Sharing The Roijoy

Happy New Year to you and may it bring you wondrous photo opportunities to capture and hone your skills with. I spent the major part of 2015 doing travel photography and editorial shoots. I also have a good quantity of images to tag and prepare for the various photo libraries I contribute to. So even though this opening post for 2016 is mainly to say "Hello" and wish you the best for 2016, Here are my last image sales of 2015. In 2008 we were driving into the Hamanasi Resort in Belize. On turning a corner we were confronted with this view of a building being delivered to the facility. It has been licensed 3 times previously to being licensed again on December 31, 2015. And last but not least, this image also shot in Belize, of one of the Garifuna Settlement Day celebrations in 2009. This image has been licensed twice before being licensed again on December 31, 2015. And the clock continues to tick so off I go for now.

Quick Tip: One simple way to make your photos more interesting and dynamic is to experiment with shooting your subjects from different angles and viewpoints. Here is a scene shot on my desk using toys for my models. Here is the exact same scene shot from lowdown with a macro lens.

Here's a fast method for giving your images the popular desaturated look. It's a look often seen in film posters but you can see this look in many other places too. This method allows you to control how much or how little you want the effect to be visible and also gives you control over tone and individual colors. It's straightforward and uses adjustment layers in Photoshop so you can save the effect as an action to use on any of your images without starting from scratch each time. Basically you'll have created your own customizable filter. Watch the video and have fun!

I've been in Belize for the whole month of May and notice that once again my stats are acting as if they are affected by my global placement. I've commented before that whenever I visit Belize, the sales of my Belize located stock photos seem to increase. So once again when I look at my stats for those pictures I see that I have made 14 sales on 10 of my Belize images for the month of May instead of just 3 or 4. It is just an odd coincidence but I wonder how long it will last. Also it's always the older images that pop up too  — anyway, these are the images, if you licensed one of them, Thank you :) Apart from these I sold an additional 34 stock images in May.

There isn't a story to this. Just walking down 17th Street in San Francisco on a sunny afternoon, and these are a handful of views that caught my eye. Boyz on Bikes Who will be the chairman? Crossing genders Weed of wisdom Sun worship at Church Blooming house 17th and Abbey Car wash, yeah! Meditation Redhead Marching to the beat

When a client requests a portrait and asks for something a little different, and isn't "just saying it", I get very interested. In this instance, they wanted a photographer who was happy to include some image manipulation to create the final result. So after a brief conversation, I submitted some visuals including this one below. This was just to help illustrate the idea and knowing that we would tweak and adjust once we actually got to shooting, everyone was happy to go ahead. We agreed to meet near the bridge on the day of the shoot. I made my way to the bridge about an hour earlier so that I could walk the bridge and get some angles I had already scouted. I wanted to be shooting my client within an hour of leaving the bridge so that we could keep the lighting conditions of the 2 components within the same spectrum. I chose a high location up on the headlands for the portrait part of the shoot. This allowed me to use the sun as a studio key light. Using t...

You've seen lots of "levitation" images and many of you have probably created your own by now. I created the image above for a Holiday Card. During their family shoot on the streets, mum suddenly asked if there was any way we could achieve a shot with her son floating with his balloons. I had no tripod or assistant along with me but after a quick glance around, this came together in my mind. First off I took a photo to set up the position of Mom and her son "floating off". As you can see I coached my clients to become actors for a while and they delivered a great Oscar seeking performance. The second and final part of the image was a shot of Dad looking up at his "floating" offspring. As mentioned earlier, I had no tripod to lock the camera down with so I was shooting while sitting on the sidewalk and trying to direct the family between the 2 shots without moving the camera too much. Inevitably there was some movement of the camera in b...