Abandoned Homestead

Last Wednesday night, I joined the team from www.creativephotoworkshops.com.au and had the opportunity to photography a couple of models around a 1859 blue stone cottage. It's been long abandoned and the sad thing is the wonderful government has acquired the land to build a freeway straight over this old cottage.

We had four models, Lauren Busacca, her cousin Daniel, Richard Connon and Natasha Humble. The light was simply beautiful as the location and it gave me a chance to experiment with different ideas I had in my head. With Lauren having a more summer dress on I thought I would photograph her with a lot of backlight, blowing the colour and contrast and ending up with what I call a Country Road type feel to the images, light, airy and fun.

Natasha came all dress in bridal gown and veil so this was a good opportunity to hone my wedding style shots. If only you could shoot wedding images in these locations with perfect light all the time. I've photographed Natasha before but being a landscape photographer this location had me jumping. You just can't beat a great location with perfect afternoon light.

Later as the sun went down was the perfect time to find a location to use the setting sun. Being a old farm are there were some great machinery that had seen better days but it made a great spot for a bridal shot.

This workshop had no theme, except a great location, great models and great light. I enjoyed this, makes you think more about the images you want and helps to stir the creative juices inside, after all your not always going to have a mentor, tudor next to you all the time. My mate Shelton has taught me so much in such a short period of time, more than any book, video or the internet will teach you.

Well thats about it for now, more images can be seen on my facebook account

Shooting the Elderly- A Lovely Experience

You know every now and then you do something that moves you inside and makes you look at things very differently than you normally would. Well Saturday was one of those days. How did this come about?

Shelton Muller is a guy I am so honored to call a friend, he's a great portrait photographer and a great mentor. He runs, with a business partner, Creative Photo Workshops and together they had an idea of shooting the residents of a aged carers home. Seemed like a nice idea so I thought that I'd join them and about 7 photographers and go a shoot at the home.

So off we went, all in the minibus and heading a couple of hours out of Melbourne to a small town called Benalla.

I'm not going to talk to much about what we set up and how we shot, but more how the experience effected me and the way I tried to shoot during the day.

I guess you can see through these couple of images that each one of the residents had their own personality and character, some a little shy, others maybe a little crazy but each one was very different.

One of the things that my friend Shelton seems to do very well is see and capture the heart and soul of a individual and translate this through their eyes and expression and then ultimately through the lens of his camera. I'm sure this comes from experience and is the one lesson I myself am working hard to achieve. These images I captured this day are the closest I have come to doing this. Each one tells a story of many years and it's this that has touched me in shooting these images.

I've already shot some nice models and enjoy that side of portraits as well, but this has been the most rewarding. These images are not posed, there not staged, they are natural, a little serious in some, a little fun in others and a little crazy in others but each one is special. Some of the residents laughed, others cried but every one of them enjoyed the special day.

Have to say thanks for those that organised this, thanks to my great mentor and I look forward so much to do this all again.

More images will be posted on my facebook page but here's one more laugh

Bruny Island, Tasmania

Wow what a busy last month, working in the retail camera business certainly gets out of control this time of year but it's all over now. As I haven't really been doing much in the last month I thought I'd just post a couple of pictures I took last year when I visited the southern area of Tasmania.

These were shot on Bruny Island. This is a great spot and well worth the visit. I'm a landscape nut and getting myself out of bed at stupidly early hours comes naturally. I was up again very early, jumped in our hire car and shot off to find a location for the sunrise I knew I'd get. I look for a clear horizon but with clouds in the sky, and this morning was perfect. 

I looked for the reflections in the water and exposed for the foreground reflection. This of course made the sky too bright and I used a

combination of Neutral Density filters to control the sky. I had a total of 4 stops of filters on this image.

This next image was shot within 5 minutes of the first image. This to me pinpoints the need to be patient and stay at a location until the morning light has finished (same applies at sunset).

Again I exposed for the foreground reflection and used a combination of Neutral Density filters to control the sky. This image had the camera swing a little more right than the first image. The clouds here really started to glow with the morning sun.
Now Bruny Island seems to be a spot a lot of people miss going to. It's on the western side of Hobart and you need to take a ferry trip to the island. My point about Bruny is, that while its not the most simple place to visit it has some very unique features. We took the charter tour around to the most southern area of the island. Well worth it and can highly recommend. You will see both Australian and NZ fur seals, as well as masses of sea birds, so take along a long lens. If you're really fortunate and go at the correct time of year, Southern Right Whales and maybe Humpbacks as well. We were about a month to early.

