We’re all lottery winners. Every single one of us who has ever lived has won the ultimate prize – we’ve been given a life.

If our parents had decided to conceive a child even a day later then we simply wouldn’t exist, somebody else would instead, and that would be our chance gone forever. Not only are we fortunate enough to have won this billion to one chance of existence, but we’re also alive right now! Today! Here!

Well, that’s the philosophical part of this post out of the way, but I must admit that I find this concept mind boggling. Some people have a fairly carefree attitude to life, and assume that it’s just a path we go through and we’ve all been given a divine right to exist, but after realising this isn’t really the case I have to admit my whole attitude to life, and work, changed.

There’s always a lot of talk about the work / life balance – this is generally about the priorities a person attaches to their work and personal life, and whether this is in fact a balance or weighted in one direction. Individuals now work longer and harder than ever before, and it looks like we’ll be retiring much later too, so it’s more and more important to think long and hard about what we do for a living.

Let’s do some maths now. The average working day is eight hours long. Lets throw another hour in there for commuting which makes it nine. We probably sleep for an average of eight hours, which brings us to seventeen hours,therefore seven hours left over. In these seven hours we have to cook a meal, manage a household (and maybe a family), carry out DIY and maintenance and more. We’ve got the weekend too, which is when most people relax and enjoy themselves, but the point I’m eventually getting to is that considering the amount of time we spend at work, and the number of years we are going to work, isn’t it important to actually enjoy what you do?

I’m very lucky in that I love the job that I do, so much so that I would probably do it anyway even if I didn’t need to work for a living. When I was at school choosing a career path I was warned about following a career in photography and design as it was so competitive. I took this advice and followed a different route for ten years before realising that I had made a mistake. I spent a couple of years retraining and then took the plunge and started a business, and it’s the one I still run today.

One of the most interesting things about what I do is the variety of people that I meet and work with. More often than not they run a small business just as I do, and I think that they have the same ideas and outlook as me too. This attitude to work means that the work they do isn’t just eight hours of the day they reluctantly spend making a living, but is literally a part of their life that they enjoy and that means so very much to them.

Because of this I think that a small business should always be given a chance. They are so involved and passionate because it’s all about them – they are not just a cog in a machine but in fact are the machine. I see how much their work means to these people every day on Twitter, and they seem more engaged with their clients and others in their region than many of the larger businesses.

It would be naive of me to suggest that only small businesses are passionate about their work, ultimately it comes down to the individual. However, us small businesses deserve a chance, so bear us in mind next time you need a quote for your project – we might pleasantly surprise you!

Summer is on it’s way out now, so as a farewell to the season I’m giving away twelve images taken this year for use as desktop wallpaper.

The preview images are below, just click on them to see larger versions. The full size files are 1920 x 1200 pixels at 72 dpi so are ready to go for most widescreen displays.

To download a zip file of full size images click here, or click the icon on the right.

Enjoy!

Of all the genres of photography I work in, for me portraiture is the most challenging and most rewarding.

Portraiture is incredibly personal, and there’s so much more to taking a good portrait than just taking a snapshot of an individual. To me it’s not just about capturing a likeness of a person on film, it’s about capturing something about them as a person too.

With this in mind, I’ve put together my top 5 portraiture tips which I think if followed should produce a pretty good result!

Engage your subject

This depends a lot on who your subject is. If you are photographing a person in a more formal setting and they are completely aware of what you are doing then you’ve got to get them relaxed. You’ve got to break the ice, talk to them, joke around a little if appropriate, tell them what you are doing and why, and what you want to achieve. You’ve got to relax too, if you don’t then your subject won’t either.

If you are photographing children then get them doing something that they like doing. Get them focussed on a fun thing so that you effectively no longer exist in that space, and then shoot away. Don’t tell a child to sit still, look at the camera and smile!

Get closer

Fill the frame, get in close and compose the image so you can really see the character of the subject, the facial expressions, the smile and the eyes. If you’ve got a zoom lens then use the long end so you’re not literally a foot from their face. If you use an SLR then use a medium telephoto. This also flattens perspective slightly – too close in with a wide lens makes noses long and ears disappear! Take care with what you leave in the frame too. If you’re outdoors watch out for lamp posts growing out of heads, distracting signposts and things like that.

