These images were taken in the family room on a grey thursday morning at ISO 3200 (with very little noise)

I shot some video at Theo’s Christmas Production but have no idea how to view it on the Mac – guess I need to follow my own advice and read the damn manual

Where do you think this is?  I must admit that I think its kinda hot

Yep …… Beijing Olympics.  There’s been lots of discussion on what this lot would cost?

There’s at least 23 cameras – loads of Canon L-Series EF and Nikkor AF-S 500mm super telephoto lenses—each around £6,000 a pop—, a few 400mm, 600mm, 700mm, 800mm here and there. Let’s assume a conservative average of £4,500 per telephoto lens.  Most of them are probably using the biggest and baddest Canon and Nikon cameras, so we can assume an average £5,000 price tag per camera, which brings the grand total to just under a quarter of a million pounds.  Crazy !!

Apparently there were 1,100 accredited photographers at the olympics, which we can assume will have more than just one set of lenses and, at least, one secondary camera, just in case the first one breaks or they want to have two different set of lenses ready to shoot at any time. My calculator doesn’t have enough naughts to do that sum.

These shots of the beach huts at Scarborough were taken by Paul on the last Masterclass, he’s a Canon guy but certainly didn’t need anything like the above to capture these awesome shots

This picture did make me laugh………….

I would like to clarify this lady is not nor has she ever been one of my students

There have been a couple of people stopped & questioned during my workshops by over zealous PCO’s – make yourself aware of your rights

UK Photographers Rights

Join the petition

Parliament Photo Petition

A little while back Rosemary asked about what I use for the black backdrops; I have a length of cheap black cloth that is fairly crease resistant. In the studio I attach it to an ikea curtain pole (cheapest they sell) and some B&Q clips. On location I drape it over whatever is available – the back of a dining room chair generally does the trick.

Here is a wide shot from the studio

All I would do is crop the image & tweak the blacks, this add some depth to the image and hide any creases (how needs an iron !)

In PS Image > Adjustments > Selective Colour

Default colour is always Red, use drop down & pick Black, + 6-12 usually works

See you’d never know it was a cheap piece of material – the crop eliminates the edges & any parts of the anatomy that may embarrass the subject in later life

I use large softboxes in the studio but you could always try your hand at making one of your own.

Trusty old black cloth draped over back of kitchen stool, lamp adaptor daylight bulb and paper shade (the larger the ball the further the light will disperse and softer it will be)

If you try this at home – make sure you share a picture have a great weekend, weather forecast is not too bad so get out with that camera !

In case you didn’t know I’m a Canon girl and I use two EOS 5D’s but I am not so patiently awaiting the release of the Mk II, hopefully this will be in the next few months.

I shoot RAW usually on SanDisk Extreme III compact flash – can’t believe how much the cost of memory has gone down (first 1GB card I ever bought was over £200).

Workflow – I download my card straight into Aperture 2

Here I would correct any exposure or white balance issues & crop images. I also rate the images 1-5* and delete the obvious shockers. Next I export the jpeg images to a folder on my desktop in readiness for a little
photoshop tlc. I then back them up on a remote hard drive.

This is where I will edit my images – I like highly saturated images so this is where I will bump up the colours, fix any skin blemishes/eye bags by using the clone tool or use portraiture plug-in for those that need a little more help

I absolutely love using actions – they save so much time especially when I am proofing 200+ images

If you’ve never used them before check out these links.

Photoshop

Elements

There are some great free actions available

I use a mixture of several different ones

Natasha Whiteley I just love her Photolicious collection and the great thing with these is they are available for PS or Elements

Itty Bitty for lush colour

more recently I’ve fallen in love with Totally Rad they add a different slant, bit of a retro vintage feel. This shot of Theo was a bit blah straight out of the camera but I used their old skool action to give it a little action CPR

Final step is to sharpen and resize for either uploading to server for a client slideshow or blogging.

I will say photoshop is an amazing piece of kit and I wouldn’t be without it but it cannot make crummy images great, you need to get it right in the camera and then enhance it afterwards

Check out Shimelle’s site – she’s having a sale of her online scrapbooking classes – they are great value for money normally but it would be madness not to make the most of this opportunity

Masterclass III workshop has finished and People Imagery doesn’t start for a few weeks so I thought to bridge the gap I’d try something a little different * FOTO FRIDAY * Each friday I will share some of the tricks of the trade and answer any specific burning photography questions enthusiasts/students have.

Post Production Basics – love everything about digital photography, the instant gratification it offers, delete button etc etc. The only thing the final images lack are the sharpness of 35mm film, this is where photoshop saves the day.

View your image at 100% (keyboard shortcut Cntl on PC or Cmd on Mac alt 0)

Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask – the numbers are all about how intense you want the sharpening effect to be

Amount (strength – increases the contrast of the image pixels, so the higher the % the higher the contrast between pixels) 100-120%.
Radius (amount of sharpening around object) 0.5-0.7% depending on the size of your image (if its a huge file I’d go up as high as 1%). If you overdo it you’ll end up with a strange looking halo effect.
Threshold (this reads the edges of object) most times leave it at 0% but can go upto 0.5% for image with high contrast.
the numbers above are suggestions for a starting point – obviously varies image by image)

If you want to fine tune the sharpening applied to image, here’s how

Edit > Fade Unsharp Mask > Mode: Luminosity & adjust opacity to suit

I sharpen ALL my images with the exception of newborn babies (like them looking soft & squishy) and it is the final stage of my workflow.

Try it out for yourself and let me know how you get on and if you have any questions for next friday drop me an email or leave a comment below.

I’ve just invested in a Wacom Tablet

I had one a few years back but couldn’t get on with it but they’ve improved lots since then – so far so good