Following on from the high and low key options, here are some different ways to present family portraiture, in duo or triple frames.
Achieving a balance is the key to success and choosing images from the shoot that work together and help to tell the story of the day.
Colour and monochrome images in the same frame can look good together, especially where the colour is kept soft without too much saturation.
This is a very informal “low-key” photograph of John…and he just loved having his photograph taken. The secret of good portrait photography is to capture the essence of your model – whether posed or unposed, to bring out their character in the fraction of a second that it takes for the sensor to record the image.
My previous Blog of baby Georgia shows what is known as a “High Key” effect. The predominant tones are light coloured, tending to white, making the result more dramatic, but keeping a light, airy, happy, clean interpretation.
Both High Key images and Low Key images make an intensive use of contrast, but in a very different way, in order to interpret the image. Everyone has a camera these days and even camera phones are capable of good quality results, but it’s the ability to interpret the resulting images that makes dedicated professionals that little bit different.
When making decisions about the processing of my portrait of John, I knew that I wanted to bring out his dark characterful face in the best way I could. I examined the raw colour file and decided that colour was definitely out – this had to be low key and it had to be monochrome. The decision about post processing is about finding the best way to interpret the mood that the picture will ultimately convey to the viewer. Low key portraits are full of drama with dark rich tones. Although the photo of John is essentially a happy one, low key can also be used to great effect to introduce a dark and brooding atmosphere to suitable subjects. Low key images, although predominantly dark, do need some areas of bright highlight to contrast strongly with the black tones and it was essential here to ensure that the sparkle in John’s eyes wasn’t lost.
We just love photographing babies…from their tiny hands and feet, to delicate skin tones, fine eyelashes and huge innocent eyes. Every baby shows his or her own character, and we do our utmost to bring that out at your photo session. Our high resolution photos can be enlarged to fill wall sized canvas or we can supply single or multi-aperture framed prints of timeless elegant design…and how about a modern approach by sandwiching the photo between two layers of glass to have prode of place on your mantlepiece? Lifestyle shoots with baby provide lots of real-life photographs of happy unposed moments shared with your family and photobooks from the session have become very affordable. Just ask for our price list.
Post-processing
We have advanced editing capabilities and can interpret the original image in a variety of ways, like the very modern high-key version below…and you might even consider timeless black and white or toned sepia…we have the skill to produce any of these effects – just ask!
We’ve done a couple of charity events for Breast Cancer Care recently. Here’s a photo from one. If you have a charity event coming up, check with us to see how you can get photos of the event and make a little profit for the charity by booking us at SteelOrchid.
Fine Art Shop
It’s been a very busy month…but we managed to find enough time between weddings and events photography to get the new Fine Art shop on the road and on schedule. We’ll be adding more prints soon so please come back for another look.
Wedding Shop
We are also developing a Wedding Shop, where couples will be able to log in to their own page and pay for their wedding package in installments. We’ll also be selling some wedding fare in the shop, for example personalised thank you cards for the happy couple and gift vouchers for family and guests to buy. So, yes, it’s another “watch this space”. The wedding shop will be online soon with a simple selection of products.
Wedding Albums
To help out in these uncertain times, we are reducing the price of our storybook wedding albums. This year, they will start at the same price as traditional (matted) albums, from £395 for a 30 page book with a level one cover.
Events Photography
On the events front, we have acquired a brand new Fuji dye-sublimation printer, so we’ll be able to print even faster than before and produce bigger and better prints at events. We are already expanding that side of our business and believe that we are now the premier events photography team in the Oldham area for producing instant prints on the night. But we don’t confine ourselves just to Oldham – we can cover most areas of the north, including Yorkshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. For charity events we can arrange to donate to the charity a part ofour profits from the evening.
Exhibition Photography
We’ve been too busy to do much exhibition work this year so far as competitors, but Chris was invited as a judge at the Southport National Exhibition of Photography (Digital Section) and also the first UK International Small Prints International Salon (Birmingham event). She has thoroughly enjoyed judging both events. Chris also picked up another award for her fine art print “Ivy Impression” in the Southampton International Salon of Photography at the beginning of March. This work is now available to buy as a “Signature edition” print in our shop.
Whilst Mike has been working hard on the innards of the new SteelOrchid Fine Art store (online shop), I’ve been populating it with products ready for next week’s launch – with some old favourites and some brand new work. For discerning collectors we have introduced luxuriously double-matted signed prints in our new “Signature” collection. If you would like to own a print but prefer to dip in at a less expensive level, we have introduced some smaller sizes of mounted prints at very affordable prices.
