Sharing The Roijoy

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...

We still have to keep watching to see if this headline can stand up for itself without needing a question mark, but maybe… Last night I signed up with Affinity Software and downloaded their beta version of Affinity Photo . I played with it for about an hour last night and by the end of that time I was finding my way around the package quite well. And that was without watching the intro video or reading any manuals. Like Photoshop , it is a 2 step offering. It has the RAW conversion engine with all the usual functions we're used to seeing. I was impressed that it also opened all my native NEF Nikon files with no trouble so it seems to be loaded with very up to date RAW processing profiles. After processing your RAW file you can move across to the rest of the package to take advantage of layers, filters, adjustments, and all the other toys that are fun to play with. It seems fairly agile and lets you do complex warps etc. really quickly. I'm going to spend more time wit...