Digitally Refreshing

Love photography but you don’t have a studio to hand?

Well, join the club – I spent all my hard saved cash on a Canon 5D and now I have to learn how to do things the ‘financially efficient’ way.

Step one
Find a beautiful model. Luckily for me any one of my sisters can fill this role and in this case Stacie Bowden helped me out. Ask her to apply the required make-up, hair apparatus and chose the appropriate clothing. In my case, Stacie was wearing a strapless top to expose her shoulders, very light make-up and her hair was left down.

Obviously the choice is your here, you don’t have to follow my lead. I was after a particularly natural shot with nothing detracting from Stacie’s smile, eyes and hair.

Step Two
Seek out a suitable background. Again, I wanted simplicity so a flat, painted, bedroom wall was perfect. I was also happy with the colour and the lighting conditions were good – but not perfect.

Step Three
Yep, make those lighting conditions perfect. The room I was shooting in had a large bright window to the right hand side of Stacie’s face. I needed to balance that light. I used a large reflector propped up against the wall to the left hand side of Stacie, reflecting light back into the left hand side of her face. With the use of my flash, pointing towards the reflector, I was able to lift the typical shadows out from beneath her eyes. This also had the added bonus of adding a little reflection to her eyes, just to bring the photo to life.

Step Four
The rest is up to you. Shutter, Aperture and ISO are your tools to bring a little magic to the photo. I used ISO320, in retrospect a little too high and an aperture of F8, keeping most of her face in focus. You should also be aware of what you’re doing with your lens. Too much wide angle and you will distort that image – I kept my lens at around 100mm, this also allows you to move away from the model, giving him/her space to breath and act naturally.

Oh one more thing, the reason Stacie was laughing so much in some of the photos was because she was holding a table top fan and trying to keep it steady enough to blow her hair away form her face! Always remember to have fun, and a big thanks to Stacie Bowden

Backing up photos leads to a lot of reminiscing. I found this image amongst a batch of photos I took whilst driving to work in South Africa. I would stop and take a photo every kilometre so that friends and family could see what I experienced every morning and evening.

The drive started in Northwold and finished in Sandton.

Part two will consist of a UK version. There will be no driving - just walking, bus and tube.

When selling, printing or generally admiring your prize winning photograph you’ll want to make sure there are no dead pixels in the way.

Dead pixels or dust on the sensor show up on a photograph as a brightly coloured pixel, mine are usually pink. When viewing your photo at 100% in a photo manipulation program such as Photoshop, these blemishes will range from being very clear to very subtle.

Finding these hotspots is usually tricky and searching across a 4000 pixel wide image can take some time. So, this is what I do…

• Set your aperture to 8, slow your shutter speed down to around 5 seconds, leave the lens cap on and take a photograph.

• Open the image in Photoshop, you should see a large black photograph with no detail – obviously as you had the lens cap on.

• Increase the contrast of the photo until you start to see small, bright dots appearing across your image. There may be none, but on my 8 week old Canon 5D, I found 4 – so I imagine you’ll also find a few.

• Copy your hot spot image on top one of your award winning photographs. Now all you need to do is adjust the transparency of the hot spot image so that it acts like a map highlighting all the hot spots, hidden within the original.

Using this method you’ll eventually get used to where are your hotspots are in your image and will be able to edit them out when processing your images.

Remember to go through the above steps every now and then, you will pick up more and more dust spots along the way and you’ll need to know where they are.

If you want to get your sensor cleaned (and you’re not comfortable doing it yourself) I can recommend visiting Fixation.

Taking photographs is one thing, finding models that’ll hold pink handcuffs is another. I quickly found that it’s quicker, easier and cheaper to photograph yourself than it is to find and convince a model to do the same. Yup that’s me.

See more photos like this: Nature, People, Objects.

Another website from Pixel Juice. Thermitec, specialising in engineering solutions approached Pixel Juice with simple requirements. They needed a no nonsense approach to web design. In the words of Thermitec ‘we need a site that tells people what we do and what we offer, clearly and succinctly’.

Visit Thermitec now for all your engineering requirements. All on-site photography supplied by Pixel Juice.

You know how to develop, you know where to host, you even know how to write good content. Now you need a great look and feel! Make sure to check out these great CSS templates from Dreamweaver Templates.

Oh and yes (shameless punt) they’re using our photos in the templates. Enjoy.

Stock photography can be fun, and we make sure it is. To see our full range of Fruit Stix visit our online stock photography store; otherwise known as iStockphoto!

If you’re looking for something special; contact us and we’ll photograph on brief. We can capture anything from: people to places, fruit to furniture and wilderness to wild-nights!

Sample some of our other photos from our photo gallery here at Pixel Juice.