A Simple Tip For Everyone!
I am a huge fan of experimentation when learning something and photography is the perfect subject to get out into the field and just try things to see what happens. Most of us end up ...
Blog
Your old work should be embarrassing!
How do you know whether you are progressing at photography? Well, There are many ways to look at this, it could be how successful you are with competitions in your local camera club or whether ...
Lencarta Beauty Dish Test Shoot
I recently bought the “MOD048 | 60cm Folding Beauty Dish Silver Mk.2” as a small, portable light modifier. These are available (or will be when stock arrives) on their website (https://www.lencarta.com/all-products/light-shapers/studio-beauty-dishes) or if you’re in ...
Social media content creation in Lockdown
How can you create new images and social media content, safely, whilst we are still operating under bizarre lockdown circumstances? The good news… Luckily, the government guidance states that people should work from home unless ...
Tilt shift lens for portraits of Andy Taylor Boocock
Who on earth uses a tilt shift lens for portraits? A nurse by day, a fashion model by – well any time he’s not being a nurse really – on this winters day we had ...
How to get Maximum Sharpness with Focus Stacking
Sometimes you just cannot get everything in Focus in one shot… This happens a lot when you are photographing landscapes with a very close foreground, the background becomes blurry if you focus on the foreground, ...
Affinity Photo for Businesses
After talking with the Yorkshire Garden Designer, Sally Tierney, I learned that business owners occasionally need to do stuff a photo editor or designer would do. Clearly, they would benefit from an affordable photo editing ...
CASE STUDY – Fundamentals First
Fundamentals First Fundamentals First an IT company based in Leeds, formed by software experts Phil, Hamish, Chris and another Phil. The purpose of this photoshoot was to create images for the personal Brand, marketing, PR ...
Are AI voiceovers a godsend, or hell?
I learn more through audio than text…. I don’t know about you but I definitely take more information in through my ears than through reading! Which is kind of ironic, because I’m writing this using ...
Try these 3 Things RIGHT NOW to improve your phone photos
You can definitely take great phone photos these days. The technology has moved on massively since the early days, and the app software is truly amazing. There are probably dozens of phone photos tips you ...
Make your photos SHINE with the LIGHTROOM Brush Tool
The Lightroom Brush Tool Stand out with Selective Editing Some images really stand out when you see them on Instagram or Facebook, parts of the shot just look so much better than you could ever ...
FREE Luminosity Mask Extension in Photoshop
Photoshop now comes with lots of “extensions” you can install – either paid or for free – you get to them from this menu item That opens up a web browser – you ...
Storm Brewing in Leeds
Having I watched the most amazing spring from my garden during lockdown it seems a little bit unfair that the weather in June is dreadful for photography…. But one day last week the sky look ...
10 “Must SEE” Leeds Areas for Photographers
If you are planning a trip to photograph Leeds, where should you go? Like most cities, Leeds Centre and shopping areas are largely bland (with a few exceptions…) and many shopping centres actually ban you ...
Locked Down Leeds
9 weeks into lockdown and I finally decided to take my daily allocated exercise by walking around the city centre of Leeds. I had been putting it off because I didn’t really want to upset ...
Get the most from your photos during LOCKDOWN
Like many businesses, we deal directly with clients in person, so have taken quite a hit with this lockdown. We can’t really leave the house to do any new work – and if we could, ...
Photos only work when you use them
How many things in life do we buy & not use? Most kitchen gadgets I use once or twice, and then stash away neatly in the cupboard never to see the light of day again, ...
Leeds Architecture 2020
There’s a lot of new building going on in Leeds, so on a rare sunny February day I decided to take the 5D Mark IV and the 24mm tilt Shift lens out and going capture ...
Medusa Shoot
What do you do on a wet day in Sheffield? Well if you’re Clare Jane Garret, you get a dancer called Sarah Hobson and paint her green, then get a milliner called Hannah Gray to ...
The Madness of Share the Shoot…
What’s it all about? About a year ago I came up with an idea, it was based on years of photographing companies and what had worked best. It offered individuals who may be just starting out (or ...
How to choose a photographer from the 1000's recommended on LINKED IN
Recommendations are King The best way to source most products and services these days is to ask for recommendations based on people’s experience. It can certainly filter out solutions, products and providers who have given ...
Jaeda Sharman 2
A second shoot with this Morley based star of the future – a model and competition diver at 12! This was at a ruin in a Morley golf club on a cold January day…. It’s ...
Don't Forget About Photography!
Everything is video these days, we are all told to do Facebook lives or record things from the seats of our cars, in car parks, before meetings to engage with our audience. I’ve spent the last ...
BusinesS Headshots – it ain't what you do…
It’s the way that you do it… “It ain’t WHAT you do, it’s the WAY that you do it” – As the Bananarama song goes. That’s probably true in most businesses but it’s certainly the ...
