Photos of the Photographer

In this new series I examine photographers themselves. Watch out photographers of the world, I’m out to capture you 🙂

Photography can be a tiring business, as this young woman has discovered.

18

Sometimes the most simple photos can be the most fun.

Surf, Sea, Sand, Solitude

Envision, prepare, observe, shoot… create. I really enjoyed the process of creating this photo. Some modest darkroom work to convey what I saw in the scene.

Breaking with Convention

Traditional western photography teaches us to appeal to our cultures left to right sensitivities in our composition. We do this by encouraging the eye into the photo where it is captured by something pleasing. We then work to keep the viewer in the photo, moving around it, pondering it.

I do love breaking with convention. Here our model is instantly blocking our eyes journey into the photo. Not only that she’s looking back off out to our left, encouraging us to go back to where we came from. Does the negative space somehow balance this out, forcing us to get lost in her gaze?

I’ll let you be the judge, and see if you like it as much as I do.

Up close

I love getting pictures of children’s faces and expression up close. Finding a rare moment of tranquility in the frothing buzzing energy of a toddler can reveal a rare and peaceful glimpse into their personality.

Pillars of Autumn

This is the view from my office and why I carry my camera with me every day. The foggy morning last week broke to a stunning low sunrise that sent shards of shattered light spilling through the metal and glass work of these hyper modern structures.

Pedal Faster?

This was an interesting find, some graffiti. I had a play with Lightroom and Nik Color Effects Pro to pull more zing out of it.

A slight departure from my more natural, unaltered work.

Pure Perspective

This photo is of my son at about four months of age. I did some very modest development with Lightroom and Nik’s Viveza to make it ‘pop’ a bit more (see a note on digital darkroom development after the photo).

This photo was published the Photographers@Microsoft Volume 2, book after the jump here and helped raise money for the United Way Giving Campaign of King Country.

https://www.fluidpixel.com/Portfolio/People/i-Pxw2D9D/A

Development & the digital “Dark Room”: I shoot  [mostly in Manual] in 100% RAW and work on the undeveloped images in Lightroom to come up with the final product for all of my photos (Except the occasional phone camera/point and shoot). This means I’m working with as much light information as the camera can capture rather than compressing it down into JPEG in camera and loosing much of the dynamic range of info the sensor captures.

RAW is like the ‘negative’ from film days. So when I looked at this photo straight out of the camera I immediately identified there was some opportunity to make it ‘pop’ a little more. The final product is what you see above.