Tuesday 21 December 2010

Fototastic 2010

Well, it's nearly Christmas and another year gone by in a flash.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all and many thanks for your support over the past 12 months. I hope you all enjoy the festive period and look forward to seeing you here again next year.

Like last year I have compiled all of my 2010 posts in to quick video recap.



Thursday 16 December 2010

Oh Christmas Tree Oh Christmas Tree!

So here we are again...Christmas time. Thought I'd better take the mandatory shot of the Christmas tree as I do every year! It's a big one this year - I swear it looked smaller when I bought it!

Just for a change, I took another shot with the camera still on the tripod and zoomed out during the exposure - It created a nice little effect.





As usual, click the images to enlarge

Tuesday 14 December 2010

Christmas Lights?

Here is a different way of capturing the local Christmas lights! These were taken using long exposure whilst driving past.

Salisbury Market Square


Salisbury Street


Wilton Christmas Tree


As usual, click the images to enlarge

Random Self Portrait

Haven't used my camera much recently so took it along on a trip to see some family at the weekend.

Took this random self portrait in the wing mirror on the way!

Monday 6 December 2010

Malta Wedding

Here is a video compilation of the wedding pictures taken in Malta. They are a mixture of the photos I took and the ones from the professional photographer



Sunday 21 November 2010

More Malta Moments

A few more pictures from my recent visit to Malta. See previous post here.









As usual, click the images to enlarge.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

Vimeo Video Awards

Received an email from Vimeo with a link to their recent awards.

I especially liked the one below which won the Narrative category, It gives a little insight in to the way we treat modern digital photography and depicts "An entire relationship told through photos in four minutes"

Enjoy...


Thrush from Gabriel Bisset-Smith on Vimeo.


Thursday 11 November 2010

Remembrance Day 2010

A quick post to show my support for Remembrance Day.

Lest we forget

Time Lapse Video

A fantastic time lapse and video compilation that I could not resist sharing.


TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.




Well worth viewing in HD if you have the tech :)

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Decking Light Trails

Whilst out in the back garden taking shots for The Darkness Descents post, I was playing around a bit and managed to capture these long exposure light trails of my decking lights!



Saturday 30 October 2010

The Darkness Descends

The nights are really starting to draw in now and will soon be dark when I go and come back from work (even after the clocks change).

Still, autumn is not all doom and gloom - with all the leaves falling from the trees the streets really are paved with gold (and brown, green, etc!)

Messing around the other night, I took some shots of these leaves which had landed on my decking covering some of the lights. Thought it was a bit different from the usual shots of autumn leaves.





As usual, click the images to enlarge.

Monday 25 October 2010

Malta Moments

At the end of last month, I headed over to Malta for a wedding and a well received break. Two good friends were getting married over there and a contingent of family and friends all went over for the occasion.

Other than a few pre wedding shots that the bride had requested and a few snaps of the wedding, I barely touched my camera for the rest of the week but here are a few Malta moments that I did catch.

View from my hotel


Malta sunrise


Boats


Malta Sunset


As usual, click the images to enlarge.

Sunday 17 October 2010

Wedding Day

Back in August I did another wedding shoot for a friend. This time I got paid which was nice and gave me a bit more spending money when I went on holiday recently :)

After the wedding I did earlier in the year I found this one a lot easier and knowing less people I felt that I could be a lot more assertive in telling people what to do, where to stand etc!

I also did the pre wedding shots for the bride to be which I enjoyed as I could be a bit more creative (see the first picture below).

I managed to save a lot of time post wedding with the processing of the photos as I had learnt from previous mistakes!

Anyway, here are a few shots from the day...









As usual, click the images to enlarge.

And Relax!

A hectic summer for me is now coming to an end and it's time to relax a bit and try and post a bit more to this blog. Have been a little useless with only 3 posts in the past 2 months which I will try and rectify in the coming weeks / months :)

Thursday 16 September 2010

Makeup - A Girls 2nd Best Friend!

Had a really hectic month or so hence the severe lack of posts.

Attended 4 weddings in the past 6 weeks and was the official photographer at one for some friends (photos to follow on a later post) so been busy busy with all that and life in general.

Anyway, I have also recently helped out a friend of a friend with a few pictures as she is starting up as a beauty therapist and wedding makeup artist and needed a few shots for her website and advertising.

Here a a few shots from the day...







As usual, click the images to enlarge.

Saturday 7 August 2010

Shoes - A Girls Best Friend!

On the evening when I took the photos in the Foxy Lady post I stayed the night in a bedroom that would be better described as the girls walk in wardrobe as it was full of clothes, shoes etc.

Personally, I'm not in to women's shoes (and don't really see what the fuss is about!) but thought the shoe rack on the back of the bedroom wall might make an original photo so took a quick snap before heading to bed.

I had a bit of a play around with the image, adding a little colour etc.



As usual, click on the image to enlarge.

Monday 2 August 2010

New Moon

I was driving through a village called Nunton the other evening and noticed a full moon rising over some trees.

I happened to have the camera with me so thought I'd pull over to get some shots. When I first stopped, there was some clouds partially covering the moon which would have made a really good photo (like something from a horror film) but by the time I got the camera and tripod out of the boot it had passed :(

Still managed to get this one though...



As usual, click on the image to enlarge.

Sunday 1 August 2010

Red Sky at Night....

....shepherd's delight

The view from my bedroom window this evening.

Thursday 22 July 2010

Spider Food

Taken in my garden yesterday evening - A quick catch of a spider tucking in to an unfortunate bug that managed to get itself caught up in the web.

Monday 19 July 2010

Painting the Darkness

When looking at Google Analytics recently I noticed that I've been getting a lot of hits on my various light painting posts.

