No shadows on the right

There are many ways of getting rid of shadows and the best and easiest is not to have them in the first place. If you are a miser like me then you don't do it by studio lighting but by dark backgrounds. If you find that your dark background is not dark enough then you can get on the computer and get rid of the shadows. On the left is the photo before manipulation.

An alternative to amending the shadow areas is to give it an arty feel by increasing contrast and making it darker. You won't find any shadows on the right.

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Natural Smiles

If you ask a brother and sister to pose then you may easily find that they stand together. It was nice to see the pose on the left and even nicer to see the pose on the right because you can see at once that the gesture is a joke and the smiles are natural.

I try to keep instructions to a minimum as you can tell they are thinking about the instruction rather than how they look on the photo. When I take wedding photos I do give as few instructions as possible but I do let everyone know when I am taking the photo. The best smiles are either during the set photos when a guest makes a joke or during the informal photos when the smile is natural anyway.

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Photograpic Backgrounds

This is the real reason that I was asked to take the portraits. It was for a photo of the two of them together. I used three backgrounds and my preference is for this one but I know it is not everyone's choice, and that's why I like to take a few more photos with a few different poses and use a few different backgrounds.

This is a collapsible background and it isn't as big as the photos may make it appear. I have amended the backgrounds on the computer and printed them out. I actually prefer a £2,50 dark piece of cloth but the image is not quite right!

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The Fridge Magnets

Here are the fridge magnets. Most photos are amended to monochrome and sepia. Occasionally I make further amendments like increasing contrast and changing the brightness. It gives it a more arty feel and that is what I wanted to convey with the main photos that they would see.

it is a very simple technique to make changes like this, well anything is simple if you know how to do it but this is simple and only takes a few clicks on the computer. As for the boxes around the images, well that helped me cut the paper to the right size.

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Two portraits

I took some portraits last week of a brother and sister and here they are. I used three backgrounds, a collapsible black background, a collapsible cloudy background and a white sheet. This is the white sheet. You may not be able to recognise it because I converted each photo into monochrome and then into sepia. so the sheet looks like sepia.

It didn't take long to take the photos. We were looking for a photo of the two of them together but it only took a few seconds to take them separately too. It really didn't take long to take the photos and a few days later I handed back a disc and 110 prints as well as two fridge magnets. I'll show you those tomorrow.

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Photographic Cropping

Panoramas are useful for long thin subjects like coastlines. This view is Morecambe. There isn't that much interest in the sky and the promenade isn't that much better. You can crop to any shape you like and common proportions are 6:4, 7:5, 8:6 or 10:8. Proportions aren't sizes and I could have written 3:2 for 6:4 but I was thinking of photo sizes in inches. In this case I was thinking in terms of inches when I labelled it 6:2 but 3:1 is exactly the same proportion.

I often think that photographs give you time to consider the view. Lighting helps as well as you don't often walk along Morecambe Prom and consider the wind farms on Caton Moor. This photo also highlight the block of flats. It is a strange anomaly for the coastline but the views from there are terrific.

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Record environmental change

On the 28th October I showed you a photo of these Viking graves in Heysham. I didn't show you these views which are not as common as those from the other side of the graves looking towards Morecambe. In the photo on the left you can start to see the way that the land is falling away from the graves. I have been told that you used to be able to walk around them.

There is quite a drop on the other side and you can see part of this difference in height in the photo on the right. More importantly, look at that fissure. It may be rock but rock doesn't last forever. Nothing is being done to protect this area and the historic church of St Peter's is not far away. You probably have many reasons why photographs are taken but you can add another one, to record environmental change.

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