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 year creating video content, be that behind the scenes footage of a photoshoot, close-ups of food or even photoshop editing videos. It’s been great fun and amazing learning curve. I really enjoy going through YouTube’s free music library to find the right tune for my videos and synching the cuts in the video to fit music… I’m sure…
Category: Photography
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 case with photography. It’s not just the end product which counts, but how you get to it. I’ve been shooting business folks for almost a decade now and with the odd exception, no one really likes the idea of it. We are second only to dental root canal work to many! It’s totally different from…
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 you’re looking to create a print of Ingleborough, could you find all your photos of the hill and quickly make a decision on which to use? Well if you’re ever in this situation, this video may help. If not, it’s useful anyway to see how others work – and this is my workflow from getting…
I know – sometimes it’s too dark to shoot and you don’t have any off-camera kit, so you have to use your flash “on camera” But the light you get off a direct flash is horrible – there’s an example in the video below. It serves a purpose, but it creates a passport photo look rather than that creative look we’re all after as photographers So what can you do? Well with most Speedlites, you can point the head in almost any direction, so the light doesn’t go straight to…
Give me grey and day There’s nothing more boring than a blue sky to us photographers! So when we got this dramatic sky all day on my last trip to the northeast, it really was a gift. Pinnacle Bridge, Sunderland First off we went south to see the new bridge in Sunderland. It’s the tallest thing in town and really is pretty huge – you can easily see it from the A19 as you pass the city. These are all taken with the 5DIV and the 24mTS-e mark 2 with a…
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, Morley, hair and styling by her mum, makeup artist and skincare consultant, Michelle Sharman – who also did the art direction, helping Jeada with her poses. Dad We started at Dartmouth Park, where we tried to blow some leaves into the photos with a leaf blower, but they were all too wet and sticky to move…
NIGHTSCAPES 2018/2019 Begins! It all started last night in Roundhay Park – our winter of light painting around Roundhay Park saw us using torches and gels to colour the world! New for 2018 is a “Manker MK 35” torch – this claims to have a 1.4Km beam – it does shine a hell of a long way, and with its very narrow beam, its great for detail work. Think of it as a fine brush, whereas other torches are more like thicker airbrushes. This photo was just the MK35 torch…
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 evening where it rained! 2018 was amazingly dry and hot – it made the whole 10 workshops a joy. So here’s a quick review of what we covered in our Photography Workshops – I’d designed them for absolute beginners to gradually learn technical and creative skills over the months. Photography Workshop 1 – Leeds “Creative…
Our second portrait workshop the summer was with Nicola Papperazzo, Chloe Mason and Andy Blue McLaren. We split it into a couple of locations on the west end of Leeds city centre. Starting in the flowery Park Square, where I showed people how to use flowers in the foreground to add blurry texture – like this one of Nicola The sun light was low and warm, so we also made use of that with shots like this one of Chloe, where she’s looking straight towards the sun The sun soon left the…
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. Can you really make this work? The dream holiday photography… For the die-hard-photographer who wants photography perfection, you really need to be up before dawn to capture the sunrise, in the best possible location which you have carefully researched! Then again in the evening, you need a couple of hours to get into position for…