I took some photos at TG on a recent trip to Edinburgh. It’s a fabulous crowd up there, really friendly & with some amazing outfits. The venue’s the best I’ve ever seen for a club, all the walls are hundreds of years old & the lighting’s fantastic so it makes for some great photos.
Lots of photos of Edinburgh itself & A great Kabarett night to come in future blogs.
On our second day in Rome we took a very long walk from our hotel near the Termini to the river via Piazza della Republicca, Piazza Barberini, The Spanish Steps (don’t see what all the fuss is about, it’s just a very busy bunch of steps!), the Trevi Fountain (amazing, but completely packed, would recommend going in the morning to avoid the crush), The Pantheon, Piazza Novona where we had a fantastic dinner at Cul De Sac, & then a moonlit stroll to take in a view of a couple of bridges & the Castel Sant Angelo. It was a bit of a random route but I discovered later we’d covered most of Angels & Demons by accident!
It was a fantastic sunny day, & remembering the polarising filter certainly helped, but I actually missed the angry skies from the day before.
The photo with the car tail lights trailing through was taken with a slow shutter speed of 3.2 seconds from our table outside Cul de Sac, & with the camera balanced on a railing.
I’m always keen to shoot alternative & fetish models as they bring something different from day to day glamour, Ruby being no exception.
We started off with some natural light shots. As this is what I do most, it’s ideal to have as a warm-up. There’s no setting up of lights & I know exactly where the light works so it’s a great way to get models relaxed before I do anything experimental.
When we moved into the studio, I did something I pretty much always do & forgot to change the camera settings over from natural light, resulting in a very bleached out image. I had a mess around with it in photoshop as I liked Ruby’s expression & ended up with this oil painting, which I really like.
This was what I was aiming for once I’d set my camera up properly! The fairly strong contrast seems to complement the outfit & gives the photo a hint of Marlene Dietrich.
With this shot I was trying to light the shoes to show that they, the bracelet & the tie have matching teeth, but as it turns out, the shots that showed that didn’t show Ruby off as well, so I chose this one & used another pose to showcase the outfit…
…this one.
Model: Ruby True
Make-Up: Tabitha Adams
I went with my girlfriend for a long weekend to Rome recently & took my main camera for the first time. It’s quite a pain to carry a 5DMkII around everywhere so I was hoping the results would turn out to be worth it, but after seeing what CS6 can do to the photos, I’m very glad I did. All the photos are the original files processed through photoshop CS6, no skies have been added.
I found myself with a bit of a dilemma, namely that I’m now carrying a camera that can take pretty nice pictures of everything around me, but if I stop to do it properly, it’ll end up feeling like a 4-day photoshoot & not a holiday at all. Inevitably these are something of a compromise. I didn’t manage to get up at 5 to catch the sunrise, but we got pretty lucky with the weather on this first day, it was hot & sunny in the Colisseum, but with a few fluffy clouds to make the sky interesting. As we walked over the Palatine Hill & to the Forum, it clouded over & made for some fierce-looking backgrounds. My only regret is I forgot to take my polarising filter with me, it made quite a difference on day two.
Photography aside, Ancient Rome really blew me away, you can really transport yourself back a couple of thousand years. We found that there’s an overwhelming amount of unmissable sights that’d take months to get round, so I’d recommend reading a guide book before going (Lonely Planet seem to be the best) to narrow it down a bit. That said, you could quite happily potter about & just see what you run into, it’s all very pretty to look at 
Top Tip: Avoid the queue at the Colosseum (it can be 2-3 hours) by booking a guided tour, you go straight to the front. It wasn’t hugely more expensive & included the Palatine Hill. Not sure you should believe every word they tell you though, we passed another guide telling her group the exact opposite of what ours had said!
Ok I’m a convert. I’ve always shied away from shooting RAW. With every previous version of photoshop I’ve read a book, had a fiddle with it & decided I couldn’t make enough of a difference to make it worthwhile, but I’ve been completely blown away by what CS6 can do, particularly in the recovery of highlights, so every photo I take from now, even holiday snaps, will be shot using RAW.
I’ll leave the tutorials to those who are more practised at them, but here’s a couple of samples from a recent trip to Rome.
The first photo is the unprocessed version, of the Hippodrome of Domitian on the Palatine Hill. The sky is pretty dull, & everything looks a bit flat.
The second photo is the same shot after processing with Camera RAW. The amount of detail recovered in the sky is just amazing. I’ve largely used three adjustments to this shot.
Firstly, I dropped the highlights to recover detail in the sky.
Secondly, I used the fabulous adjustment brush, which allows you to paint any adjustment in to chosen areas of the photo. Here I used it to lower the exposure of the sky.
Finally, I used the Detail slider to give the hyper real effect.
There were some other minor tweakings, but it’s those three that made the difference. Here’s another example, of Trajan’s column in the Piazza de Venezia.
In this shot the sky was pretty fierce to begin with, but RAW has turned it into something a bit special.
The other great thing I’ve found so far is a noise reduction filter. I’ve always used an external plug-in as I’ve found photoshop’s noise reduction to be a bit rubbish. It still is, but the one in RAW is pretty awesome.
I’ll be spending quite a bit of time getting to grips with the new RAW over the next few weeks, I’ll keep you posted with the results.
Rome was amazing by the way, we could’ve spent a month there & not seen all the sights. Photo blog coming soon!
This shoot at The Hempel Hotel was the first time I met Becky, & we’ve become good friends since. She was a make-up artist before she started modelling, so now she’s coming to the end of her modelling days she does make-up on many of my shoots (not dressed like this). Her positive attitude & general bounciness mean we’re always in for a fun day when Becky’s in the house
As a large part of what I do is making the models relaxed & comfortable, it’s vital to have a make-up artist who I get on with, & who also puts the models at ease (& is also great at make-up!) With Becky having gone through all this for several years, her experience is really helpful to the models. Also, you need a certain amount of energy for a successful shoot so if the model’s a bit on the quiet side, Becky & I vibe off each other, which tends to wake the model up a bit
NB my other make-up artists are also great to get on with, they just haven’t posed like this for me so they don’t get a blog yet