Understand your equipment

Know how your camera works, and understand its strengths and limitations. Never try new, untried techniques without also utilising those which you know will get you a shot. Play it safe, THEN experiment. Check your settings too, for example make sure you’re not shooting at ISO 1000 in daylight because you forgot to change the setting from the low light shoot you were doing the night before. If all you do is keep your camera in full auto mode then that’s fine, so long as you understand how it works and how the results are likely to come out.

It’s all about the light

Probably the most important aspect of a portrait is the lighting. The easiest way to produce a flattering shot is to take the shot outdoors on a reasonably bright but overcast day. Shooting in direct sunlight produces very contrasty images, so although people like being in the sun for photography it’s not ideal. On-camera flash can be useful in bright sunshine as it fills in those dark shadows, but other than this it can be particularly harsh and unflattering. In low light if you have to use flash then see if you can bounce it off a wall or ceiling, or use some kind of diffuser. With a compact you’re pretty much stuck with direct flash, though you can always try a couple of shots with the ISO turned up and the flash turned off.

A diffused light source from an angle rather than head on can be particularly flattering. In the studio we can control this to a tee, out and about this is more difficult but there are probably things around you that can help. Positioning your subject next to a light coloured wall gives you an instant reflector to bounce light back, or shooting under trees should give you a gentler, more diffused light. Try a variety of ideas in the same shoot and see what works, then learn from it.

There’s more about lighting here on another of my blog posts.

Ease off the post processing

Imaging software these days is very good. You can do all sorts with it, including repairing images, removing items you don’t want in shot, and applying various effects to improve different scenes.

Go easy on this though. Overuse of software can make your images look a bit odd, especially attempts to airbrush skin. An incredible number of portrait images fail here because after processing they just don’t look real. A well taken portrait should require very little post production, so know when to stop. Usually I balance colours, subtly adjust the exposure if I need to in order to emphasise shadows and highlights and then gently sharpen the image. Never use a Photoshop filter just because it is there.

There’s many more things to consider, but I think that these can be picked up as you go along provided you get the basics right. If you want to see some more examples of our portraiture sessions then you can visit our portrait site at http://www.elmportrait.co.uk.

There’s been a lot in the press about this recently, so it’s a topical subject to write a blog post about. We see it on just about every fashion magazine cover in the high street these days, and nobody is safe from it. Tennis star Andy Roddick had his biceps ballooned so that the image would go with the ‘Big Arms’ headline on the cover of Mens Fitness, Kate Winslet was airbrushed on the cover of GQ to appear slimmer, and Keira Knightley had her bust enhanced for the promo shots used on the King Arthur film.

So what is airbrushing? What steps are generally involved in manipulating an image? I’ve been meaning to write a post on this subject for a while, but thought it grossly unfair to pick on one of my previous portrait or boudoir shoots and show how it’s done. I’m sure that the subject would have something to say about that! I needed to find somebody with imperfections and who isn’t bothered about them, and who doesn’t mind being the subject of a post about making their old features look younger.

After a couple of days of thought I realised I knew the perfect candidate. And here we are, the result is my first venture in front of the camera rather than behind it!

The camera (a Fuji S5 Pro with Nikon 85mm lens) was tripod mounted, a softbox placed close to my head on the left and a reflector on the right. The self timer was set to two seconds, and the exposure underexposed by two stops.

Right then, let’s get down to business! Any of the images in this post can be clicked on to show a higher resolution version. The original image straight off the camera was this one below. The softbox provides a fairly soft light, but if you click on this image you’ll see all the imperfections in the skin, lines in the forehead, bags under the eyes, spots, moles, in fact everything!

The first step in airbrushing is a bit like the first step in makeup – and that’s dealing with the base layer. Many imaging software packages have a skin softening tool built in. This effectively allows you to select the skin colour using an eye dropper tool and then apply an amount of blur, and then allow an amount of detail to show through. This adjustment only applies to the skin colour, so hair, eyes, and lips remain sharp and unaffected. The image below shows our test image after this step has been applied.

