Sharing The Roijoy

When it's bright and sunny and you set your camera to capture a scene you sometimes end up compromising between great clarity in your images and a washed out blue sky. Here I'll quickly show you here how to digitally add a little more saturation back into your faded blue skies. At the same time you'll see that you can also add a little punch to the overall colours in your photo. You can opt for subtle or more extreme results very easily and quickly.

The London shoots began in a houseboat on the River Thames. The sun was kind enough to pop out so that we didn't have to contend with dull grey looking water. To keep the swans and ducks interested in staying within shot, one of the guys on the UK production crew was outside on deck with a yellow rubber duck that he made bob about in the water with the aid of a length of fishing line. This kept the ducks and swans curious enough to stick around and give their cameo performances. After the houseboat shots we moved along to central london for a street musician set up. This shot is in between some takes the film crew were capturing with the violinist managing to give her cold fingers a rest. It was quite chilly that day. I captured general stills from outside while the film makers were busy filming from the inside of a building. Once the film director had what she wanted, I was able to move inside and capture more still through the same window for this scene. The last s...

You've been busy swapping lenses to capture that perfect composition, you're outside, and it's windy. Chances are some dust will make it into your camera and attach itself to the filter in front of your dslr camera sensor. This is a little extreme but you can end up with shots that look like this! Dust on your sensor shows up in your photos. Where I'm based, you can take your camera in to a camera store who offer a sensor cleaning service. Some of them can even do this for you within half a day. The cost, approximately $60 each time. I quickly learned to clean my sensor myself!  I was using a wet cleaning method and even though I'm quite adept at it now, there's still some slight anxiety every time I'm in there cleaning the sensor. If it gets scratched or damaged, basically my camera instantly becomes a paperweight. And even though it's cheaper than going to the store, it still costs me almost $50 for a packet of 12 cleaning swabs plus the li...

After spending the night in London, we traveled down to Kent to shoot a series of scenes. The film crew would capture footage for the film and I would get the still shots for the media campaigns. It was a fresh and beautifully sunny day as we arrived for lunch at The Bull . After a hearty pub lunch it was time to continue with work. The location was a beautifully converted windmill and we would be working with a child and with an animal. For this shoot you can disregard all the sayings about working with children and animals. This all went well and I would happily work again with the girl and the cat talent anytime. The cat was up first and with the help of the cat wrangler, we were able to get a whole range of usable poses for the kitchen window shot. As the day moved on we shot a few other sets within the windmill including bathroom scenes and other window shots.  Every room and corner in this fabulous conversion would have easily lent itself to beautiful s...

Especially when you're including architecture in your shots, there are times when the combination of the angle you are pointing your camera and where your point of focus is, leave you with an image Where all the vertical lines slope into your composition. Sometimes you want this effect to be pronounced and at other times it would be nice to be able to compensate against the effect. If your main job is doing architectural shoots you may have already invested in some high quality, tilt-shift lenses. If you're a Nikon shooter like me, you can purchase a very nice Nikon lens for just over $2000.00. If you have the latest versions of Photoshop or Lightroom CS, they include a function to assist you in fixing converging lines in your photos. But you can also do a simple fix to your photos manually in earlier versions of photoshop that you may already be running.                              Before fixing the ver...

My image "Breaking Up",  a conceptual image alluding to the pain and suffering of breaking up with someone or having a nervous breakdown.  has just won 2nd place in a competition hosted by Eye-Fi and Studentstock . I tend not to enter competitions because of the trend to choose winners based on likes through social media. I sometimes feel this method weighs things in favor of popularity above the content of the work. Not that there is anything wrong with this approach - it's just not for me. However, I noticed that this competition would be decided by a panel of judges and not based on social media responses, so I though why not.