There’s a new iPad magazine out by Ilex called ‘Photographer’s I’ which is “a revolutionary departure in the world of photography magazines”, and I have found to be a delight. If you have one of those superfluous Apple/Android tablet thingies like me, and you’re into photography, then you have to see it.

I have a feature in there that covers the making of my images ‘The Smothering’ and ‘Their Evening Banter’. It’s a ‘how-to’ kind of spread, but things are of course slightly different in this context: with a clickable moving picture style narrative, showing the process to production. It’s really rather nice.

There is also a short video I made exclusively for the magazine, showing the production of my image ‘Loopy Lupinus’ (below), a whimsical self-portrait-with-cat-with-help-from-Matthew I did earlier this year:

Buy the mag even just to see the awkward moments of trying to hold my cat in one position. Or even just to hear the pretty birdsong of spring and hefty shutter clicks of a Phase One body, both which I’m missing already.

Of course, the magazine is full of much more than just my article. It has numerous interactive features from a range of photographers, well worth the price. This pilot issue is going for a cheapo price of £1.50/$1.99, which is literally a steal.

Check it out.

Here’s my latest video, 3/3, completing my series of Phase One insights!

You can also view it on YouTube here.

This was a shoot we did in an abandoned place, a self-arranged fashion shoot for which I recruited a team: model Samantha Jane, hair and make-up artist Hellie Last and of course trusty assistant Matt.

Normally I shoot with natural lighting when I shoot self-portraits in abandoned places. Because we were shooting fashion images I felt it was necessary to use flash lighting, and most shots wouldn’t have worked without it. In the video I talk about the ’split lighting’ technique I favoured using, ie. positioning the light to one side of the model to come across the scene, which lengthened the model, and generally gave the subtle but defined look I wanted.

Click the images to view larger. I have also written a thorough story on the entire process from my lighting technique with the TritonFlash through to workflow and processing, which you can shortly view on Photoflex’s website. I’ll post the link here when it’s ready.

I went a bit experimental with these images, from in-camera motion blur, to funny crops and geometric shapes layered in Photoshop. Putting them together as an editorial was even more fun because then I got to play with font and text. I really would like to try more of this experimentation with text and graphic design across other work I do, even just to play around.

There were lots of hoisted arms in these images…

Costume by Ara Jo, hair & make-up by Hellie Last, model Samantha Jane. Assistant was Matt Lennard. Styling and photography by me.

(or view on YouTube)

Here’s the next video in the little series I’ve been doing, showing the stuff I’ve been producing with Phase One medium format system. The video goes behind the scenes to look at a shoot we did in April this year (which I previously blogged about) where I directed and modelled with a python, collaborating with my boyfriend on the taking of the pictures (more equally so than the usual ‘collaborations’, because I had to place most control of the equipment into his hands during this fairly time-constrained shoot, whilst I dealt with some other heavy equipment). We used the Phase One 645DF and P40+ back, and the video describes the advantages to the high resolution of the resulting images.

Oh – and it contains an abundance of full nudity, so puritans beware.

There’s lots of close-up details of the images, though not as amazing as it looked during the editing, thanks to the crap compression output from iMovie.

In the video I’ve also included a visual overview of the Photoshop compositing process to ‘Double bind’, one of the resulting images.

Upon the publication of this, that’s pretty much me sacrificed bare for art, no going back. Hopefully its not in vain and that the video brings some insight!

Check out my new video below – this takes a close-up look at pictures I shot with Phase One kit (645DF and p40+ back) at recent Shoot Experiences in London. I used a 75-150mm Phase One medium telephoto lens for most of the images seen in the video, and the quality of the lenses you get with Phase One is something I find quite exciting. I highlight how the pin-sharp quality of the lenses makes the images that bit more beautiful in detail, fitting for fashion pictures of made-up models. Although this might not make a difference to an image until it’s needed at a larger scale, the 40mb resolution along with that important depth achieved means the images can be viably cropped in post-prod as close-ups.

Images shot with 3 different lighting set-ups: flash, constant and natural lighting, are all shown here, and despite the staggering weight of the camera, plus the volume of the long lens on top of that, I was ok shooting handheld all day. Hope you enjoy the video.

Next video to come: shooting with something big and bulky, that didn’t turn out to be so scary. Not just the 645Df but a 9-foot python. I’ll be showing behind the scenes footage, and beautiful close-up detail, of my recent nudes with a snake. This will demonstrate one great use you can put all that massive resolution to: printing big for galleries.

Part 1: Interview on aspects of my work

Part 2: My post-processing secrets

Part 3: My tips on successful social media for photographers

Check them all out!

From THIS:

A few people were against me posting this entry, as they preferred me to keep the mystery of my imagery intact.

Because I’d already written it and promised it, I think it’s only right that I publish my entry on this occasion. I don’t do it with alot of images anyway.

