Digital Imaging - Smoke Trails!

So our task for last week was to photography smoke trails. I was abit optimistic about photographing smoke trails as I have never tried to shoot smoke before, especially trials which are usually shot at close range and which are very detailed. I always thought it would be very hard to get the perfect picture. But I spent abit of time (which was only about 20 minutes due to work commitments!!)setting up a backdrop for some 'trail and error' photography smoke trails.

The setting for my images were my window sill funnily enough! I propped my laptop on my window sill as the black backdrop and used the flashlight on my phone as a 'softbox' on one side to light up the smoke, if you can picture that! Almost like a miniature studio for tiny people! It actually worked better than I expected as I wasn't expecting to get anything first time round! I got my dad to light the match and blow it out so I could focus on capturing the smoke trail in detail in which I only managed to get one good image in the short time I had! But I will be trying this technique out again after Christmas to see if I can get some more to add to my collection :) for now here is the smoke trail I shot which I am really quite pleased with!!!

 

 

 

 

Laura xx

Studio Shoot

 During my first year at University our group did a lot of work with the Media Make-Up students, getting to know them and shooting in the studio with them and their models for various assessments and to build up their portfolios. I found that working with them during the second year was very limited, due to shoots being not as often or me focusing on my other assignments. But on Friday some of us had the opportunity to shoot around 8 models that had been made up by the Media Make-Up students for one of their upcoming assessments. I was very excited to get back into the studio and start shooting again! We got into the studio an hour early and set up all the lighting and backdrops ready for the models!

The students could choose what the theme of their model was, we had models sporting recycling, a flower, a circus dancer, a butterfly, a royal in the Victorian era and a few more! It is honestly amazing what the Media Make-Up students can do in just a few hours! My favourite one was a girl who was made into the theme 'the earth'. The Media Make-Up student added on fossil and earth-like things onto the girls body and it looked beautiful! She really made a brilliant effort and the model was so easy to work with! So for now I am just going to post a couple of my favourite images from this specific theme as I believe they really stand out as a group of images which I will be adding into my portfolio! I am so happy with my images, especially these specific ones, I'd like to think I captured the work of the student well to get some really lovely images that I am proud of!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had so much fun shooting on Friday and cant wait to shoot again when the opportunity comes up!

Laura xxx

Digital Imaging - Splash Photography

So this weeks task from one of our lecturers was to experiment with the word 'splash' and create images around 'splash' photography. Splash photography is very interesting and can create some very beautiful and striking images that you wouldn't normally see through the human eye, instead, through the camera lens, you are able capture a still life image that presents a lot of detail and technique.

I wanted to use something everyday to create a splash so I just picked up an apple from my fruit bowl, some spare black A3 paper and filled up a glass bowl full of water and off I went to my kitchen to start shooting! I did drag my mum into helping me so she could drop the apple into the bowl whilst I focused on capturing the image! It took us a few attempts to get it right but we eventually got some good shots!

I am very pleased with the outcome seeing it was my first attempt at this type of photography!! Some images are below, enjoy :)

 

 

 

I really loved experimenting with 'splash' photography and it is something I would definitely do again. If I were to do this again, I would change the object I was dropping into the water, or I would perhaps use a different glass, or a see through box so I could photograph the object falling into the water from the side of the box to get the objects splash from inside the box etc., just to do something different. I also like experimenting with angles and the different splashes you can achieve from the angles from the camera lens, so experimenting with that further is something I would like to practice.

 

Until next time :)
Laura xox

Who doesnt love a film camera?!

So during my weekly visit to my grandparents house, my grandad thought he'd surprise me by getting out his old Canon AT-1 50mm film camera! I was so excited when he opened up his old camera bag to find inside this little beauty! We sat there for an hour or so talking about the camera and what he used to shoot with it and so on! He has a big pile of old film back in the day when him and my nan went on holidays and outings! Although I am a Nikon fan rather than a Canon user, I found this camera absolutely fascinating, to the weight of it and how heavy it was to the way it almost looks like a toy camera when you hold it in your hands!

 

 

I love the old fashioned way of turning the dial to set the correct aperture and shutter speed, although it requires a lot more thought, it just shows how photographers used to work and what they had to work with back in the day before digital cameras were even invented! It was also amazing the condition the camera was in, being almost 50/60 years old, all the numbers were still perfectly bold without any that were worn away! (It must have been in the back of the cupboard for a while haha!) My gramps still had the old fashion camera flash unit to pop on top of the camera body too!