One other creature on Bruny Island and one I really wanted to find was the White Bennett's Wallabies. These are not Albino, being about 2 generations off we were told. Finding these wallabies isn't hard but they are only on the southern tip of the island, so be prepared to have a walk. These wallabies really show off the remoteness of the place as they have no natural predators. In fact I'm sure they also must not have the best eye sight as the one we found didn't hop away but came out and posed for us.

This was only a small part of our trip, more to come later, but I hope this gives you an insight into this wonderful island that if you plan a trip to Tasmania you will add this to your plans.

As another year comes to a close I hope you all had a great 2009 and lets look forward to what 2010 brings us.

Werribee Open Plain Zoo

Had the wonderful pleasure of being on a special training program with Olympus Imaging last week. I was chosen by Olympus to do this training to be a brand ambassador for their cameras and lenses. First day was a trip to Werribee Zoo for a chance to shoot with some of their longer lenses. Olympus really push the quality of the lenses they make all the way from their budget kit lens right through to their Super Pro lenses. I was able to try out both their 50-200 /2.8-3.5 and the big gun 90-250 /2.8, a 180-500 /2.8 on their bodies. This later lens I also used with the 2x tele convertor making a 320-1000 /5.6.

Now if you have never been to Werribee Zoo then I'll explain a little about it. First of all if you just rock up and pay to get in you also get a safari in a big closed bus that drives around the open plain section. This bus follows a route around the zoo and that's it. If the animals are off

somewhere else that's bad luck.

A better option for a photographer is to go on a photographic tour in a open 4x4. These take you to the animals for up close and personal shots.

This first image of the Giraffe, who decided the 4x4 was something to stick its head into was shot with the E30 and 90-250/ 2.8. All images are hand held and show that the IS (image stabilizer) works very well in the camera bodies.

While we were here the animals feeder came along and I was able to hand feed this giraffe. Sort of a nice experience except the slobber left all over my hand. Imagine the Olympus add with the dog that slobbers all over the camera and times that slobber by 10. It was gross.

The problem with the feeder being around is the White Rino's decided to pay us a visit.

This was all well and good and gave me the opportunity to get in super close and shoot images like the one on the left.

Again it's with the 90-250 and 2x convertor. All the images with the 2x on are shot at f8 or f11. The insures maximum sharpness with the convertor and I have to say it is tack sharp with this configuration.

The whole tour took around 1 1/2hrs, much longer than the normal bus tour and we were able to drive right up to every animal.

Of course you just have to get a shot of the Zebra, and again for this image I tried to just shoot the patterns on them. I have many others of the faces but I liked this one better. You recognize straight away what they are without seeing the faces.

After the tour we didn't have a great deal of time but I did manage to snap on shot of the Meerkat.

They were all resting under a tree when I got there and I had the camera and lens pointing down, it's quite heavy the 90-250 lens. One Meerkat decided it would go look out and

scrambled up the rock to the look out post. I lifted the camera and lens and fired off one shot. The Meerkat was then gone. So at 1/320 @ f9 at 950mm I scored a take sharp image of the little guy. IS was definitely helping here.

So next time you visit Melbourne or maybe it will be you first time, book in a visit to Werribee Zoo, make sure you do a photographic tour and these do need to be pre-booked. Sometimes working in a camera store has it's blessings.

Photo Retouching

You know sometimes our photos just don't come out the way we thought they would. Maybe they are flat, lack sparkle or are just a little bit boring. A friend that I met through my favorite coffee shop in the city had just this problem. Her wedding photos, while ok, were straight shots from the camera. Some of these shots definitely needed some work on them. They were flat, often her face and that of her husbands were to dark, so through talking to her I offered to help out with retouching the photos.

Now this is just one of many I have touched up and I'll explain why I cropped it so harshly and what filters I used to create the overall effect.

Firstly I felt the photo had way to many distractions, the brick wall did nothing for me as did the open screen door, but the major distraction was the photographers own reflection in the window. This to me was a little funny, do you not look in the viewfinder before taking a shot?

Anyway I decided these distractions needed to be cropped out to centre the focus of the image on to the bride. So after some careful framing I decided it looked best in almost a square format.

If we look at this photo now we see it's not to bad but it still looks a little flat. So what did I do.

I use Photoshop CS4 and Nik software for my retouching. So first of all I took any blemishes off the skin. Then I used Nik software from then on, the reason for this is Nik software speeds up the retouching process and I prefer to not spend hours on a computer to retouch a photo.

