Rocking in the Dark

So I've now had the chance to test my camera out in a full lit room with moving children, and a gentleman who could out pose a rock. My next challenge was to take photographs of a rock band performing live at a venue. My last camera suffered from high noise (that's those speckled coloured dots that appear) and even at the high ISO range (the amount of light that is let through to the camera's exposure sensor) it still couldn;t handle fast shutter speeds. This meant if someone moved a fraction to fast, it left a blurred trail.

So here is a picture from my old Fuji FinePix bridge camera. This is one of the better photos, and with some simple editing the noise was reduced to give it a nice smooth look. But it does lack some definition in the subject. but this might have to do with me shooting it from 15 meters away! But, at least the stage was lit up like a chirstmas tree!

This next photo was taken at a completely different venue, it had nice dark moody lighting, great for moshing in the dark... terrible for taking photos and hoping to achieve anything usable... or so I thought. This was the first time I had used the RAW setting to get the best potential... this meant that when I edited the photo I could adjust the colour and luminosity before converting the file into a JPG. So by playing around with the light curve I was able to give the photo a comic art sort of look, which means that the JPG is unedited... get that through your brains! (With the exception of me adding a border this photo has not been manipulated since it was converted from the RAW file). Still unsure about RAW, open a new tab and google it! The above photo was also taken in B&W at the same time in JPG mode on the camera.

Again I had gone for the gritty comic book art look, it worked only on some of the photos, there still had to be the correct amount of light and a decent enough shot to make it work still. Because of the stage lights I ended up with 3 distinct colours come through.

Now, the above photo was already a JPG from the time the photo was taken by the camera. The great thing about B&W images is you can go further with the whole contrast and sharpness, it doesn't matter if you end up with a bit of noise, it makes it look more gritty! But here I've gone the other way, in my program Photoscape I have the option to add bloom effect, this is where the image is blurred slightly and the light is increased, making the whole image appear softer. I see so many times from photos of live performances of just the band memebers, so let's take some time to admire the beauty of the instruments they use too huh?

When it's dark, and moody, with lots of high contrast (whole fade of shades from white to black set against each other), then Sepia or Black & White is king. Colour tones work very differently in these settings as you;re move worried about getting the correct amount of light on the subject rather than the colour that you see (ie.. green skin would just look weird, but if you make the skin green in black and white of sepia instead, it actually helps make the skin tones look more subtle and soft).

Here we have the same chappy as in the top photo, now appart from the obvious colour differences, what else can you tell me that really stands out from this photo to the one far above? Try to bare in mind the first photo had enough lighting to see from out of space, where here it was full of colours that shone from the sides only.

Anyone interesting in hearing this band play can find IRIS's (In Retrospect I See) website here. They've commissioned me to do a proper photo shoot at some point so keep an eye out for that!

Fascination and Babies

The two normally go together for a lot of mothers, and even fathers, 'fascination and babies'. Absorbed by their own creation, a new release of life. For those that don't have children don't ever look at babies the same way. So when I was asked "Would you like to take some photos of my baby" I looked at it more from a photographer's point of view as "I just read some hints and tips articles about photographing kids, I'd love to apply that knowledge to good use", rather than "ohhh, a baby!!! how cute would that be!"

Well as it turns out, I found baby Nathans huge transfixed eyes and simple little smile quite cute, maybe I can see the fascination. It's the stories the mother tells you after your initial thought of that though that makes you go "yuck, maybe not"


To start off with, we had Nathan placed on a soft creamy coloured fleece. I was worried that the bright studio lights at 560 watts might blind him or cause him to cry, squint or give me evils. But as it turns out he was more interested in me the whole way through the shoot which made taking photos of him a doddle.







With the bright red football shirt on, I thought maybe it would be better to try with a black background, and maybe apply some tips and tricks I learnt about using sepia to make the picture stand out. As I found with young children and babies, they tend to suffer from heat rashes, red blotches and exzma around the face. So a lot of red colour alteration was required as time progressed as Nathan's face was ticking over like a red hot boiler in all his clothes.

I added some grain (noise) and went to town with the contrast settings with the photo on the left, I quite like it personally, but is as always the way, everyone has different perceptions of what they like.