A short but sweet blog today, showing you the wonders of a vintage family film camera! I absolutely love this old film camera and I honestly cant wait to try it out!!


Love,

Laura xxx

Digital Imaging - Experimenting with exposure

For one of our homework tasks for this week was to shoot some images that we have purposely under or over exposed. Then it was our job to open up the images and fix them using the tools we have in Photoshop.

I really enjoyed this task due to the fact that when I shoot, I wouldn't think twice about using an image that perhaps had a lot of dark shadows in it or if the image was so over exposed all the detail was washed out of it. I would almost always think about deleting them straight away. But our lecture this week taught me that even if an image isn't perfectly lit or exposed when originally shot, you can still make it look beautifully detailed and exposed when recovering it in Photoshop.

So this week I went out shooting in different lighting situations that would make the image look purposely over or under exposed by 1 or 2 stops and shooting in RAW. I was really excited about getting the images into Photoshop and seeing what I can do with them.

These are my outcomes:

Under exposed by 2 stops

Over exposed by 2 stops

 

I really enjoyed doing this task, it was something I had never done or even thought about doing with an image that looked over or under exposed before so it was definitely something that really interest me. I love the colours and detail you get out of Photoshop after shooting in RAW, it gives the images a lot of depth and vibrancy after recovering the image, especially with the leaves and branches in each image. Even though this was only a short task, I am definitely going to carry on with this specific skill and work on images that I have shot with the incorrect exposure, it will allow me to keep practising the technique and also teach me not to just delete images just because they don't look perfect, without working on them first.


Laura xxx

A change of scenery

So I usually blog about my favourite genre of photography, that being fashion and portrait related and upload my newest images which I add to my ever-growing portfolio. But for this specific blog I wanted to blog about a different genre of photography, that being landscapes. I started off my love of photography shooting almost everything and anything that looked interesting or beautiful. But the one thing I used to do the most was to go up into my sisters bedroom at the back of my house, I live on a hill which means when looking out from the window I can see for miles and miles over to Lacock from my house in Pewsham! I can see all sorts from the railway and trains passing by in the distance to hot air balloons floating around the sky in the summer! The sun sets almost everyday in the horizon of Lacock from my sisters bedroom window which is perfect me, allowing me to capture lots of different landscape and sunset images with a variety of colours throughout each image.

I would love for images like these to one day be sold on canvas, hung on walls or something similar, I think they would look very striking blown up on a beautiful canvas around someone's home.
Below are just 3 of my favourite sunset images which I think look absolutely beautiful!

 

 

 

 

Photographing a Hair Show

On Saturday I photographed my first ever hair show! It was such an amazing experience and one that I was preparing for for a little while now! After waking up at 6am and going to my usual job until 4pm in the afternoon, I had to rush home and get my things together and head down to the hair show. I arrived at 6 and the team were doing a final run through. So Caroline, the lady who owns the salon and who organised the whole show took me backstage where I was introduced to the hair salons regular photographer, Nick. He made me feel less nervous and we were having a laugh and a joke. He was telling me all about his 15 years spent in the photography business, with his own home studio and company, it was really inspiring listening to all the experiences he had during his photography career!

There was a lot of waiting around as the show didn't start until gone 7:30, but I was peeping out from behind the side stage curtains, out to where my mum and sister were sat, who were in the audience (they were trying to put me off!!) haha. The show began with a speech from Caroline, followed by a dance crew who were very good and started off the show perfectly! It then went into hair of different eras including 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and so on, one even dressed like the spice girls did back in the day! There was also a men's cut of the on-trend cut based on 'The Only Way is Essex'. Below are some images I took from the different decades of hair.

 

There was also another salon there which showcased their work during the second half of the show, the image above was one of my favourite images I took of 3 different hairstyles that were produced.

 

A live cut on stage: Long hair into a Bob

 

 

There was also live music during the evening which added something different to the evening, everyone in the crowd was signing along!

 

 

There was then a masquerade ball, which showcased big hair that would usually be sported back in the days when people 'went to the ball'. The hair was amazing and looked like it took hours to do! Complete with beautiful gowns and lovely make-up from a well known make-up artist it all came together brilliantly!

