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.

VISIT MY Flickr.
LIKE MY Facebook Page.

Turning myself into a tiger.

After getting my new camera, I've taken a different turn in the photos that I take. It's less of a "look for a nice scene and click" type of thing, I now imagine more radical ideas and try to achieve them using my limited photoshop skills. But I am improving! And the following photo has put my photoshop skills to the test.

See it on Flickr

The photo turned out a lot scarier than I imagined, but I think it's pretty cool. I'm now doing less of the picture taking and more of the post-processing work, but isn't that what the current industry is all about? 

Using all the skills that I have (which isn't a lot), I've managed to create this look on myself. I used no makeup, just a blank photo with a plain background. My idea overwhelmed me and I was reluctant to start work on it, because there was so much to do at the very beginning, all these ideas ran through my head, "where do I start?", I asked myself. 

Most of the editing I do is trial and error, I don't watch many tutorials. With every photo that I take, I get better and better. I'll look back at this one in a years time and find 100 ways that I can improve it. 

I'm very tempted to do a photo series on this idea, that would take me a very long time. Editing this photo alone probably took about 6 hours. Hopefully one day!

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:

Follow my new Flickr account here, where you can see all my photos that I take in high quality.

Shooting in the woods.

Back in Ireland.

After two rapid months of warm and cold summer days in Lithuania, I am back. All summer I imagined to myself that the weather here will be miserable, I was counting on the worst. Luckily it isn't as bad as it could be. This summer was the warmest for Ireland in years, and it sure isn't ending this August. Not yet anyway.

My cousin Veronica is really like a traveller at this stage. She and her family have come to visit us in Ireland, from Israel, to Lithuania, to Ireland. That is a hectic way to spend your summer holidays abroad! I was over the moon about that anyway. I get to see my beloved cousin for another week, before we don't see each other for a whole year. I should start planning on visiting them in Israel sometime soon, that would be cool.

Now I believe I should say something about what exactly this post is about.

My cousin and I decided to have another photoshoot. A location I've had in my mind for a while are the woods that are right next to my house. It's a really cool place with interesting geographical features. In places, it has large emtpy spaces spanning from very low ground to very high ground. All covered by trees.

That same day we bought a shirt which was on sale in Topman and it suited the surroundings extremely well. We were so lucky with that purchase. 

Something that we were very eager to achieve was beautiful bokeh. A blurred background with unfocused circles of light looks so pretty, and it suits 'fashion' shoots like this one (even though it only featured one piece of clothing). I figured out how to get nice bokeh completely by accident. What I did was walk far away from the subject being photographed, and zoom in to achieve a blurred background.

All the photos have been edited with Photoshop Lightroom by me.

Extra photo outside of the woods that has been getting quiet a lot of credit.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures! I have more posts planned out, they will be posted soon.