The Wonder Of Light

If you look at the high end fashion magazines and the work of some the really good fashion photographers, all their work has a certain polish and feel to it. Now I’m by no means a fashion or a beauty photographer, but I wanted to see if I could create a beauty portrait from start to finish, producing a final image with the same sort of quality and finish. I had all the necessary ingredients in terms of a beautiful model, a professional make-up artist, what ever lighting equipment and modifiers I needed, so the rest was down to me (more…)

It feels like an age since I’ve taken any real images in anger, so I jumped at the opportunity yesterday to go along to the Irish Cross Country Mountain Bike National Championship race in Djouce Wood, Co. Wicklow and I had a lot of fun I’ll be the first to admit that shooting sports is not exactly my genre, let alone shooting mountain biking, but at the same time I was really interested to see if I could apply my “skills” and techniques to this sort of event. Kit wise, I kept it pretty light, necessitated more so by the walk into the woods than anything else. On my camera for the majority of the day I used the 70-200mm and for lighting my Quadra Rangers got another outing; which were perfect for an event like this. (more…)

I’ve been asked the very same question a million different ways by a million different photographers (perhaps a small exaggeration in the numbers.. but you get the point!). Does a photographers ability in Photoshop supersede his/her ability to actually take a photograph? Is Photoshop a more important step than the actual image capture itself? Indeed, is it possible to produce a “winning image” without the use of Photoshop? Unfortunately the answer is both yes and no! But let me try and explain… (more…)