Sharing The Roijoy

So we're already over a quarter of the way into 2022and Easter has come and gone. I had some fun doing another photoshoot with Emma at Alternative Adventures in Hopkins, Belize. It worked out this year that Emma had a couple of celebrity motorcycle world travellers staying at her hostel ( Crashpad in Hopkins Belize) she pitched the idea of collaborating with them for her Easter shoot. You can check out these 2 adventure riders by visiting their Instagrams: @advtorally and @biologist_on_a_bike . You can also catch up with Emma's 2-wheeled exploits by following her Instagram  @dualsport_emma . It is worth the visit. You'll also see how she used my pictures of the 3 of them turning in Oscar performances... And the pictures are here too, but you'll see that I have used them slightly differently to  @dualsport_emma I chose to shoot just as the sun was going down to get the dramatic sky and backlight. I got the hard foreground light by using an off-camera, single unmodifie...

Mask wearing as a mandate has ended in Belize since April 1st, 2022 and the country is buzzing with tourists.  We also had Royal visitors in the village. Hopkins was a 2 night stop for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince William and his wife Katherine. While in Hopkins they were shown a slice of Garifuna culture with drumming, dancing, and traditional food preparations. The Duke and Duchess even took part in some of the dancing with the Duke in particular showing that he had some moves. February brought us a palindrome and ambigram all at once on the 22nd. I teamed up with @dualsport_emma and @masha.homayounfar to produce this 'Reel' to mark the occasion.

We all have views and stories regarding this current year. For me personally, it hasn't been too bad, a little strange at times, but nothing disastrous. Meanwhile I know people personally who have been, and are, going through the mill. I was busy doing a shoot when a section of a room at a location I was working at, began to stimulate my imagination. And the image above is the result of all of that. Below you can see how I made it using other photos that I have taken in the past along with doing some illustration work on my computer.

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On my way to a meeting, I glanced the other way up the road where I had parked my car. I immediately saw a scene that could offer some nice compositions for some stock photography. This action was taking place too far up the road in the opposite direction for me to go in for a closer look, and still be on time for my meeting. I happened to have a Nikon 800 in my camera bag with a 70 - 200mm lens attached. Very quickly I was able to capture a few frames without diverting up the road and I would let the resolution of the Nikon give me some options for the final crop. Above you can see the frame I captured for the image at the top of the page. The final crop is shown as a lighter rectangular area within the scene. From the various frames I captured this was the tightest I went to  for a crop.  The Nikon 800 body can resolve at up to 36 megapixels.  When shooting to make the most of the camera's resolution, you have the latitude to make fairly aggressive crops to images and s...

We needed to have some pictures showing night scenes but logistics and model availability meant we could only shoot in the daytime. So what do I do? This first image was shot by the beach, in the Caribbean, at noon on a very sunny day. To achieve this look I changed the exposure setting on my camera away from what might be considered the complimentary setting for shooting in bright day light. I was going to have to do some retouching but wanted a good base image to work with. Light during nighttime often displays with a pronounced amount of blue, so capturing an image with lots of blue already in would be a good place for me to begin. So I set my camera light meter to read the light as if it was coming from a tungsten source. This would push the overall ambience toward a blue tone. However, I wanted to keep the skin tones warm and not blue. To make this happen, I shot with a speedlite and set the lighting to expose the foreground only. I also put an orange filter on the f...

2020 just keeps on doling out more twists to each story. A lot of people now wonder if there is anyway out of the wormhole we all seem to be existing in. This is a straight forward shot of the vehicle on one of the local dirt roads with marshland on the right side of the scene. I stood on a ladder and took a selfie using the self timer function and cut out the image. Next I illustrated the ladder digitally and placed it into the main image. Once I was happy with the ladder position, I positioned the selfie cut-out onto the ladder and sized it down to a scale that I felt worked for the composition. Once I was happy, I also added shadows and highlights to the ladder to help with the illusion. I did further work blending the ladder where it appears to enter the clouds. With all of this in place, I went ahead and digitally created the 'This Way Out' sign and blended it into the composition. Finally I did some overall toning to the image. Main Image Location: Sit...