Busy Holidays

Lately I have been busy visiting relatives over the holiday period. I managed to buy presents for most of my family members this year, which is an achievement for me! 

For christmas I got 'The Photo Book' from my Aunt and it is wonderful! It lists many different photographers and a picture of theirs and will be super helpful with my photography work.

I finally finished writing my personal statement for The Arts Institute at Bournemouth today and am planning on applying through UCAS as soon as I get back to college. I have decided if I don't get into Bournemouth then I'm going to set up my own photographic business instead and work in Bournemouth.

Lately, I have been working on my photoshopping skills and have been bulking up my portfolio of work which I will need to print when I get back to college. Busy, busy, busy. Hopefully I will be able to afford the cost of printing my best images for my portfolio, otherwise I will have to print on standard matte paper and wont have the best quality for my work.

Using flickr.com I have uploaded some of my images to the internet hoping for constructive critism and feedback. If you would like to see them then please copy and paste this link or click it if you can; www.flickr.com/gemmiev

At some point in the future I have decided to do some volunteer work in another country, either working with children from uganda or doing conservation work for a month or two. I would love to be able to document my time there and have some images of another culture. Hopefully, I will be able to teach in another country and make a difference to people who are not as lucky as I am.

Here are a few images I have been working on;

This was created using two images in Photoshop, I experimented with overlaying the layers and changing the blending options.

I play on photoshop for hours to get the right effect and its not unusual for me to edit the same image four times before I find an effect I am happy with.

This is one of my favourite images.

I really love the colours in this image and the highlights on the eye. I like the writing on the t-shirt because it helps show the girls interests.

I have made some new year resolutions which I am determined to stick to, these include; 50 sit ups a day, eating more fruit and taking/creating one new image a day :]

I am going to end here because I'm watching jurassic park and it's distracting me :P

Thanks for reading!! 

Before and After

I attended an open day at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth on Tuesday. I am going to apply there for next year and hopefully I'll get in.

Im concentrating on my personal statement and I'm getting on with my portfolio. For my course I would be doing a module on photo editing so I'm putting together some before and after images, which I have used photoshop to edit.

Going through my images of before and after, I have looked at my images with more criticism and I am cutting down on my very best images.

Here are some of the images I have edited.

I used the actions I have on photoshop to edit this image.

I used 'boost' to boost the colours and the contrast. I also sharpened the image and then gave it a letterbox crop.

This is another picture of the same dog. I boosted the colours and cropped the image to get rid of the top part of the image. I also had to clone the top left to make it all grass because otherwise the background would be eye catching.

I also sharpened the image and made the right hand side lighter to even out the image more.

When I had edited the images, I realised the grass in the foreground is more in focus than the dog is. I am not as keen on this image as I was before because of this.

This is the end of today's post.

Thanks for reading. :)

Lights, Camera, Action.

Today I was introduced to a website ran by a lady who calls herself Pioneer Woman who lives in the country in America somewhere. She is a wonderful photographer and she is very friendly. Her website has many tutorials on how to use Photoshop and she has even given a link to download some free actions into Photoshop. These actions were very useful and I have been experimenting with them today. There is so much that goes into the actions and they are so simple to use! Her website is http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2008/10/to-celebrate-the-point-and-shoot/ make sure you check her out if you are into photography because she is a wonderful photographer.

Here is a before and after of an image I edited using one of the actions and also a tutorial given by this wonderful lady.

Before editing:

Image taken by Ken Pegg http://www.prosperos-book.info/ I have permission to use this image for anything, I am the model.

After using the actions 'Ethereal' and 'Boost' Boost, enhances the colour and Ethereal makes the picture seem dreamy. I then used the gaussian blur filter to make me blurry and used a layer mask to delete the effect from my hair, skin and clothing. This made the background blurry putting more emphasis on me as the model.

After:

My skin tone and the colours are all enhanced and I think the overall picture is stronger.

I am going to do alot more experimentation with these new actions and will probably post more images later on in the blog.

There is much more colour in my skin and my eyes which makes me stand out more.

I have also learnt about HDR images which are basically a series of images which are put together all of the same subject, at different exposures and the effects are really cool! I will have to save up and buy Photomatic before I can learn how to do this technique.

Here is an image that has been edited using HDR. The website says 'feel free to use pictures, but with credits and links' so the credit goes to the person who owns the image and the website link is http://stuckincustoms.com/2006/06/06/548/


this is one of the images they has taken using this technique:



It's amazing what you can find on the internet.

I think this picture is very beautiful even though the colours arent balanced. This is not a conventional image but I love the effect!

Well that's it for today's post, I'm quite tired so I'll probably go to bed soon.
Thanks for reading :]