More of the traditional stuff

Not too traditional mind, I try and avoid the getting in the wedding car shots whenever possible. As mentioned previously, I did have a lot of time with this couple as they are close friends so as a result I have quite a few to post, I might put a slideshow up at some point too.

These are more the traditional black and whites which I really love. The shadows are slightly warmer than a straight black and white and a decent vignette also help the image along.
I won't go into the exif data other than to say I was at a higher ISO than I should have been in bright outdoor conditions but only 400 so not really noticeable. It's never a good idea to step out of a dim church into the sun and start papping everyone at ISO3200!

Different style of wedding photography

I'm still playing with photos from a recent wedding, I have done a load of black and white conversions which I really like but now I'm doing some cross processing and more texture overlays. Cross processing is another throw back to film days where people would use different types of developer for different film producing high contrast stuff with odd hues. It was often quite unpredictable and yielded great results as often as bad ones. With digital the randomness of the process isn't really replicated but it is a technique that can work better on some shots than others. Museums tend to be quite big on cross processing and lomography, usually of bicycles or old cafes. Not for everyone but I quite like some of the results. I've also done some border overlays to complete the look.

The Bride and The Veil

We had a great wedding at the weekend and I have a number of shots to process but I thought I'd post this one. The wedding was at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire, it was a fantastic location and the weather was great. The couple are good friends of ours so it was a bit of a bus man's holiday but they were up for anything in terms of photography which is always good, you'll see what I mean if I post some shots of them walking on the stepping stones on a pretty wide river. There was a light wind so every time the gust picked up I tried to get a flowing shot of the veil, this being an example. I did a little HDR work to really bring out some detail in the veil back of the dress but not a great deal. The shot was converted to mono with silver efex so it has some authentic film grain too. The shot was taken at ISO400, F4, 1/4000 at 35mm (all the fours!)

Smiling Bride

It's wedding season again! We got this one a couple of weeks ago at a great wedding in North Yorkshire. I'm currently experimenting with textured overlays as they can give quite interesting effects. You can build up a library of photos of interesting texture, be it brick walls, wooden tables etc. and try overlaying them in photoshop. All you have to do is paste the texture onto a new layer and set the blending mode to overlay (I start with overlay but some of the other ones give different results) Reducing the opacity and masking areas also helps. These can be a bit hit and miss but it's just a bit different from the selective colouring we see quite a lot of. The image itself was taken at ISO200, 200mm, f/2.8 at 1/1250.

The black and white I've posted was a follow on from the technique I was working on a while back taking a slightly out of focus image and adding a little film grain to get a retro reportage style shot that would otherwise have been binned. This would also work with a lomo or cross processed style of processing. This was taken at ISO200, 78mm, f/2.8, 1/200. For the grain I use silver efex or alien skin's exposure, which also has coloured film effects.

2 Minutes of Sky

Last post 24th March! If I knew what the date was I'd be shocked, I know we're close to some religous shebang that has something to do with chocolate and bank holidays. Anyway I went out the other night as the light was looking pretty good so I arrived and set up and the light went straight to hell so I thought I'd do a few more long exposures. I did a few at 10 minutes but didn't like the results, this one was exposed for 120 seconds, f/16, ISO100 16mm, and if these setting seem familiar it's because I was taking photos of a tree and they are the only settings I allow for tree photos :) Not much else about it really, the 10 stop gives off a little magenta hue for long exposures but if you shoot RAW you can have a little diddle with the white balance when you get home. I quite like how the outer leaves were blurred but the stable branches stayed sharp, gives it a etheral quality. Have a good weekend everyone.