The first thing I do is correct the highlight and shadows of an image. I can selectively do this with the Nik plugin, so with this image I selectively brightened her face and arms to make them stand out from the background. I then smoothed out her skin again using Nik software. I used to make masks and selections to do this but Nik makes it a one click process. I ran a contrast filter to boost that a little and then used one of the most common Nik filters. It's a bleach bypass filter and effectively copies what fashion photographers used to do with film. If you want to know more search the technique. I ran a small glamor glow after this and the image was basically done.

Again the effects that you can produce out of Nik software is huge and this is only one of many different versions I could have produced with the software. I have done many B&W's, Duo Toned, Sepia, and the list goes on.

Why I'm posting another article about Nik software is to show the speed and versatility you get from using it. It truly is a quick way of working in a digital workflow.

Well that's about it this time. I am avaliable for photo retouching so contact me if you would like to discuss what I can do for your photos.

Again just to show the difference about 10 minutes can make I have posted the two images side by side

Nik Software

Today I had the pleasure of attending a training session with one of Nik Software's Pro trainers. This was a big buzz, I knew of the software, in fact Nikon Capture NX2 is made by the same company. Now these guys know what they are doing when it comes to designing class leading Aperture, Lightroom & Photoshop plugins and through the training today I got to see exactly how these plugins work to speed up the editing process of images.

To start with they have 5 different plugins, Dfine, Viveza, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro and Sharpener Pro. So what do they all do.

Well simply Dfine is noise reduction software. It analyzes a image in continuos tones and applies noise reduction to that area, it try's to avoid areas of detail. It works extremely well and I have tried it on a few high ISO images with stunning results.

Viveza is their best selling piece of software, if you use Nikon Capture NX you would be familiar with Viveza. With this software you can use what

Nik call "U-Point" technology. This allows you to adjust just certain areas in the image by dropping control points on them. New in version 2 is a structure slider.

Color Efex Pro is a bunch of filters, and the image here has a couple of these applied to it. Midnight, Darken/Lighten Centre, Dynamic Skin Softener, Glamor Glow & Bleach Bypass, again using control points you can use the filters in selections on the image instead of the whole image. You could do this in Photoshop by itself but I would think a good 1/2hr would be used. With Nik Software these filters took less that 5 minutes and although a little rough gives a good idea of why these are such a time saver.

This second image used Silver Efex Pro, this plugin is for converting to B&W. It will emulate film grain and is the best B&W converter period.

It has a split tone added to the image in a Sepia tone.

The last one is Sharpener Pro, this is the best output sharpener I have ever used, selective sharpening is dead easy and it even helps for loss of depth of field.

All up the 5 plugins are a photographers dream, making some things that would take quite a while in Photoshop, just a couple of clicks with Nik Software

Scott & Tina

Starting out in wedding photography is sometimes a daunting task. I never thought I'd ever want to shoot weddings. After all I started as a landscape/wildlife photographer, but there was something about weddings that just made me want shoot them.

Now, I'm not the type of photographer that will just become a weekend warrior and advertise that I will shoot someone's wedding, I want to make sure I know what I am getting myself into and make sure I also know what I'm doing. So what did I do?

I became an assistant and second shooter for professional photographers. Now at Scott and Tina's wedding I was a second shooter/assistant for good friend Shelton Muller. Scott is my wife's cousin so that was easy. Becoming a second shooter helps to learn the basics of what you will need to know later when you go out on your own.

The whole experience was a blast, Shelton taught me real quick that unless you're relaxed, comfortable and confident then the bride and groom will sense this and they will not be relaxed, comfortable and confident either, this will show in the photos. So to start with, learn to show confidence on the outside even if the butterflies are going on inside.

Then start to watch how professionals pose the couple, how they use the light that's available and learn from it. Don't worry if you can't shoot to start with, carrying their bag and getting the gear they need in a hurry will earn you more points than trying to shoot your own images.

When you do get the opportunity to start to shoot your own images, don't shoot over your mentors shoulders, try to set up your own images and shoot your own style, you will need this when you start out on your own, and it helps you to develop your own style.

Look through the yellow pages for wedding photographers and send them a little portfolio if you have one and tell them what you would like to do. Don't expect payment for you helping them, do it to learn. If and when you really are an asset to them, then maybe they will pay you for your service.

Again it's a lot easier to learn when it's a family wedding to start with, the photographer will have already met the couple and organized his day, your just a helper that the couple already will feel very comfortable with and it will make the day a lot smoother. So if weddings are something you want to get into, hopefully these couple of little tips will get you started.

Until next time shoot the light.