This has taken a lot of the texture and blemishes of the skin out, the difficulty is doing this without making the skin look plastic. So, now we have smoothed the skin the next step is to make me look a few years younger. The lines in the forehead need to go, and this is done by using a cloning tool in Photoshop. Basically, we paint over the lines in the forehead with a texture sampled from another part of the skin. We can also remove some of the larger spots or moles. The result is shown below:

The next step is where the fine line in airbrushing is often crossed, and that’s by physically adjusting the appearance. In the glossy fashion magazines this is where waistlines are slimmed and other parts enhanced, but with my photograph I think I’ll fix the nose I broke when I was six, remove the bags from under my eyes (it’s been a tough week!) and slim my face slightly. And while we’re at it lets whiten the eyes! The result follows:

The last step is purely a choice of style, and that’s converting the image to a toned black and white version. A little film grain effect is added – this also helps cover any over enthusiastic smoothing of the skin. We’ll bring out the eyes a little, and finally add a soft focus effect. The final version is shown below along with the original.

If you would like to view each image in sequence to see step by step results then click on the colour image above and then click the arrow that appears when you mouse over the right side of it. Continue until you get to the final black and white image.

And there we have it. So, is airbrushing a useful tool that an art director can use to make a model look his or her absolute best, or does it set a dangerous precedent, where impossibly perfect models appear every day on the front cover of magazines in full view of impressionable youngsters who feel that they can never live up to an image that society expects of them?

It’s a difficult question to answer, and I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on it. I think ultimately it depends on the purpose of the image. For example, if on one of our boudoir shoots I was asked to retouch an image then I probably would without feeling too guilty about it. These are private images, usually between a couple in a relationship, and they aren’t going to be seen by anybody else. If the subject wants a little help to look their absolute best then why not, but within reason.

I think it’s a different question when we’re talking about images in the public domain though. A little bit of skin softening here and there isn’t a bad thing, and if a customer turns up to a portrait shoot with a big spot then it’s easily removed. In fact it’s not too different to what most ladies do with their make-up anyway. When it comes to physically altering a body to conform to what’s seen in society as being ‘beautiful’ it’s a worrying trend though. Nobody should grow up believing that they are not normal based on an opinion formed from an airbrushed image in a magazine, especially when the person portrayed in that image is a role model to the viewer.

So what do I think of the images now that I have been airbrushed? Well, I’m not too offended by the end result, but I can’t help but feel that it isn’t really me. I think I could comfortably take it as far as step two where a little bit of skin softening has been applied but features and lines are still visible. After all, it’s these ‘imperfections’ that make us who we are.

It’s been months now since I ditched my zoom lenses in favour of primes. It took a little getting used to as I admit zoom lenses are convenient, but I’ve never looked back.

My two favourite lenses are my 50mm f1.4 and my 135mm f1.8. These two are used for over over 80% of my photography, and I’ve found that not having the flexibility that I had previously using two zooms (a 28-70mm and a 70-210mm) really hasn’t been an issue for the kind of photography that I do.

Most of the photographs I take are either of interiors, outdoor scenes or people. Whereas with a zoom lens I would turn the zoom ring to frame the shot, I now think a little more about composition and physically move the camera, or the subject, in order to get the shot I require. Admittedly this wouldn’t work with sports photography, or wildlife, but that’s not what I do so isn’t an issue.

My most used lens out of the two I’ve just mentioned is the standard 50mm lens, and the more I use it the more I appreciate it. The 50mm lens has been somewhat neglected in the last few years, but I would urge any DLSR owner to pick one up and rediscover the joys it has to offer.

An example of a blurred background. Image taken with a standard lens wide open at f1.4, cropped square.

• Maximum aperture – a standard lens with an aperture of f1.4 gives beautiful results in available light, and allows you to blur backgrounds in a way you’ll never manage with an f3.5 zoom. You have to be careful with focussing in such a limited depth of field, but the results can be really worth it – see the example on the right.

• Superior image quality – a 50mm prime lens is quite possibly one of the sharpest lenses that any camera manufacturer has to offer. Extremely simple design, tried and tested formula and tremendous image quality.

• Lightweight – if you’re used to carting around a reasonably fast mini zoom then you’ll really appreciate the weight (or rather lack of) of a standards lens.

• Bright viewfinder – the large maximum aperture gives a nice, bright viewfinder, which in turn gives you a much more responsive autofocus.

• Field of view – not too far off the field of view of the human eye, the 50mm lens gives a wonderful, natural perspective. It’s because of this natural perspective that the 50mm lens is often called a ‘standard’ lens.

• Cost – you can pick up a Canon or Nikon 50mm prime lens for around the £100 mark. A bargain!

