Don't Discriminate with Tea

Do you like your tea with milk? Or without milk?
How many times have you been attacked by people for drinking your tea with or without milk? Because this happens to me on a weekly basis. "HOW can you drink tea without milk??!" I get asked.

Yes, I drink tea without milk. I'm not crazy! There are many others that do this, and this ongoing argument inspired me to create a photo.

See it on Flickr

This is a composite of two photographs, I made a composite mainly because I didn't have 2 similar cups.
The actual process of taking it was difficult. The post-processing was difficult too. It's my lack of equipment that makes it so challenging. I was forced to use the inbuilt flash, and drop the tea bag with a 2 second countdown on the camera, rather than using a shutter release cable. After maybe a hundred photos I got this, and I decided to go with it.

Lighting
I bounced the inbuilt flash with tin foil, lots of it. A large sheet on the right, large sheet in front of the cup and a small hand-held one in front of the flash to bounce it. Unfortunately this created uneven light and white balance in photos, which was a challenge to fix in post-production.

These are the two separate photos that I used, I combined them in Photoshop.













Before & After comparison
I then came up with the basic image that you can see below (top photo). I exported it to Lightroom and edited the colours, hue, white balance and added split toning etc, resulting in the bottom photo.

I was going for a "morning" look with this photo, and I hope I achieved it. This was actually taken at about 21:00, with the only light sources being the kitchen light and the inbuilt flash.
You can see this photo on my Flickr account here.

Suffering for photography.

Yet another crazy idea popped into my head.
Summer is coming to and end and another school year is about to begin. Temperatures are dropping and leaves are starting to fall. So one day I got up and saw how sunny and warm it was, my friends and I quickly decided that it's was a day for the beach.

Since I have an underwater camera, I decided that it might be a good idea to try and take some pictures in the water. Only then I had no idea how painful that would turn out. The water was freezing cold and I could barely hold the camera still for a picture because I was shaking so much. I could literally feel my skin burning from the harsh temperatures. My beautiful friend Ula bravely agreed to model for me. I was quiet surprised at her decision but at the start she didn't take me seriously. But who would? It sounded like a crazy idea then, bathing in the Atlantic ocean without a wetsuit in late August. I honestly didn't mind it though, a passionate photographer is ready to do almost anything to get a good shot, right?

Now a little bit about my awful camera: it's actually an ancient Fujifilm FinePix A500, and its waterproof casing. The camera is only 5.1 mega pixels so that is why the photos are of really bad quality. But that is the only waterproof camera I have at the moment so I had to work with it. Another minus about it is the fact that it eats up battery life like crazy. The batteries will be gone in a couple of minutes. I found that out the bad way, trying to work out why it's not working while freezing in the water and having Ula complaining at me (at least we will know what it's like next time). I edited the photos in Lightroom.
Enjoy the pictures.

A slight problem with taking pictures in the water is that you sometimes get drops of water
on your lens and it ruins a perfect shot. I kind of liked this one though.

...
About a week ago I was in London and I decided to take pictures there with my Smena. I purchased a colour film and a real black & white film. I have the colour film developed and printed, but the photo labs in Cork cannot process the black & white. It costs me 20 euro because they have to send it off. That's a ridiculous price, and absolutely unacceptable. Hopefully I will have the photos ready soon enough and I will post about my trip to London soon. I can't wait for you to see the photos.