I took around 400 images, so it was very hard to just narrow it down to just a few, so I picked my favourite from the evening to put on my blog post today! I had an amazing time, I was there around 4 hours and it absolutely flew by I was having such a brilliant time! I am so so pleased with my images and it was such a different and amazing experience, one which I would do all over again!!

Laura xxx

Birthday Treat!

 

So on Saturday it was my 20th birthday! Beforehand I cheekily asked my parents for a new camera lens for my Nikon D3100, and I wasn't at all expecting to open up one of my presents and for a camera lens to appear! I was so excited! My parents bought me a Sigma 70 - 300mm lens, which is a telephoto/zoom/macro lens. After only having my 18 - 55mm kit lens for a long time, it was nice to add a new lens to my kit bag, especially this one, which has a lot of scope and variety to it which I haven't had before.
Below is an image of my Sigma lens on my camera body with it almost fully zoomed out. (I didn't realise it would be that big!) I also have a lens hood on the end of it. This came with the lens and is something I also wanted. As I do a lot of outdoor/ location shoots it will prevent the glare from stray light through the lens and also on my images which I am very happy about.

I also got a flower lens hood which was a separate present from my parents. I love the fact I have 2 lens hoods, so I can swap them about depending on what lens I'm using, as my flower lens hood is specifically used for my 18 - 55 mm lens. Again, this will prevent the light from reflecting into the lens and to prevent my images from looking washed out.

 

 

 

 

A short blog post today, but just a little insight to what's new in my camera kit bag, I cant wait to keep adding to it and to start shooting with my new Sigma lens!

Laura xxx

Creating my own website

After going back to University after a week off, we started on the subject of creating our own websites to really get our name and work out into the big wide world. I have always wanted to create my own website, I just wouldn't know the first thing about how to start one up! So I am really looking forward to getting one going in the next few weeks with the help of our tutor!

This week we started to look at what we wanted our website to look like, the layout and also what the most important aspects of photography web pages are, to consider within our own.

I immediately knew the sort of style I want mine to ultimately look like. I really love photographer Dan Kennedy, a fashion and celebrity photographer from London. He is definitely a photographer I look up to. Working in commercial, advertising and fashion photography, is definitely what I would love to do in the future. Although his images are stunning in their own right, its also his website that stands out from many others in the same business as him. Photography is a very hard and competitive business, and a good website is almost the first impression you can give to potential clients and other growing/amateur photographers wanting to work up the photography ladder. Below is one of my favourite layouts of a website, which is Dan Kennedys website.

Homepage: His homepage is very simple, yet so striking. I think its very brave of a photographer to just have one image on the homepage of their website. Because its not going to be of everyone's taste it is almost a gamble. But it shows that Kennedy is very confident and proud of his work, and so he should be, its a beautiful image to have as a first impression. It is also very clever as there are no captions to click on specific areas of his photography, you have to click on the image to enter his full website, I really like that idea.

 

 

I love the layout of his website, with his specific sets of images separated into different tabs at the top of his website for easy navigation, including, 'portraits', 'fashion', 'commercial', 'news', 'pdf' and 'contact'. The image you are clicked on is the main part of the page, and you can change the image you want to see by clicking on the washed out images below to enlarge them. The colour scheme is very simple and sophisticated, with a grey for the background which compliment his images, without drawing any attention away from them.

 

Above is his 'Contact' page. Including a small 'About' section and Job opportunities. The page also includes celebrities he has photographed and images he has used for publications. This page again is very plain but very neat and tidy, it doesn't need any colour or fancy layout to it.


Another favourite of mine is James Nader's website. A fashion, commercial and editorial photographer, again his work is just amazing and his website is really one of a kind, especially before you enter the full website. I just want to show you his homepage, as I find it very different to anyone else's website. Probably my most favourite homepage, the image used is incredible, with just the simplicity of his last name in capitals underneath with links below that. Set within the centre of the page, the 3 aspects of the model, his name and the little tabs, all link in as almost one image and aspect together. The pure beauty of the white background just completes the homepage and adds a feel of completeness to it.