With this in mind and having just completed soldering up my new and improved LED ring light I thought I'd revisit this popular topic by playing around with a few shots.

I started simply by rolling the LED ring light along my bed.



This created quite a cool geometric pattern so I then started to play around a bit more.



Followed by going along the floor, up the wall and across the ceiling!



Then I ran out of ideas!!

I think I will revisit this but am thinking of getting hold of (or making) a wheel with LEDs attached as rolling the ring light along smoothly is pretty difficult. Anyway...watch this space.

By the way, if you fancy trying out some light painting and your camera has manual settings then you don't need to make anything. As I've shown before in this post you can just use a phone as your light source or any old torch etc. Below is a quick shot that I took using my iPhone.



As usual, click on the images to enlarge.

Sunday 18 July 2010

Macro Drive

More experimentation with the Macro Lens Adapters.

I really like the depth of field in this close up picture of an external hard drive.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Lonely Little Tree

Just looking through some old memory cards and found this shot on one of them.

The tree looks a bit lonely sat on the top of a hill all alone!

Monday 5 July 2010

Foxy Lady

I went to a friends place in Weybridge at the weekend and had heard beforehand that they had a fox which frequented their garden - so much so that they've named it Stella! So I took along a camera to see if I could get a couple of snaps of the foxy lady!

I have only seen a couple of foxes close up and it's generally just a glimpse as they dart off so was surprised about how close this one was happy to get to us all as we sat in the garden and enjoyed a few drinks.

Foxes (especially urban ones) have had a lot of bad press in England recently but I for one like the furry little critters!

As usual, click the images to enlarge...









Monday 28 June 2010

Wedding Shoot Tips

As promised in my Wedding Shoot post, here is a follow up.

This might be useful to you if you are thinking of doing your first wedding shoot.

Venue - I found that it was well worth visiting the venue before the wedding day to take some sample shots (of the bride and groom if possible). This will give you some idea of the space available and the different backgrounds that can be utilised. It will also give the prospective bride and groom a chance to see how the scene looks in pictures and make choices on where they would like the photos taken. Also, think about where the photographs will be taken if the weather is bad on the wedding day as it was on the wedding shoot that I did (it rained for most of the day)!

Tripod - If you have one then it's worth using. I had to do most of the formal shots indoors. Also a quick tip - make sure you set it up and it's level before you start taking the shots. Mine was slightly off level and although it's easy enough to straighten up the pictures whilst processing it will save you a job if it's right at the time!

Lenses - You're more than likely not going to have time to change lenses, especially during the formal shoot so go with a good all rounder.

Cropping - If you're like me and most of your photographs are used online then you'd probably be more used to cropping to common screen resolution sizes rather than print sizes. I spent a lot of time re-converting my original RAW images and re-cropping photos after making this error initially! Photos that are likely to be printed need to be cropped to a print size ratio (such as 7x5"). If you just hand a printer a copy of all your shots straight from the camera then they will be cropped during the printing process and you may end up with important bits missing!

File Format - If you have a camera which will shoot in RAW format then that's the way to go. The photographs will take up more space on your memory cards and will take longer to process after the day but you will be able to make many more adjustments after the event which is great as you probably will not have time to review each shot in great detail in real time.

I hope that this post has been of use to any prospective amateur wedding photographers. I've got another wedding to shoot later in the year so I will be putting these things in to practice then.

Here are a few photos from my first wedding shoot...





Monday 14 June 2010

Starry Eyed Surprise

I have been meaning to try out a close up of a human eye since I got the Macro Lens Adapters. I know that getting the light right can be difficult with reflections etc to contend with and wanted to try out something a little different.

I quite like the effect you get from ring flashes so started thinking about making one. After a bit of thought, I purchased some bright white LED lights from a well known auction website. I then mounted these on an old bit of ply board with a cut out for the camera lens and soldered it all up. I thought I'd start small with just 8 LEDs but will be attempting some more ambitious LED projects soon (I have another 92 LEDs to use up after all!).

Here is one of my shots with the DIY ring flash / light.



By the way, it is my bloodshot eye in the picture - Must have been a heavy one the night before :-)

Tuesday 1 June 2010

Shuffle Up and Deal

I have made an adaptation to my DIY macro-light which I used with the old Canon Powershot S2 to try out with my Canon Speedlite on the dSLR. I basically used a bigger bit of tin foil and added an elastic band!

I was just wondering what to test it out on when I saw a pack of cards on the side.

Here is a shot of my camera with the hi-tech device attached and the results of a couple of test shots. The second one really captures the action of the shuffle and the merging of the cards (click to enlarge as always).





Thursday 27 May 2010

Product Shots

A while back I did a load of product shots for the Beautiful You website.

It is nice to see that they have now started using some of them.

Tuesday 25 May 2010

Wedding Shoot

So, it's has been a while since I posted. It's actually been over a month so I've really been slipping this time....sorry folks. I aim to start posting a bit more regularly again (time permitting!).

Anyway, along with work and the other things that keep most of us busy, I have recently done my first wedding shoot! It was for some good friends and although somewhat stressful at times during the day and a lot of work on the computer after the event I have learnt a lot and hopefully ended up with a good album of pictures that they will like.

I'm not going to post any pictures of the actual wedding here until the happy couple have seen them (they are still off enjoying their honeymoon) but I did take the shot below of the invitation to use as a Wedding photo DVD cover so will share that one.



For any of you who are thinking (or have been asked) to do your first wedding shoot I will follow this post up in the next week or so with some of the problems I had, mistakes I made and tips that may be useful so watch this space.