The crafting of a portrait.

I've recently created a new blog at LoveEnfield.blogspot.com which showcases some of the great people in the borough who are making Enfield such a great place to live, work and shop in.     I decided to do this as I wanted the opportunity to make some great, considered portraits of these people, to help promote their businesses or events and to make some local connections.

Yesterday I photographed Karen & Gunther, who run a great local coffee shop, MyCoffeeStop at Enfield Chase station.   It's a small unit, and I wanted to maximise the space available to me, so I thought about using my 8mm fish eye lens.

I decided to pop this on my 40d as the crop sensor would mean that I got a slightly less wide field of view, and could focus more on Karen & Gunther than I would had I used my 5dII.   

Here's how I set up:

This gave me the following photo, straight out of camera:

Importing the photograph into Lightroom and allowing it's automatic lens correction feature to complete gave me this:

Which is OK, but leaves Karen and Gunther a little small in the middle of the frame.  I therefore chose to manually "correct"  the photograph, which gave me this, still distorted but more natural look:

My next task was to enhance the effect of the steam.  Pushing the clarity & contrast helped a little, but I didn't like what it did to my subjects who'd turned a ghostly shade of pale!

So I took this copy of the photo and layered it on top of the previously unaltered copy of the same photo.    This further enhanced the steam, and gave me further options for refining the image:

The image below shows where my photoshop work was done:

1. The image was naturally vignetted, but because of the crop I needed to darken down this one remaining corner
2. By masking out the blend over Karen & Gunther I could allow the original, natural skin colours to come through.
3. A Waitrose carrier bag behind Gunther was cloned to remove the logo, and darkened down where it had caught the flare from the flash behind him
4. The tiles were cleaned up, the various posters being removed and cloned out.

This gave us our final image (see it large at the top of the post):

I hope you found this useful and/or interesting.  Let me know in the comments below and I'll do it again if there's enough interest.

Dan

Pre-Wedding laughs in the January Sunshine

It was an absolute pleasure to spend an hour last Saturday with Nikki and Mez, who's wedding I'll be photographing at the end of the month.      We met at Enfields lovely Town Park, where we had a stroll together, getting to know each other a bit better, and taking some fun and relaxed photographs away from the stresses of wedding planning.

The guys will soon chose their personal favourites from the shoot, and I'll build them a completely unique, custom canvas montage as a memento of the shoot.     Can't wait for the wedding now!






Nikki and Mez were clearly and hugely in Love, and being so relaxed with each other helped me to quickly start getting some great photographs like this one.

Either Mez has the best set of one liners I've ever heard, or he's very adept at subtly tickling Nikki as they walked together.


Mez practices his "Action Man" pose whilst Nikki shines out from the other side.



Nikki certainly gave as good as she got - no shrinking violet she.


As well as the laughs, their love shined through in tender moments like this one.


It was such a pleasure to spend time with such a light hearted couple.  I hope the laughter continues for many years into the future guys.


Time to show "the rock" off


The January sun briefly visited, and we took advantage with this lovely natural light portait.

There are more photos of Nikki and Mez on my Facebook page - why not pop over and have a look.   Whilst you're there don't forget to click the "like" button to be kept informed of all of my news, and to have a first glimpse of their wedding photographs at the end of this month!