5001 Smiles

For the recent ‘Smiles’ competition that I took part in, I wanted to do something totally different. Over a weekend, I took 250 smile related photographs and then used an absolutely amazing, and free piece of software called Andrea Mosaic to create the mosaic that you see before you.

Click on it and take a closer look. 🙂

Joshua – Smile

Here’s a lovely black and white photo of Joshua that I took for a competition entitled smiles. This was taken when he was splishing and splashing in the bath 🙂 I used my zoom lens so that I could fill the frame and then converted to black and white in lightroom.

Starburst

Not much explanation to this one. Camera on a tripod, 1 second exposure and zoomed out whilst taking the photo… tada… star burst 😉

Explode – Original

So, the answer to the question in the last post… water flowing out of a lemon juice bottle. 🙂

Below is the original image that I used for the explode photograph – see the previous post.

I filled an empty lemon juice bottle  with water and hung it upside down with the cap on. Underneath it was a glass. If you plan to reproduce this photo make sure you set up so that the bottle contains just under a full glass of water otherwise either:

(a) – The photo won’t work well

(b) the water will overflow. 😉

I set the camera to ISO 100, f13 and a 5 second exposure. The camera was on a tripod, and black card was behind the bottle.  (I wedged the bottle into a sawing workbench and piled a variety of items under the glass to get it to the right height.

With one hand on a remote shutter release trigger and the camera in mirror lockup mode, I clicked as soon as I’d unscrewed the lemon juice cap with my other hand.

To light the photo, I had my cheap and trusty snake LED light with the bulb touching the base of the upside down bottle. This resulted in the bottle and water being nicely lit but unfortunately also resulted in the glass being lit green 😦

I put the photo into lightroom and converted to the whitish colour because it’s just… tooooooo green otherwise! After this, I rotated it and cropped it to remove the glass as I felt it made the photo more mysterious, more like an explosion as opposed to water flowing out of a bottle into a glass 🙂

If you do plan to reproduce this, good luck, enjoy and please link back to this post.

 

Explode

Last week I spent around 3 hours trying to capture a particular photo from an idea I’d got whilst playing around with the camera a few weeks back. This was the second time I’d tried to reproduce the image and the second time I achieved nothing but a big mess and a lot of cleaning to do and nothing to show for it 😦

Eventually I figured… screw it, and decided instead to try something different. What I ended up with is shown below.

So, what do you think it is? Have a guess and I’ll explain it later in the week 🙂

Tree Light Bokeh

Well, hello there. After spending the last two weeks at home, going back to work is going to be a real shock to the system… I decided to take a break from blogging over the last two weeks and just relax. Last year I started by posting photos I’d previously taken to help me get this blog up and running. After that I started following the Daily Shoots a bit, and tried to get 5 photos posted every week. This year I plan to post much less, probably around once a week. Instead I want to try and get better photos by spending time working on one idea and getting a better understanding of how to use photoshop and lightroom properly. Any tips for how I can improve my photos will, as always, be very welcome. Today was my first real day back with photography and, well, it wasn’t successful. I had an idea in my head that I wanted to work on, I spent around 3 hours at it, but, it just didn’t really come together 😦 So, after several shots which failed dismally, I was pleased to eventually get around 3 good shots later in the evening.

Here’s one that I like… it’s simple and the shot that you’ve seen done by everyone else already…. Tree light bokeh. I used my macro lens for this, purely because it allowed me to get more light in, than my other lenses, settings f2.8, ISO 100, 0.25 seconds.

All that’s left to say is… Happy New Year. 🙂