Daydreaming!

Doing nothing gets you nowhere, I need practise if i'm going to get anywhere.....so I decided to get out the lighting set-up and persuade my wife to pose for a shot. As I only really do casual studio stuff from home (and the fact i'm skint) meant that the Jessops vouchers I won from Photo Answers magazine last year bought me a set of Interfit Ez-Flo lights. Not the best by any stretch, but the soft continuous light means shooting at wide apertures is easy-peasy!!!

Continuous light at head level at around 8 o'clock, with a white reflector at around 4 o'clock. White balance set to Daylight and ISO400. Sigma 30mm, shot at f1.4 at 1/3200s.

Straight from camera...

After post-processing....slight crop, level adjust on the background to darken it a little, some softening and dodging and burning.....

Out of Africa!

Having just returned from a wedding trip to South Africa, I find i'm still trudging through loaddddssss of images. Some are worth keeping, alot aren't!

The following two pics, aside from some wedding shots, are probably my favourites. The first is of a White Lion cub take at The Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve in Gauteng, Johannesburg. This little guy was really placid and posed for me no problem (shame his sibling wasn't and ripped my shorts!).

Processed in CS3, slight sharpening and a contrast boost to bring out more fur detail, the run through Dynamic Photo HDR to further improve the contrast and tones......

And secondly, a street beggar in Cape Town. I have an immense fear of heights, so as my Stu and Jono climbed (yes climbed) Table Mountain, I wussed out and went window shopping on the Waterfront. There happened to be a band playing on the front, when a frail beggar (and his wobbly crutch) hobbled up and started busting some moves. As he sat down for a rest I took the opportunity to ask him for a pose in exchange for 5 rand. No worries!

Again, processed in CS3, DP HDR, then back into CS3 for some dodging and burning to bring out some more skin detail. One bad habit of mine is always converting portraits to mono, but on this occasion I actually preferred the colour version. A couple of people asked for a mono conversion, so I obliged. I'll post them both up and you can make your own mind up.....

Here Goes...

What am I doing? Goodness knows......It's about time I got into blogging, so here goes. I'm not a professional photographer, I just do it for the love of creating (well trying to) images to document my life. A heck of a lot of my images are of my children, but i'll shoot anything that's available to me at the time.


At the moment, I exclusively shoot with a Sigma 30mm f1.4, with as wide an aperture as possible. If it means sticking my ND4 filter on so that I can shoot at f1.4, then so be it :)


I'll post up my first pics now I suppose, a trip to the local playpark with my 2 and 4 year old.....precious times.