And as I had done all of the HDR goodness before I was looking to try something different and finally came away with one photo that I really like:
Since everyone else on the photo forums seems to be trying out a nameless person’s style, I tried my hand at dodging and burning and walked away happy at it’s final look.
I had a fantastic time, even if I did my usual thing and lurked away in the corner and avoided talking to anyone. Really, I enjoyed everyone’s company. It wasn’t you…it was me.
The low point of the weekend was my flash dying on Saturday morning, I was about as pissed as this as you’d imagine. The motor that moves the light back and forward has died, powering the flash up gives a wonderfully Martian-esque clacking noise. Fie. It’s gone in for repair and I hope to have it back in a few weeks or so
The high point was meeting some other boardies, having a great time, and crawling around haunted chapels and having weird stuff happen. Another thing I really enjoyed was seeing everyone else’s photos after I got home and comparing the various styles of different people. You can (variously) find their photos in the depths of this thread, and here and here on Flickr. I think my photos probably say more about the trip than any words would, so I’ll skip to my three favourite photos:
The first was taken Charleville’s ruined chapel (if anyone else who was there has photos of the chapel, I’d love to see them) and er, feature the stained glass windows as its focus. I have more detail on the Photoshop work up on boards.ie, including links to some actions I used in all this processing. For now, you can find all of my Charleville photos up on Flickr. Enjoy!
I originally went out today to try and photograph waves breaking on rocks at Claddagh beach, but the tide was fully in by the time I got out and the lack of cover at the beach was disheartening. I started out with my big 28-200mm lens at some seagulls, but I wasn’t happy with the photos I was getting, so I swapped it for my 18-55mm and went over to the swans, where I made an ass of myself by crawling around through puddles, poop and Unspeakably Worse Things to get a good photo.
I read an article in a magazine yesterday about a man who used a wide angle lens to catch birds in flight from a few feet away (he shot over his wifes shoulder, who threw bread at them), so I got right up underneath a few swans, who just sat there and staring at me expectantly for bread. Fie to that. I came away with two photos I’m really happy with and a few more I’m not so happy with:
And that’s it for the exciting photos. You can find any other images here
This will work with most photos, although the most usable photos with little tweaking are bright, non-contrasty photos.
I saw a few photos in a bleached style which I really loved and after some experimentation and souring the web, I’ve come up with a good Photoshop technique for this style of picture
This will work with most photos, although the most usable photos with little tweaking are bright, non-contrasty photos.
1. Open up a photo (always a must!), for this one I’m using the photo I’ve been working on:
2. Just for the sake of tidyness, create a new layer group (Layer-> New-> Group). It keeps everything in one place for later work.
3. Next, you need to create a black and white layer (Layer-> New Adjustment Layer). In PS3, I use a B&W adjustment layer with a blue filter. In PS2, the channel mixer in monchrome with 0/0/100 red, green and blue will produce an identical effect.
4. Right-click on the black and white layer, select layer properties and set it to “Soft Light.” This gives main part of the look.
5. You can see now that the image is much darker and contrasted:
6. Next, create a Levels adjustment layer and use the following input settings: 31, 1.31 198:
7. Finally, create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and drop saturation by 50.
And voila, the final look:
It probably looks a little underwhelming here, but you can do things like paint in the eyes to brighten them using a mask, adjust opacity or setting of any of the layers – you have a huge amount of things you can play with and adjust.
Try it. :]
For the lazy of you I’ve created an two actions, one for PS2 and one for PS3
As an aside, here’s the final image when I finished with it:
There’s a storm blowing right now – 100km/h winds. Sleet, hail and rain showers. Power lines coming down.
And I had to go to the storm in this. I was wearing waterproofs, boots, hat and gloves, and I still nearly got soaked through. The bit that made the trip worthwhile was passing a nightclub and watching 50 or 60 fucking idiots dressed like it was July, huddled, cold and wet as they waited for it to open. I hope they all get the flu and use the week in bed to ponder the wisdom of their actions.
I’d have more of a blurb about these, but I feel like crap and I’m going to bed:
