Little ones new sunnies

A before and after shot for those interested in the technique.

Firstly I used a pink wallpaper (as my backdrop) with butterflies on, which my wife recently used to line the drawers in my little one's chest of drawers.

Then after some careful lining up of the sunglasses to get one of the butterflies through the glass, I took the shot, being careful to get the flash bouncing off the ceiling behind the sunglasses so that 1) The butterfly would be well illuminated, and 2) the shadow of the sunglasses would fall in front of the image.

Oh...and you have to use manual focus for this one, as the AF sensor would always focus on the glasses and not the butterfly, which is what you want sharp.

After all that you can see in the shot how it looks SOOC (straight out of the camera).

Processing (in Gimp as always)

This is the easy part, as all you doing is using the blending modes between layers.

Take your base copy layer, then duplicate it and then set the blend mode to softlight. This darkens the frame and whitens the lights. The take another copy and set the mode to Dodge.

This now bleaches out all the whites. Using the eraser you can erase everything (on the soft light layer) around the image so there are no distractions. Then erase on the dodge layer to bring the shadow back in, as it would have been washed out.

Focus then on the lens with the butterfly image, again gently erasing so that the butterfly comes through nicely and starts to glow.

Merge your visable layers, and then do an Orton effect. The Orton effect will make everything soft and dreamy, but you will need some areas to be sharp to give the eye a good frame of reference. So again, using the eraser on the "out of focus" layer of the Orton effect, erase the layer so that the sharpness of the butterfly comes back through, and then do the same on the metal butterflies around frames of the glasses. This provides some anchors for the viewer and a bit more pleasing in my view.

Merge your layers, flatter your image, save down to jpg, check your EXIF is intact (important for flickr Interestingness) - Thats it all done.

Is this it?

My wife saw this the other day....The St Pauls church in Hammersmith is currently being refurbished in a big way, to the extent that they have had tarpaulins covering it for years now. To make it pretty, the covers have been painted with a church.

Anyway at the moment, they are advertising the Alpha course (a christian course to explore the meaning of life). As you can see the current slogan is "Is this it?"

Of course the answer is around the corner, being advertised on the same church ..... Michael Jackson declaring "This is it" and judiciously pointing at the church, and in fact the slogan.

Is Michael Jackson a deity...?...not in anyones eyes!

Orton and Selective Colouring

One the photographic effects I have discovered recently is the Orton effect. In version of Gimp its in the FX-Foundary collection of plugins you can get for Gimp. In essence it gives a really dreamy effect to images, by creating two layers of one image. The 1st layer its boosts and sharpens, and in the 2nd layer it adds a blur. Then it multiplies the two.

Take a look at these two images.

The first is pre-orton, then 2nd after.

You can see in the 1st version that the swans are nice and sharp..and in fact there isn't anything particularly wrong them. But for the image I wanted, it needed to have a dreamier effect, and to mold into the background a little more.

The final image ended up like this

The technique was orginally developed for slide use by Michael Orton, one slide out of focus over a second slide

very sharp. The Orton effect is really easy to use and great for adding a luxury feel to image
s for portraits or Christmas and so on. It even has a group on flickr now.

For me it really adds to the image. For this one I used selective colouring on an autumn scene of leaves on a bench. Todo the selective colouring you create two layers, and convert the top one to black and white, then with the colour version below, erase the b+w layer around the leaves, so that the colour comes through.

Then add the Orton effect on the whole image, and it gives the dreamy view you're looking for. (It even enhanced the bokeh at the back of the image).

However I still wanted the crispness of the leaves to show through, so I erased the top layer just in the centre around the leaves, so that they would remain ultra-sharp.

Check out my other images in flickriver

Apple shot

Many people have been asking me how I took the apple shot or apple bullet, so here is a short description of the process.

Please note that I use RawTherapee and GIMP for my processing, and the majority of you probably use photoshop and/or lightroom. Well most of the techniques are exactly the same, but sometimes called something a little different.

So lets get going for this really easy shot!

Firstly the setup; you need

1x black background (I use my black jacket hung on the back of a chair)

1x Water holder (I used a glass vase with water)

1x Fruit, you know I used an apple don't you?

1x table to hold it on.

1x off camera flash. This is important, you can probably freeze the water quite well with your oncamera flash, but you must watch out for illuminating the background too much.

I use my flash off to the left, resting on a worktop slightly behind the background angled in towards the vase. (This was to avoid any light spilling onto the jacket)

So if you have all that you are pretty much setup. In the raw photo you'll see the setup in my kitchen, with the jacket hung on a chair and the vase sitting on a small table.

Setup up your camera for manual, at f11 and 1/180 (assuming your flash sync speed meets this)

Setup your flash at full or half power, and then take some test shots to get your exposure right. Remember you can adjust the flash for power, or the aperture, but don't touch the shutter speed, as its the flash that catches the action.

I would recomend keeping the aperture over f8, simply because with most lens' this is where they are sharpest. If you go wider than that they will get soft, and also with some lens the quality will deteriorate at f22.

Once you have your exposure right, fill up the water container to the top and get your fruit ready.

With one hand (or an friend) hold the apple above the container, with your camera focused in the other hand. Drop the apple, and press the shutter when it hits the water.

You will need to take this many time to get the look you want!

Processing

Ok so get your images onto your PC/Laptop, wipe up the mess you've made in the kitchen, and then open your editor.

Always taking a working copy of your base layer, and switch off the base. (This is so you always have the original to go back to)

secondly take another copy of the layer, and changing the blending mode to hard light.

This increase the contrast dramatically and gives the shot the drama it needs.

Increase the saturation to bring out the fruit and any reflected colours in the water.

Then remove the glass, by cloning water around the rim of the glass.

Then rotate the image so now it looks like the fruits moving sideways.

I also brushed out the edge of the glass so that the fruit looks like it was travelling through air.

Finally crop to get your final dimensions, and then sharpen. There are many ways to sharpen..I use an unsharp mask on the image, and then another one on a high pass filter layer. Doing this enabled me to get the sharpest drops I could without getting halos.

...and thats it.

for more photos checkout flickr