Studio photography - Still Life At Home

 

 

 

 

I decided to take a few snaps of chillies because my fridge is full of them! I also love the strong colour you get from them. I decided to lie them on a white piece of fabric with a little bit of texture for the background. I chose different types of chillies and some were more shrivelled than others as you can see.

I just used one light (a desk lamp) positioned above the subject, looking down but as you can see from the shadows, it was a little bit more to the right.

I also used pieces of white card around the sides to reflect more light onto the chillies.

I think the shadows are a bit too prominent in this image due to the lack of lighting I had so I used the dodge tool in photoshop to tone them down a touch. I do like how the different tones have turned out but a desk lamp is certainly not the best thing to use! I would like to try this again using proper studio lighting or even using 2 lights positioned above the subject, one to each side.... but I had to make do with what I had at home. No harm in trying! 

Here are a couple more I took....

With this one, I changed the white balance to cloudy to add warmth.

 

 

 

 

Digital image capture & editing - Still life & Homemade Texture

I wanted to play with textures more but this time create my own texture rather than using textures off the internet.

 

First I got one of my Mum's piano music books and ripped a page out......not really, she'd kill me. I photocopied a page from the book.

 

 

 

 

Then I ripped it round the edges and screwed it up and dipped it in tea. When it dried, I used some brown ink to give it more of a 'worn' look and splattered some in spots on too.

 

 

 

 

Then I scanned the texture onto the computer and saved it.

 

 

 

 

 

I used this image below that I took of a rose, and using photoshop, merged the texture with it.

 

 

 

 

 

This is the finished result. I changed it to a sepia colour as I thought it suited the style more.

 

Digital image capture & editing - Textures

 

 

I took some photos of some still lifes (or lives) I set up in my dining room to have a mess around with textures again...

 

 

 

 

 

This is fun!

 

Digital image capture & editing - Memories

 

After the introduction to the montage project, I started to think about collecting some photos and textures that I can scan in and use for my memories montage.

 

When I think of the word 'memories', I think of my childhood and memories with family.

 

This (below) is one of my favourite childhood pictures of me and my big sister because it shows how close we were as kids and shows how I remember us being.

 

I used photoshop and layers to add a texture and changed the image to black and white to give it quite an old hazy feel, because I don't clearly remember being this age. (i'm not quite old enough to have had black and white photos!)

 

 

 

 

This is the original image.... I just used my phone to take a picture of the photo.

 

 

 

 

 

Photoshop - touching up

Today, I had a go at getting rid of some of the imperfections on this old photograph below on photoshop. 

First, I straightened up the actual image by using the ruler. I dragged a line across the top of the edge of the photo and then clicked image and image rotation and then selected arbitrary. The angle was already set to 3.12 which made the image straight.

To get rid of the little white ripped bit at the top right of the image, I used the lasso tool to roughly draw around it, move the selection just slightly above, clicked the move tool and duplicated it down by holding down the 'alt' key and dragging over where the rip was. 

With the other rip on the top left hand side, i used the lasso tool again to make a selection around it, then clicked edit, then fill and then selected content-aware on the drop down menu. 

To get rid of the coffee stains on the right hand side of the photo, I used the spot healing brush tool.

To get rid of the numbers and the white lines at the bottom of the photo, i used the clone stand tool. To get a sample from the surrounding grass, you press 'alt' and click and then stamp it over where you want to by just clicking. You have to keep sampling to make it as accurate as possible. When doing the white lines at the bottom, zooming right in was required as the lines go over the boy's shoes so you have to get nice and close.

This was the finished image. It's not the best as I did it quite quickly but it demonstrates what I did!

Photoshop - Fruit Man!

 

 

In todays session with Dave Gee, we had a go at using different images to create a montage in Photoshop.  

 

 

 

The tools I used for this exercise were; the elliptical marquee tool, the move tool and the magnetic lasso tool. I also needed to resize and rotate some of the images and duplicate some for the eyes, ears and hair.

 

FUN! :) 

Studio photography - Commercial

In today's session with John, we talked about commercial photography. This is photography of which the photographer is paid for. This could include photography for; advertising, fashion, food, paparazzi or portrait and wedding photography.  

Today, we photographed 'shiny things'. We were demonstrating how someone might advertise jewellery. We had a studio made up of 2 lights; one with a honeycomb modifier behind the subject and one to the side. We were using quite dull, uninteresting backgrounds for the jewellery to go on to accentuate how nice and shiny they are and to create a contrast between the subject and background. I went out and collected an old brick with moss on it. There were a few woodlice on it so i brushed them off first.

I used a macro lens and got really close to my subject.