Sleeping Child

This is photo that I took for a competition with the theme "close-up". I didn't have a digital camera of my own at the time (to speak of), so I took the photo with an Olympus digital camera that I borrowed from a brother-in-law. I converted the photo to black & white by playing around with various channels - mostly it came from the K channel in CMYK mode with a bit of the other channels mixed in to avoid the completely blank areas that you get with the K channel by itself. The detail in the photo was a little soft for my liking, so used the pen tool in two ways to help to improve it a little:

• I used the pen to create masks along some of the lines that needed to be sharpened up a little (for example along the eyelids, nostrils, etc.). Ironically the masks needed to be blurred a little (with the blur brush) because the lines directly from the pen tools were a bit too sharp on their own. I used the resulting masks to sharpen things up a little by lightening / darkening along the edge of the mask as appropriate.
• I draw paths along each of the eye-lashes (ok, so I had too much time on our hands!) and stroked the paths with a black brush using simulated pressure. This resulted in reasonably realistic, sharp lashes which were a significant improvement on the originals which were a bit too blurred and grainy for my liking (although, again, I had to reintroduce some blurring in places to soften them back down a little).

Picture Frames

The idea for this came from a similar idea that I had seen somewhere else at some point in the past. I rigged up a white sheet as a background and got each person to sit on the sheet (one at a time) holding a framed picture (borrowed from various walls around the house!). The actual picture in the frame that they were holding didn't matter. Once all the individual photos were taken, I opened them in Photoshop - converted them to black & white (primarily by converting to CMYK and using the K channel mixed with a little of some of the other channels) - and then used "free transform" to transform then so that they fitted into the frame that the other person was holding. I also had to do some erasing of the background here and there to touch things up.

If you've got kids (or know someone who has), then why not give this idea a try yourself - it's not particularly difficult, fun and is a bit different from just a straight family shot.

Wedding Book

I don't think that I would really want to be a professional wedding photographer - too stressful and repetitive, I think - however, I do quite enjoy it when I get roped into taking wedding photos for someone once in a while. In the past, I have always had to work with film, so I was quite excited when the opportunity came along for me to cover a wedding digitally for the first time. In particular, I wanted to put together a photo book with the shots from the wedding. The result is shown below - each image shows facing pages from the final book. The bride and groom were happy with it at least :)

I used a Sigma 24-70 f2.8 lens and a mixture of available light and bounced flash (except during the actual service when I was not allowed to use a flash so used available light only).

[Note that these photos link to my old Flickr ID - there were too many of them for me to get round to moving them all to the new "Delight in Light" account.]

The Claw

This is a photo of the left-overs of a crab that my brother-in-law and I had (rather unsuccessfully) cooked on the bbq. I noticed that the left-over legs looked like claws so I decided to try to capture a photo that looked like some sort of monster's arm reaching out for something. The "something" was a plastic bouncy ball that I found lying around the house; the "arm" was miscellaneous pieces of left-overs strategically placed behind the legs.

To get the photo I found an old piece of hardboard and drilled a hole in it a little smaller than the ball. This allowed me to light the ball from underneath to give it the "mysterious glow" effect. The light underneath was a bare flash with barn-doors (so that it only lit the ball and didn't spill out around the sides of the board). The "claw" itself was lit with another flash in a home-made soft-box behind and to the right (as you look at it). I positioned the soft box a couple of metres away so that the light wasn't too soft. I used a Mamiya medium-format camera with Velvia transparency film and a flash meter to set the exposure for the two flashes. I subsequently scanned the transparency and gave it some slight tweaks in Photoshop (curves and that sort of thing) to give it a bit more punch.

I'm not really convinced that the hardboard and shavings really worked, but, other than that, I was pleased with how it turned out - particularly as that was still in the days when you didn't get to see the photo instantly to check the effect, but had to wait for it to come back from being processed!

Victoria Falls at Sunrise

I took this photo several years ago when I was visiting Victoria Falls (on the Zambezi River in Africa between Zimbabwe and Zambia) on honeymoon with my wife. It was taken with a 35mm film camera (remember those??) - the digital version here was scanned from a 6x4" print on a flat-bed scanner

Whilst visiting Vic Falls, I (obviously) took quite a few photos (not as many as I probably would in these days of digital, of course) but most of the were what you might call "record" shots - I don't know if it is because I had seen so many other photos of the Falls in the past (I used to live in Zimbabwe), but I was finding it difficult to feel inspired about capturing something that I felt was at all interesting or that captured anything of the feel of the place.

In the end, based on the well known fact that the light makes or breaks landscape photos, I decided that the best plan would be to try to get a shot at sunrise (sunset, which would have been easier, didn't really work because the light direction didn't seem to be working).

I have to admit that it was a bit of a challenge to drag myself and my wife out of our nice warm bed early enough to get there in time, but the light (and, actually, the whole experience) was absolutely fantastic - if you are ever anywhere like that, then I strongly recommend making the effort to get up and see the sunrise. Not only did I get some photos that were much more interesting that the others I had taken, but also a memory that both of us treasure - and one that we would have missed if it weren't for that desire to get out there and capture that more interesting photo.

In terms of technique, by the way, there wasn't really anything difficult about this shot - I'm reasonably sure that I used my tripod, and I determined the exposure to use by taking spot readings from the dark and light areas on the scene and then choosing an overall exposure that I thought would give a reasonable overall exposure.