 

 

I really enjoy looking at other photography websites, as inspiration and also the level and standard to what the top photographers of the genre I want to work in are doing at the moment. I cant wait to create my own website!!

Laura xx

 

Upcoming Events!

As I haven't blogged in a while I thought it was the perfect opportunity to tell you what is upcoming in my photography calendar and what I have lined up for the next few months.

So my most exciting project or event I have coming up during the end of this month is a Hair Show. Being asked to be photographer for an event like this was a privilege, as during my first year at University, our group worked a lot with MUA and their work on hair collections. Events such as catwalks and hair shows have always been something I am very interested in, which I guess relates to fashion and the world of fashion/editorial photography, which is my main ambition. I contacted a local salon during the summer, who kindly took a look at my work and took me on board. A lot of prep work is going into this hair show, with models, very well known makeup artists and hair stylists showcasing their work to family, friends and other businesses. I will be working with the salons regular photographer, which will enable me to build my portfolio, gain important skills, add to my experience and to show that I am versatile in different types of photography. I am very excited for this event, although I am nervous I cant wait to get there and start shooting a night as it happens. I hope to get some great results and I cant wait to share the images.

Another exciting event coming up is after Christmas, but again, I am also working with the salon to help them shoot a Portfolio for a hair stylist, in which the images will go towards the 'British Hairdressing Awards'. These awards are huge and the images need to look the part. Again, not much has been organised do to with this as the hair show is the main priority, but I am very excited for this event. I enjoy shooting in a studio environment, capturing beautiful portraits of hair which I have had a little bit of experience with. I will be using my portable studio which is very handy and very easy to set up. Again, these images will be a great group of images to add to my ever growing portfolio, which can showcase my photography for future clients or future job opportunities. Getting paid is always a bonus!!

Lastly, I may also be doing Music Photography, more specifically, shooting a portfolio of images for a band. For a local pop punk/ punk rock band I know who want to get their name and music out their. After recently completing their first EP, they want some images for their website/Facebook and Twitter pages. Again, the band and I are in the process of this shoot and I will hopefully be shooting with them in the upcoming months. This is something new and definitely a genre of photography that I am looking forward to trying out.

Until next time :)

Laura xxx

Bowood Part 2

So on my previous blog, I blogged about a recent photo-shoot I did at a beautiful waterfall in Bowood House and Gardens. Although I did shoot at other parts of Bowood during the same day, I just wanted to blog about those specific images because I thought they were a very powerful set of images just on their own. But as I just said, I did shoot at other places of the House and Gardens which I didn't want to leave out so I thought id show them in a separate blog post and show you what I did on the other half of my morning at Bowood House. Below, are some of my favourite images (before my model got wet!!).

 

The dress I picked out for my model to wear reminds me of the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in the famous image of her dress blowing up. Luckily on the day we went to shoot, it was quite windy which allowed the dress to flow in all directions creating a really nice effect.

 

I am really pleased with these images, the setting was beautiful, the weather was perfect and I will definitely be going back to shoot here again soon :)


Laura xxx

A hidden gem

 For my most recent shoot, a friend and I popped over to Bowood for the morning. Being only a 2 minute drive from where we both live is very handy - you don't always have to travel far to find beautiful locations to shoot at! Once we arrived my friend got changed in the house toilets and we started making our way down to the hidden gem - the waterfall! Being a long walk and right at the bottom of the lake, I was worn out before I even started shooting! The waterfall is beautiful, set back from the rest of Bowood, to get there your have to walk over little stepping stones over the river! The sun also made an appearance every now and again which looked lovely peeking through the trees surrounding it. We started to shoot straight away, we couldn't wait to get started! I felt bad that my friend was getting wet from the water so I decided to take my boots off and get in with her.. well only up to my knees! We had a lot of fun and it was a great experience, especially walking back to the car in the rain and thunder and no umbrella! I will definitely be returning for another shoot here in the future, but for now here are some of my most favourite images taken from Wednesday :)

 

 

 

I have used Photoshop Elements 11 on all these images, increasing the contrast slightly and also bringing down the saturation level. I didn't want the colours in the images to be bright and 'in your face'. By dimming down the saturation in the image allows the colours to still be there but to be a lot more subtle, giving it a very smooth look to the image - an effect that I love! I am so proud of these images and it is definitely the best shoot I have done so far!


Laura xx