There are many great photographers who have used the humble 50mm standard lens almost exclusively throughout their entire career, and I would heartily recommend picking one up and giving it a go if you haven’t already. Getting back to basics is often a good thing, and I’ve found that having a fixed focal length lens has really improved my photography. I do give a lot more thought to the composition now when framing the shot in the camera viewfinder.

Everything looks pretty in the snow, and we often find that we’re quite busy photographing when the white stuff arrives! Just before Christmas we photographed Seaham Hall when the first snow of the winter fell – you can read about how we did that by clicking here.

Northumberland was treated to a second wave of snow on New Years Eve, so we were asked to make the journey to Matfen Hall to do the same.

The main obstacle with taking the image of Seaham Hall was that firstly the front of the building was in shadow, and secondly there were loads of footprints from the early morning hotel checkout. This wasn’t the case at Matfen Hall. We were lucky as when we arrived the hotel was bathed in gentle sunlight, and the snowfall was so deep that the sensible residents had stayed next to the log fires sipping brandy!

The original image is here (note you can view a larger version of any image by clicking it):

It’s been taken on a 30mm prime lens, at an aperture of f8. We needed to make sure that the depth of field was sufficient for both the hotel in the background and the swans in the foreground to be in focus. The image was overexposed by 2 stops to make sure that the snow (and swans) came out white rather than grey. A camera’s metering system assumes a scene is of an average tone of 18% grey, so when the scene is predominantly white you need to compensate.

So we’ve got white snow, and the image has been fairly accurately exposed with reasonable sky detail. However, we prefer to recover detail in the sky so, just like the Seaham Hall shot, we used the same raw image and processed it twice – once for the sky then again for the rest of the scene:

The image on the left is the version exposed for the sky. The foreground is too dark, but that doesn’t really matter at this stage. We layer the original lighter image on top of the dark image then created an adjustment layer and removed the overexposed parts of the image so that the correctly exposed darker version below shows through, but only where we want it to. The image on the right shows this top layer after we have removed the sky and a little of the foreground water detail (the chequered background in Photoshop shows that this part of the image is transparent).

The result is this:

This is an improvement, but the image still lacks punch. Using the curves and vibrance tools in Photoshop we can gently give the image a little more contrast and increase the saturation of the colours without blowing them out.

The last step was to increase the luminance of the hotel and it’s reflection. We used the Viveza plug-in from Nik Software which allows you to isolate specific colours and apply adjustments to them without affecting the rest of the scene. We did the same with the sky, slightly increased the overall saturation of all colours, and that brings us to the final image below:

We now have an image with correctly exposed highlights and shadows, white snow, foreground detail and a vibrant main subject with a matching reflection. All in all a good days work, in fact ultimately the hotel decided to use the image for the cover of their Christmas brochure!

We’re keeping with the theme of gardening with this post. We were asked to capture images of a garden and present the shots to the garden owners as a gift for their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Any couple who’ve been married for this long deserve something a little special, so to reflect the amount of time they spend working in their beautiful garden we put that little bit extra into preparing their images. We produced a hard backed book with a selection of their favourite photographs in, and we finished each page with a gardening quotation in the footer.

We took a mixture of styles, from low depth of field floral shots to butterflies and bees, as well as a few general overview shots of the garden as a whole.

You can view the album online here:

http://www.elmphoto.co.uk/garden/

We’re well into Spring now, this week in particular is turning out to be a blinder. Let’s hope the Summer turns out for once to be all that we wish for.

To celebrate Spring arriving in such style I’ve decided to give away nine of my Spring images for free to use as desktop wallpaper, or whatever you want for that matter. The preview images are below, just click on them to get to the higher resolution versions. The full size files are 1920 x 1200 pixels at 72 dpi so are ready to go for most widescreen displays.

Enjoy . . .

Everyone likes to win, but second place isn’t that bad is it?

We’ve just found out that we came second in the Warehouse Express photography competition. It’s bitter sweet to us – we’re delighted to have done so well but came oh-so-close to the top spot. Next time maybe! The image we entered was the one below of the Tour of Britain cycle race:

Taken on an ultra wide angle lens, the riders were around three feet away from the camera as they zoomed around the corner at break neck speed. A shutter speed of 1/40 sec meant that by holding the camera still the riders would blur, whilst an aperture of f11 made sure that the background was in focus and sharp.

The image was converted to black and white but the vivid colours of the riders were brought back in using Photoshop masking techniques.

