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…
Category: Training
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…
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…
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 Auto Settings – that will take account of the background as well as the foreground and skin – so you can end up with all kinds of problems! Here’s an unedited shot of Brad – the lighting’s pretty cool, but I’m, not sure whether his skin’s right or not. In general, Caucasian skin will be…
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 life throws up. We have to say no in order to stay in business – hope this explains why! We love running workshops at McFade – it’s our way of doing photography we love AND sharing our passion for all things camera related. But for our workshops to be worthwhile, we need to keep an…
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…
Our little secret! All photographers and designers know how to do this – and it is REALLY easy to do – and it really can leverage that photography investment to your advantage. We use Adobe LIGHTROOM to do it at McFade, but there is a free tool called “IfranView” which does it as well. Leverage your investment Get 30 for the price of 10 Imagine you’ve invested in a shoot and received 10 amazing edited photos. How do you make this into 20 or 30 photos without actually “editing”*** the image? This…
Gone are the old days… Stitching panoramic photos used to be a pain. you’d have to do all kinds of prep on each photo in LIGHTROOM first, then export them as high res files, then create a stack in PHOTOSHOP and merge them…. and it’d probably go wrong at some stage! The panoramic world has moved on Happily, this has all moved on and you can stitch photos in seconds using LIGHTROOM and no other program. If you start off with 2 photos like these:- TOP PART OF PANORAMIC BOTTOM…
Night Photography at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds Ok, we’re really lucky to have a ruined abbey right on the edge of our city – and it’s got lots of free parking! So each year I take a new group of photographers down there to light it up with powerful torches and sparks. Here’s what we got up to this year – this is Feb 2018. The group really enjoyed Light Graffiti – that’s drawing things with torches if you keep moving your body doesn’t appear in the photo, just the trace…