My Photography Blog

The Aim for this blog is to assist anyone with an interest in photography; a step by step guide by someone still following the steps. Hopefully I can post some helpful tips to getting the most out of your camera and will show you the process I take to learn to be a photographer myself and the experience in photography that i've been so lucky to have. I will look at products, techniques, styles and other photographers.

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I have just recently updated my online portfolio website and thought you guys would like to check it out. All my new photography is on there and in great quality. If you could spare a minute or two that would be amazing.

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I thought I'd re-blog another one of Ben Minors photos, saw this one today and just had to share it. The style and of course the model is beautiful.

Go check him out.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Minor-Photography/112961898796836?ref=ts&fref=ts

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Last week I did photography at Crystal Boutique Nightclub where they had a Cardiff City FC promotion party where the players of Cardiff City FC were there. It was an amazing night and very busy at the club where I worked. This is one of the photos I took of the DJ, Luke Smith which I wanted to show you as I think it looks quite cool.

With this photo I used long exposure photography with 1.6 seconds shutter speed which capture all the lights around and made a trail of light as you can see. After I took the photo I edited it in Lightroom 4, I desaturated the photo after editing it. I then used a brush tool to very carefully re-saturate the lines of light. I then changed the colour of the lines from orange and red into this very cool lime green. I'm very pleased with the effect.

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This is another of the photos I took the other day at the Cardiff Bay with my friend Rhod. This one is my favourite shot in the set because I think the background is a little more interesting to the eye than the previous shots I have posted below.

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The other day I went to Cardiff bay with my friend Rhodri to just have some fun and take photos. I thought it'd be the perfect place to take some photos of Rhod. When editing the photos I tried out some new things, one of them was the colour and style of the photos, making them lighter, less saturated and the other technique I tried out was the selective colour option. With selective colour option you can change the colour but what I did was changed the black shades to a grey, so there is less of a contrast in the photos between blacks and whites as now you can see there is only a contrast between grey and whites. For these photos I think it works well but in comparison these photos don't fit when next to the other photos I have taken. Though the technique is something I do want to try out more in the future. One of the things I would like to change with the photos is to make the sky more dramatic for example, which would add more interest to the photos. But besides that I like them. Hopefully planning a conceptual shoot with Rhod in the future.

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This is another photo I took at Pourfection Elite Barman Competition at Mocka Lounge Cardiff. I wanted to show everyone this photo because it is a great representation of what the night was like, with the judges applauding one of the contestants who is doing bar tricks and flaring. Also I wanted to show everyone another of the photos from that night just so you can see how they turned out and how my set up worked well for me (Which you can read about 2 posts below).

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This was one of the photos I took last week at the Pourfection Elite Barman Competition that I took. Was so pleased with the outcome of all my photos, if you want to read more about what I got up to at Mocka for this competition then you can read more below.

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Pourfection Elite Barman Competition

So last week I did photography at an Elite Barman Competition called Pourfection. I was particularly nervous for this because it involved so much equipment and I knew there would be a lot for me to think about when it came to me taking the photos, what aperture, shutter speed should I be on, the strength of each individual flash and how they should change depending on what I was taking photos of. But I planned it well, I got all the kit sorted (As seen in my last post) and I spent a long time thinking about how I would do the photography. The next step was having a look at the venue and where I would be taking the photos. It was at this club/ bar called Mocka Lounge in Cardiff, there was a large balcony looking over the main floor area where the competition would take place, so this gave me an idea of where I should set up my equipment.

I ended up putting two wireless flashes on tripods, one either side of the balcony shooting downwards and then set up another wireless flash on a tripod downstairs shooting sidewards onto where the contestants and judges would be stood. The flashes strength were set to a lower setting so they didn't blind any of the audience and more importantly the contestants. To counter act this and after a bit of trail and error I had a small aperture setting so the photos would come out brighter and a quick shutter speed to reduce blur, my ISO didn't need to change from the normal club photography I do (Which was around 1600 ISO).

There were 4 rounds, 1st one was removing the bottle caps from bottles the quickest, the 2nd was a speed pouring round, the 3rd was a contest to create the best cocktail and finally the 4th round was a flaring round where the contestants showed off their bar skills and did tricks with bottles. For the first 3 rounds I was able to use all 3 flashes and uses primarily a 50mm Canon lens and I found some spots where I could take photos perfectly without getting in the way or in front of any of the people who were watching and this provided me with some great original shots. Occasionally I would swap to my wide angle Canon lens which I used to take photos of the whole audience, judges etc just so people viewing the photos could get a feel for what was taking place. For the final round I had to turn off the flash on the lower floor because it would interfere with the contestants when they were flaring, but the other two flashes worked very well anyway so the shots came out looking really good. There were some great tricks and one really amazing photo I took which I will put up later. All in all I was very pleased with the outcome of the night and managed to secure work at the same event in the future, which is fantastic!