I can hear you all sigh reading this title. Here comes another ‘film vs digital’ debate, but that’s not really what this post is about. Not all of it anyway.

We’ve probably seen the biggest single advance in photography in recent years with the relatively low cost availability of good quality digital cameras. We all talk about how many megapixels our cameras have, and enjoy playing around in image manipulation software like Photoshop to produce work of different styles. We replicate the old darkroom techniques digitally, and it’s cleaner, easier and much quicker.

But, in my opinion we shouldn’t write film off just yet. There’s something about an image taken on film – it has that quality that digital can’t yet reproduce. Digital is certainly catching up, there’s no question of that, but it will never match film. It will always be different in one way or another. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, I’m simply saying that they have different qualities.

When I refer to film here I’m not speaking purely of the standard 35mm film that we used to buy from Boots years ago. I’m talking about a range of formats, from 35mm through to large format. If we compare a cheap compact film camera to a modern digital equivalent then I think digital will win every time. Compare a modern digital compact with a Leica IIIf (35mm film) from 1955 and you’ll probably find the opposite.

There’s still a general consensus that if you spend over five grand on a new Canon EOS1Ds Mk III you’re going to get the best possible results – far better than film anyway. This is true up to a point, but even a camera of this cost can’t quite compete with a well taken medium / large format film image that has been properly exposed, developed and hand printed. If you’re a purist looking for the best possible quality then you need film. You need to take a perfectly exposed image, develop it correctly and produce the print yourself. Provided you have the skill, expertise and experience to be able to do this then the results will speak for themselves – though not many photographers have this skill now.

The best way to get the ultimate quality digital file isn’t to use the best quality digital camera. It’s to use medium or large format film and scan it, but get it scanned properly. From here you can use Photoshop rather than a darkroom to carry out your post processing, but your original digital negative has all the characteristics of the film source, like grain (or lack of), sharpness, and exposure latitude. One of the biggest problems with digital at the moment is the way that it handles highlights. With film you tend to find that highlights are handled much more naturally, similar to the human eye. Digital has a tendency to clip highlights quite severely. In colour you find that one of the colours tends to clip first (either red, green or blue) producing unnatural results. The best camera we’ve seen so far for handling highlights has been the Fuji S5 Pro – that’s why we use this for our ‘people’ photography. As good as it is though, it’s not as good as film.

All things considered though, I’m sticking to digital. The reasons for this are many, but ultimately it’s a trade off between the absolute image quality of scanned medium / large format against the convenience of the digital workflow. I find that the results I get from digital are certainly good enough for my purposes as I don’t produce 5 metre billboard images, and don’t think I ever will. I can use a number of plug-ins in Photoshop which do a pretty good job of replicating the properties of film I have enjoyed using in the past, like Ilfords beautiful FP4 for black and white or Kodaks classic Kodachrome 64 colour tranparency film. I don’t really have the time to develop my own prints because as much as I would like to I can’t pass on the labour charge to my customers. I’d be priced out of the market in weeks.

What I can do though is carry over the principles of film photography into my digital workflow, especially at the capture stage. There’s a discipline that’s missing in many photographers today, and I find that more and more tend to work in a ‘smash and grab’ fashion. Holding down the shutter in machine gun fashion hoping that one of the shots you take is ‘the one’ just misses the point. For our ‘people’ photography we always, always remember that there is a person on the other side of the lens, and taking a good image depends on engaging with them, and taking a little time to make sure we get everything right, not just firing off a blast of shots.

Jerry Avenaim is a well respected professional photographer who has had his images used on covers of all the leading fashion magazines. He says:

“A photographer can’t simply accept what is in front of them and take a  picture, that’s not being a photographer, that’s not even being a photo journalist, that’s paparazzi at best.”

He suggests carrying out your own experiment. Cover the back of your LCD panel on your digital camera with paper and sticky tape, then find a subject and spend as much time as you like photographing it. However, you are only allowed 15 shots. Compare this with your attitude to your photography if you allow yourself only 10 minutes of time but unlimited shots. You’ll probably find that following the first route will make you think more. Each shot is now more valuable than the last, and patience and discipline will ultimately give you a far more pleasing result than the alternative.

My conclusion? For ultimate quality you still can’t beat film, but digital is a pretty good compromise, and in 2010 is certainly good enough for most applications. However, to me the way we worked with film at the capture stage is something we should remember and try to include in our digital routine.