitally enhance a photograph to make it look more appealing, either by enhancing skin to make it look utterly flawless, putting extra shine on hair to make it look more glossy and even exaggerating body part sizes to make them look smaller or bigger (eyes are key for bigger)

Buying is often about emotion. If a digitally enhanced image triggers certain emotions which lead to more product sales of a particular brand, does that make it acceptable, after all, haven’t we been duped to some extent?

Take a look at this photograph. What do you see? I see a beautiful model, confident, happy, newly wed, either looking out of the window of her new home, or maybe her old.

Now what if she were holding a small bottle of Chanel No 5 and was spraying it on her neck. What would you think then? I bet it would certainly conjure up some emotions!

Sadly, the view out of this particular window looks nothing like this. Living in rural Wiltshire we see fields, not tower blocks. The following image is the image actually shot, straight out of camera. I shot the image with the express intention of replacing the background.

What a difference a background makes. Now if the model were holding that same bottle of Chanel No 5, would you still have those same emotions?

I’ll let you decide

Best – Colin