How to organise your photos like a pro
Finding old photos can be a pain – if someone asks if you’ve got photos of Liverpool (or something like that) in future, how quickly could you locate them in your file system? Or if ...
A Beach Wedding
We love working with creatives – one day after a fashion shoot in Leeds we discussed what we could do for our next project. I wanted to do it over in Liverpool for a change ...
A LIGHTROOM Dream Come True
HDR used to be painful in LIGHTROOM If you’d shot 300 shots of a house, you’d need to merge them down to 100 photos – that’d have you anchored to the computer manually selecting and ...
How to create a Panoramic in Lightroom
1 Shot from 2 parts This is one of the many beautiful waterfalls in Iceland – not often seen as it’s on a 4×4 route and well-hidden. It’s called Fagrifoss – they’re all fosses! In ...
Goodnight Kris
Imposter syndrome, self doubt, feelings of doom, am I doing the right thing… everyone who has taken the plunge to leave employment and go it alone will have had all of these in varying degrees. ...
Abi the Ballerina – in some woods
Abi In The Woods Abi’s a talented dancer from west yorkshire and got her dream to pursue dance at ballet school this summer We took her and family to some woods near Bingley to get ...
Our Group Photoshoots – Mike Doing a Presentation
APOGII’s MD – Mike Munt This is MD of design and illustration agency Apogii – Mike Munt. He came on our 3th Share the Shoot day – which was early 2019. Watch the live action ...
5 Days in Austria – It’s Magical
In 2018 we had out 7th trip to Austria and got images on all 5 days of the trip – this video contains some of my favourite moments from the holiday. It’s well worth a ...
All Creatures Great and Small
Do you recognise this ford? Here’s the ford you see the old car go through at the start of All Creatures Great and small, a BBC TV show through out my childhood. It was compulsive ...
A Fast Website Refresh
A new look without a new site Websites can be a stressful thing to create, write and update – you’ve got to think of all that functionality, the copy and layout – it’s usually the ...
Winter 2019 Workshops
As spring begons we say good bye to another winter, and what a fantastic winter is was for workshops at McFade photography. We had a series of weekend workshops, places like Liverpool, the Yorkshire coast ...
Jaeda Sharman – Future Superstar Model!
Leafy November Shoot This November I did a shoot with young Jaeda, a star of the future who’s not only a great model but a competition diver too! A portfolio shoot around our mutual hometown, ...
Summer Night Photography Workshops – 2018 Review
Another series of Photography Workshops drew to an end in Manchester on the 26th September. It seems like ages since we started on our beginners evening in Leeds, which turned out to be the only ...
Mavic Air Drones for Photography
3 Weeks with a Drone…. So I got one – I saw just how small the “mavic air” is on Youtube and thought the time had come! Reasons why I got one… It really does ...
Save £1000’s by NOT breaking photographers copyright!
Copyright tracking just got easier How sure are you that your website images are all legal to use? By that, did you buy a licence or hire a photographer – or did you just pop on ...
Mastering Black and White in LIGHTROOM
Mean, Moody and Mono Sometimes you don’t get that perfect light – the colours are missing and you’re tempted to get back in the car and drive home. But so long as you’ve got a ...
Correct Skin Tone in 1 Second
When you’ve done a shoot and have hundreds of shots to trawl through, you need a quick way to get the skin tone the right brighness on your subject. It’s not straightforward enough to use ...
The Reality of Running Workshops
One of the most common issues we get are people asking to cancel (or come on a different workshop for no extra cost) – it could be work related, or a sick pet or anything ...
Brad Quinn on Dock Street
It’d been on the cards for months but just hadn’t got round to doing this shoot with Brad. So on Weds, we met up at The Tetley in Leeds and got some great images around the ...
The Nightmare Of Holiday Photography
Can mixing a holiday and photography ever work? So you’re off somewhere amazing for your holiday, with friends or family who probably are not photographers – or at least not as serious as you are. ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (7)
7 – License to use the images And finally, the one no-one considers. When you commission a photographer, you are paying for them to create images, edit them and a license for you to use ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (6)
6 – Time to edit the images This is just as important as shoot day, and in many cases, has more influence on the final look of the photos. The signature of a photographers style ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (5)
5 – Time to take the images So this IS the time we spend with you shooting, the contact time, the time on site – it’s where the magic is started, but by no means ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (4)
4 – A 3rd Party view of your business Following closely from point 3 – business owners are often too close to the wood to see the trees… Getting someone from outside into bounce ideas ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (3)
3 – Creative Mind and Ideas It’s often difficult for business owners to think of images to represent their business. If you’re an accountant and spend most of the day in Sage/Xero/Excel, how do you make that ...
Hiring a Photographer : 7 things you’re REALLY buying (2)
2 – The Right Kit for the Job! They have invested in the right bits and pieces for the job. This really does vary on what subjects people cover and style they achieve. Portrait people will ...