Night-time outdoors photoshoot

School is taking up a lot of my time, and I don't have much time to think about photos anymore. I have many extra-curricular activities and now I'm joining drama classes too so I don't know how I'll be able to squeeze this hobby in, but I'll try my best to continue to take photos. 

This week I was inpsired to create a dark photoshoot, where the model is only illuminated by a flash. Unfortunately I only have an internal flash (I should stop complaining about that now and just get an external one) so the photos were difficult to take. In addition to that, it was cold and windy and rainy. After all, stormy weather as prognosed for this weekend. Status: Orange. So I probably picked the worst weekend to do this. Thankfully though my model was a resilient girl who wouldn't give up. It was an enjoyable evening.

Here are the best photos (strictly filtered down to this bunch by the model).

 I used a slow shutter speed, so the street lights made a "light leak" effect, but the model was frozen still because the flash fired for a much shorter time.

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Multi-tasking.

A few more composite photos that I took recently.

This is the third composite photo I tried taking. I'm just learning how to use Photoshop but I think it's coming along very nicely. Really happy with how this photo turned out. The only thing that annoyed me was the background. I only have a white background so I had to draw or create a brand new background that would suit the photo. I'm not very good at that yet, so I played around with everything, eventually created this. It's a bit random but I think it works. Exported to Lightroom and adjusted the colours. Turned out just as I wanted it to. See it on Flickr.

For my fourth composite photo I tried something more ambitious and I didn't realise how difficult it would be to create. After creating the composite of myself styling my hair (See it here), I wanted to do a bigger one with a girl. So I planned it out, the props we would use and the positions of hands. Done that. When it came to taking photos, getting the hair and the hands perfect in each picture was difficult. Another painful thing was getting the blow drier shot. We couldn't get the hair to actually blow nicely, so I decided to flick the hair with my hands, and take a picture of the blow drier separately. I think it looks pretty good!

Then it came to the difficult part, trying to put all the pictures together. The hair was difficult to select in photoshop, it was everywhere, so that was an annoyance. I couldn't come up with a nice background either, so I left it beige. (See it on Flickr.)

Thank you very much to my beautiful models, you did great!

Portraits, Before and After look.

All these photos can be found on Flickr here.

In this post I'd like to show some before and after shots of a few portraits that I took recently. I decided to do this because the photos that I end up with after post-production are usually so drastically different to what they were originally, mainly because I like being a perfectionist.

The first photo is a self-portrait that I took in my bedroom. Originally it was supposed to be a composite photo with many hands (like the ones here), but following the negative feedback I received, I decided to just stick with the first photo. 

Here you can see the before (left) and after editing (right). For this I used Photoshop and Lightroom. Fixed some blemishes and other small annoyances in Photoshop and adjusted the colours, contrast, hues etc. in Lightroom. This photo would actually look very nice in B&W but I decided to keep the colours because I like them so much, a common B&W photo would be slightly boring. Here's the end-product:

The second photo I want to show you guys is a quick and unplanned portrait of my friend. On the same day we took a composite make-up photo, and since at the end of that shoot she had her full make-up done, we decided to have a small photo shoot. I quickly adjusted the scene as best I could and started taking some photos. Honestly, most of them didn't work at all, but this one was good enough to publish!

I thought the original (left) actually looks pretty good on its own, but I tried going for this colour scheme, it suited the surroundings. All edited in Lightroom, adjusted perspective to make the model look taller, and edited all the colours etc. Here's the after:

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