Tonight is the last of the family portraits (for the time being anyway). Lisa actually allowed me to take her picture. This doesn’t happen very often so I should really enjoy the moment. As with James and Abi the goal was to capture Lisa doing what she does every night, and I think I nailed it! Lisa didn’t want an iPad when they came out, but I convinced her to try one and once she did she wouldn’t put it down. Now she lies of the sofa and plays “games” on her iPad – for hours! She pretends to be watching TV but really she’s playing her games, I even have to tell her when to look up when something interesting happens.
I wanted to do a black and white again, but Lisa insisted that I leave her bow on her slippers pink. No idea why you will have to ask her.
Big game of tug-a-war tonight, three Master Chief’s against smaller weaker halo characters. Guess who won?
So yesterday I started shooting environmental portraits of the family. I started with James on his Xbox, and tonight we have Abi reading. Now Abi is a very keen gymnast and is usually flipping or cartwheeling around the house/garden/sofa etc., and my immediate thought was to capture her doing her gymnastics thing.
But I walked into the family room and found her literally in this pose reading on the sofa. I loved the pose so much I grabbed the camera and took the shot.
Of course the moment I pointed the camera in her direction she started to pose for me and I had to ask her to just pretend I wasn’t there. After a couple of shots she stopped smiling and I got the image below.
So that’s two for two, tomorrow night is the Lisa picture – if I can just convince her to let me that is.
This evening the Halo guys decided they wanted to play connect four. So out came the game and the competition started.
I decided today to try something different and take some environmental portraits. Usually an environmental portrait is someone at work in their normal “environment” (or place of work), but I thought it would be interesting to photograph the family doing what they usually do. OK I admit it, it’s not that interesting, but it’s still too cold to go outside so hang in there with me.
So I had a talk with the family and they agreed (after all sorts of threats and promises etc.), to let me take their photograph. To give the images a different kind of look I decided to make them all black and white.
Tonight’s lucky subject is James doing what he does best – Playing XBox.
Feeling brave, Carter decided to “ride the doggy”.
Today was wet, snow melting and rain failing, so I thought I’d try something else. I happened to see Abi looking out the Window and thought it would make a nice picture.
By the time I got out lights, the rain stopped, so I had to ask James to join me in the garden and point the garden hose at the window! The picture came out ok though.
Interestingly, since I have been posting images I’ve had a number of questions from people about Photoshop. So I thought I should comment.
Every single professional image that’s posted anywhere is Photoshoped. From magazines to billboards, post processing is here to stay. Now some people say that this doesn’t count as photography and consider it “cheating”. But even the famous Ansel Adams was a king in the darkroom and spent hours perfecting “dodging and burning” while images developed. Today, he would do this in Photoshop.
So what kind of things do I do in Photoshop? The answer depends on the image. At a minimum, every picture is sharpened and color corrected so it accurately represents what I saw. If necessary I can change everything, from color, tone, exposure, brightness and noise reduction to lens and distortion correction. If that’s not enough I can remove blemishes and wrinkles, smooth skin and even re-sculpture a face or body. I can also remove distractions and composite a fake image from multiple parts.
At the end of the day the goal is to create an image that draws you in, makes you think and insights some kind of emotion.
In reality I’m still learning how to do all this well. I have some successes but shoot thousands of images for a few nice ones (literally). And to be honest there are very few I personally like.
So what can’t Photoshop do? Well it can’t create a good composition if one wasn’t captured and it can’t regain complete darkness or blown out highlights. So you have to know what you’re doing with the camera in the first-place and know how to use ambient light and how to augment or replace it with your own.
Hopefully at the end of the day you end up with a picture that looks great.
Today’s image was sharpened and I added a small vignette (to make the corners a little darker and draw you in). Hope you like it.
We went out for Mexican tonight and I had a Margarita. I turned my back for 30 seconds and found this scene…
Today I was asked to go to Cross Fit in Redmond to photograph Danielle. I’ve never been before and didn’t know what to expect and it was quite a surprise! The class was called “Barbell Group” where members attend and (it appears) try to lift the heaviest weights they possibly can. These weights were massive, huge and I sat there feeling completely inadequate. The people there were lovely, very friendly and amazing to watch. But it looked really painful! One guy was was screaming as he lifted the weights and his face was totally red. While I was watching all I could think of was how heavy my camera and lens was – what a loser I am! I knew I was in another “land” when I heard a women behind me say to someone else “I love chin ups”, I mean, who loves chin ups? What’s wrong with chocolate!!!On the way there (I promised to get there at 5pm), I drove past what I can only describe as the most amazing sun set I have ever seen. I was crying as I drove to the gym – but then that’s usual.OK technical bit coming, so stop reading now if you want. Taking the picture was a challenge. Not only was the light horrible (lots of fluorescent tubes throwing out nice “green” light) but there were so many people there that getting close to Danielle was really hard. I had to shoot with very high ISO and get what I could. I’d have liked to have put up a couple of lights and then I would have got some great shots – maybe next time.
This was another fun won. I’ve decided that the blue Halo dude (Carter) is the cleaver one, and the other is an idiot!