 With the next two images you see I decided to use what I had learnt from taking photos of a band at a gig. How can the two possibly be related and how can that help? Well, it's the red lights from stage sets and how I round a way to edit out the red light whilst still retaining skin colour tones! It takes a lot of painstaking effort, The photo on the left here probably took me about an hour of careful touching up and alterations to get that healthy glowing look. The original photo would look quite flat in comparison, showing huge amounts of bright red skin along Nathans cheeks, top left of his forehead and on top of his shoulders. What I like about working with such a large photo, is you can zoom in at 100%, the photo is still in focus, crisp and sharp to the point you can see almost every skin pore. Otherwise when it comes to changing skin colours and contrast you'd be left with pixelated blobs of mess which you can only get rid of by smoothing the skin. But then you'd end up with a photo of a baby that looked like it had plastic for skin.

The last one captures Nathan's natural foot fetish. He was always grabbing it and pulling it up to his face, but it looked so natural and what you expect babies to do most of the time.

All in all I was happy with the end results, I learnt a lot about editing the skin tones from this little project and hopefully I can put that to good use next time I go round someone's house to photograph their ickle one.

Click here to visit my website about any of my portrait or wedding photography services.

A change of path

After getting a call out of the blue one evening, I was asked if I could take some photos of a DJ for his website, as he needed some professional looking photos to give to agents for advertising his corporate services. Now I had no idea what to do for corporate looking photos for a DJ, so I did the google search for other corporate DJs (the sort that do events for either parties, celebrations or whatever they're hired for) and was amazed how many top corporate DJs don't have a decent photo of themselves.

Most of the ones I found have a mobile phone upload of themselves in the blurry distance or taken with a disco light shining into the lense. So from the offstart I thought I had no trouble for comparison here.

I had a few ideas, but as the DJ needed some shots taken in a Tux and some in a shirt to look smart, the best idea I thought to begin with was a black background. I've seen this technique used normally on baby photographs as it eliminates any over garrish colour of the skin and gives the picture a more pleasing look.

All my shots were taken in .jpg format as I hadn't used my RAW editor software yet so felt more at ease editing the .jpg directly the one time over so as to not loose too much image detail. But as the photos are intended for 320x320 resolution max I guess there wasn;t much to worry about that.

The hardest part is thinking on how I wanted the DJ to look so as to look professional about his work and look friendly and inviting so as to not scare of any potential clients. Out of the 160 odd photos taken I scrutinised and narrowed down the field to just 42 photos that I was happy with...still giving the DJ plenty of different images to pick and choose to use. Some with mirth, some that looked like out of a James Bond movie and a couple that I was very happy with.

When I took the above photo I knew I wanted a close up to make it into a B&W photo. It meant getting very close to the DJ's face so had to make sure the studio lights were set at a wide angle so as to not get any drop shadow appear. Applied a few adjustment filters using photoshop and voila.

For this one I posterized the photo to using just 7 colours before I applied my B&W effects. And to give it more drama I upped the contrast and brightness and added a slight blue hint via a digitally applied blue camera filter. Maybe a bit much for a corporate DJ, I don;t know. I kinda got my idea from Goldie who played a villain in one of the James Bond movies.

My final image of this blog is one with less editing, simply had some minor sharpness added to it, slight contrast enhancement and sepia effect added. The angle makes it look different from the standard straight on poses I took and it stood out more for me, with the DJ in his Tux and with accessorised bow tie and ear phones, it made the complete picture. Though he could always use it for going into a live sports commentator career.

For more information on DJ Lucci you can view his website www.djlucci.com

A Great Start

Ok... I haven't been up to much photography lately, but I've been working hard. I've made my first wedding booking of the year now (6th August), booked in a band for a photography session at various locations and going to help build them a website to front them, and got past this issue where mobile phone users who like to browse the web can't access flash based websites (like mine). So I've created two websites using a service call Winksite.

http://winksite.mobi/ljsdigiphoto/weddings

http://winksite.mobi/ljsdigiphoto/portraits


The links are self explanatory about what sort of information is on them. I've also managed to get 2 new designs for some flyers and even a 3 page brochure for our wedding services. Now to just wait for them to arrive and hope I can get places to stock them to give out!

I'm hoping to get a couple of baby photo sessions booked in the next few weeks so keep an eye for them also. Otherwise, I think I'm going to go for a nice long walk with my camera and see what I can find!