Our collection of prints would not be complete without a Saddleworth section – being based in one of the most beautiful and varied areas of the Pennines, local shots are an absolute must and this winter has provided some interesting opportunities for capturing the best and most dramatic of Saddleworth weather conditions.
We have some special offers for the first few weeks and will be introducing featured prints at special offer prices on a regular basis…so please keep coming back for another look! In the meantime, here’s a taster…
Chris
The new Magento based store is now fully working (except for the PayPal account, of course) and we will have enough fine art prints available in the new range of sizes to open the store on the 8th March 2009.
Getting the store (B.T.W. which term do people prefer: store or shop?) up and running was relatively straightforward but far from simple. The documentation is not the most comprehensive I have seen but in its favour it has an active forum where you are very likely to find a solution to most any common problems and the software is pretty much “feature complete” “right-out-of-the-box”. So for basic use it is simply a matter of choosing a theme and away you go! That is assuming you are running it on your own server. If, like us, you are running on a shared host you need a provider who is either very understanding, like ours, or one that is optimised for Magento. It is rather demanding of the server. We think we have ours configured for our use.
It’s too long since I added to this blog, but the summer and autumn seem to have gone by in a whirl and suddenly it’s winter again. Our first fall of snow on the Pennines came on Tuesday…by Wednesday the sun was out and the snow was thawing…so I made a quick decision to take some time off and dash out with my camera to capture the snow before it disappeared completely.
When I arrived at The Manns, the light under the cloudless blue sky was very strong and contrast range very high. The danger, in these conditions, is that either the highlights will blow out or shadows will block up, so I decided to try some HDR shots.
The principle is simple….take at least 3 shots, one an average for the scene, one a stop over exposed and one a stop under. (In retrospect, I might have tried 5 shots and bracketed even more.) The files are then downloaded and openend in PhotoMatix Pro…a clever little bit of software which merges the differently exposed photographs into one image with increased dynamic range; stage two of the process, tone mapping, reveals detail in both highlight and shadow areas.
Here is an example: The three original exposures,1 stop under, “average metered” and one stop over, with the blended tone mapped composite below.
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The merged and tone-mapped result.
Shadow and highlight detail are improved…the tone mapping has revealed much more depth of colour in the sky and the colour of the grasses and trees is much richer.On the whole I think it is an improvement on the original, though it certainly doesn’t have a “natural” feel to it.
My second example is from Dovestone Reservoir.
The merged and tone-mapped result:
Here, the HDR software has done a good job, creating a more richly coloured image and handling the moving birds very well, without ghosting effects.
It was a great shame that Saddleworth Wartime Weekend was such a washout this year. It has grown into a major event in the village and, with new organisers, extra attractions had been added for families with children to enjoy. But torrential rain showers on both Saturday and Sunday turned Churchill playing fields into a mud bath and the battle re-enactment that had been planned for Sunday afternoon had to be cancelled by the safety marshalls.
I donned hiking boots and waterproof (even a camouflage waterproof jacket for my camera and lens) and we set off between the heavy showers. The event has blossomed from the Yanks event of the last few years and this year there seemed to be even more vehicles in the parade than ever. The convoy was led off by veterans and the British Legion Pipe Band and was applauded by crowds of visitors.
See more photos in our client galleries…
When we arrived at the campsite/battleground (Churchill Fields) the extent of the rain damage became obvious. Children waded through puddles and Pearl Harbor nurses picked their way gingerly across the muddy grass in their high heeled shoes. The military vehicles negotiated the soft ground easily, but one saloon car had become totally bogged down in the mud.
A gallery of pictures from the event is in our client gallery section.
Hewlett Packard were top of my customer services list last week. My B9180 printer sprang a nasty surprise when it spat out a couple of its tiny pizza wheels a few weeks ago. That didn’t stop it making prints, but we decided to contact HP before the warranty runs out in August. A quick phone call to the call centre somewhere in the Asian continent brought forth the question…”can you fax your receipt?”…yes we did that…they called back a day or two later with the question “do you have a digital camera”…..which we thought was a bit odd. The reply being in the affirmative, we were asked to photograph the damage and email the pictures. That duly done, another phone call told us to expect a new printer being delivered within a few days. (more…)