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On Sunday I will be doing photography at a club called Mocka in Cardiff. The event is called Pourfection and it will host a group of professional barmen who will be flaring and showing off in order to win the best Barman competition. So for my set up I have 3 flashes, wireless transmitter and 3 receivers, 3 tripods for the flashes and my new manfrotto 290 tripod for my camera. Will be using a canon 550D with an 18-125mm Canon EFS lens as well as a Canon EFS 10-22mm f3.5-4.5 wide angle lens. Will show some of the photos from Sunday next week. Wish me luck.

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This is another photo I took at the shoot last week.

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So last week on the 2nd I did a shoot with the lovely Steph. Being a photographer without a studio it is my main focus to do a photoshoot which is different. The main thing is location and for this shoot I thought a train track would look great; it's not your normal in the middle of the street or up against a wall kind of shoot and people know there was some thought going into the shoot. The idea of having a train track works well because you have the active train tracks vs the passive looks of the model who is standing still and posing. I am very pleased with how it has turned out. A little bit of editing went into the photos, obviously the initial colour, contrast, lighting etc in Lightroom 4 and then I edited them in Photoshop burning the image, lightening it in places (The hair for example and adding saturation in those places) and then airbrushing in brighter parts as if the sun was hitting my lens. I hope you guys like what I have done, if you have any questions just let me know.

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Antidote Cardiff Video

So last week I took photos but mainly did videography for the first time. I have a friend who does videography at University and when I called him one night telling him I had to shoot a video at this club launch and get the video done in a certain amount of days he was shocked by the work load I had taken on. But through a lot of hard work I managed to get the video done to a quality that I was very pleased with and from the response of others who have seen it, they too like the video.

But It was a long process in order to get the finished product...

Being a beginner with the software and the filming equipment it did limit the end result but I managed to pick up Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 very quickly and luckily managed to get enough footage to make quite a good video. I shot the video as a narrative and when editing put it together as a narrative as well. I used some cool effects like photo burns which I overlapped on top of the changing of scenes. It was just a lot of work compiling, changing and swapping about clips until I got the finished video. With the video I had the clips changing on the beat of the backing track which worked well. Initially I was going to have just the backing track and no background noise, but I ended up buying an microphone to connect to my camera which provided some background noise and i'm pleased I did because it added some atmosphere to the video. Hopefully in the future when I shoot my next video I will try and work on the type of shots I get, getting a variety of shot and work on my editing skills. But so far I'm very pleased. 

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So this is the finished look at the video I took for the club launch night of Antidote Cardiff at Undertone. I'm very pleased with it, I will post up a commentary on how I did it, what I thought of the process and the final clip in another post. Hope you all like it.

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So last night I did photography and videography at a club called Undertone in Cardiff for a club launch night 'Antidote'. It was such a great night, cosy but lively atmosphere and great music. Obviously i'm not here to tell you guys how good my night was but to tell you how the kit worked out for me and how my first ever night doing videography turned out.

Firstly it the photography part went well, but there was the initial issue of trying to let drunk people when I was taking photos and when I was shooting video. Moving past that, it went well, I got a lot of footage and what worked out well for me was creating a narrative from which I could do the video on. I am still yet to start editing to video but I have shot a lot of footage in a narrative way, the guys arriving to the club all the way up to the party going at full steam. I will post the result of it next week when I have finished and let everyone know what I have done and what I think of the video, mostly I'd be interested in what you think of it.

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This is my camera set up for next week for the launch night of Antidote at the club Undertone next Monday. I have bought a frame which attaches to the camera and then allows me to attach a Opteka microphone I have just bought as well as the LED lamp on top. I’m hoping this will work well for the night. I will let you guys know how it goes next week after I have done the night and then after post the video up to see the final result.

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Received my Gorillapod SLR Zoom tripod today and have tried it out this evening while filming my band doing photography. Works so well at clinging on to almost anything. One thing I would recommend though is to purchase with it the Ball Head accessory to make the positioning on the camera a little easier. But worth a buy! Hopefully in a weeks time I will be using it for club videography as well as some of my own night photography.

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If anyone is interested in seeing my photography then you can take a look at my online portfolio which is updated regularly.