Now, first I must advise you: I do not recommend doing something like this, ie. taking a picture in such bad lighting, with so much clutter, and then striving to drastically improve or change the image in Photoshop.

In fact, I have never really planned, for any of my images to date, to do as much work to the image in Photoshop as I might have ended up doing. Take THIS image I did for Life Pure Water, for example -

- for that one, I stitched together two main images, each taken on separate days (one with flash, one not) plus a couple of extra images, and I got there in the end, with many hours’ work. It worked (I think) but I would never recommend PLANNING to take this route. Instead, I think of these occasions as being OPPORTUNITIES when you CAN do something amazing to an image that doesn’t look so good straight out of camera. It is sometimes possible, if you have a substandard shot in your possession, to do something with it – of course it doesn’t always work, which is why you can’t RELY on this method.

I will also reiterate, before I have loads of people expressing their cynicism at a ‘fix it in Photoshop’ attitude, that I don’t overly process all my images.

I have three groups of images: the almost SOOC, slightly tweaked images; the 50/50 images where both original shot and processing style are EQUALLY contributive to the final result; and the third group, the heavily manipulated images where a lot of work in Photoshop takes place to bring together several images into a composite, looking very different from each original shot. This group includes the clone images and the trick images which seem to be the most talked about element to  my stuff. With this category, things can be a blind journey, and that was very much the case with this image in question.

Besides, everyone knows that Photoshop doesn’t fix things itself anyway, it’s the talent of the user, right?

Ok let’s get to the point.

What did I want to do?

This was one of those times (like the early self portrait days) when I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, I was open to spontaneity. I had the trick images from over a year ago in my head. I wanted to do something like my picture The smothering:

In my head I also yearned to shoot underwater, but that wasn’t to be possible now. I also looked up at my ‘Yoga Cats’ calendar, hanging on the wall, that my sister had bought us for Christmas. That may well have inspired the result (ha).

What did I do then?

I decided to do some movement, and try propelling my body into the air. My flat is small and quite cluttered at the moment so it wasn’t easy getting an open area in which to shoot myself. But I was (a) eager (b) impatient (c) feeling ambitious. I cleared a gangway which was insufficient for shooting but thought, even if these shots get relegated to an archived folder on my hard drive, at least I will have blown the first layer of dust off my self-portraiting abilities.

Shot a variety of pics of myself against the wall with some curtain fabric I hadn’t used before, from a charity shop, round my waist as a skirt. I beared in mind I might composite one leg with another so it looks like both are propelled. Tossed a few playing cards over myself, a prop I have been using in my recent shots, but they didn’t really work in this context.

I must state here: these images are rubbish and I did not spend much time on the settings. I wanted to keep the ISO low enough to not create a world of noise, and to keep some low-light ambience in the image. I know I don’t have to post these images to the world to show off ‘what I did in Photoshop’, and on one level, I don’t want to even talk about this process. I guess I want to share it because I like to share tales of things I have done, whether they involve Photoshop or not. This is something I’ll be doing more of this year – and something I will be doing more of in my next Blurb book.

Did what I could, then uploaded the shots onto my laptop. Looked through them, and approved the ones that could be of use.

How did it come out?

Not good. Did a quick mockup to sense what vibe I was getting from the image’s potential. This wasn’t looking good. Just looked silly: me up against a wall, messy lighting, face looking too dark, no narrative or meaning, not sure what I wanted to try and convey: which way should I rotate the photo? Messy, poor quality, already looking noisy – next time I needed good, diffused lighting to avoid having one big hotspot on my legs.

Was that it then?

I thought so. Considered the attempt a failure, as expected, due to poor preparation. I didn’t see easy potential, I just saw a potentially futile processing nightmare, and resolved to get a better location bext time. Shut down laptop and went to seethe in the bedroom and plan what to do next. Planned to shoot some pictures of myself in the bathtub after replenishing myself with food and water.

After chopping veg, and whilst food was cooking, wandered back to laptop and had another look at the pics. Decided that if I were to do anything with them, it would take some work indeed. Decided I’d try it. I was keen to create something, right now.

Started by cleaning up the image with slight adjustments to Levels, Colour Balance, lightened a little with Shadow and Highlight.

Decided on a crop. I wanted to get rid of the clutter and hone in on the figure.

The main thing I’d need to do is bring another leg in, to replace the supporting sticky out leg, so I got stuck into this vital operation-like stage of compositing. Took the leg from another image (the third one in the 3-image montage above). Took some work to do this.

I then had to clone in patches of wall to cover the unneeded leg (as I had forgotten to take a proper image of the scene ‘without me in it’, the necessary element for trick images). I then stretched various bits of wall to cover offending corners and bits of leg. I’d need to lighten that top foot later.

What next?

Finally got the complete shape of my pose against a relatively clean background. Still wasn’t sure about it at all. Then, Matthew walked past and said ‘Oh, I like this one!’ He is never anything but brutally honest, so that was a good sign. Felt encouraged to keep going, aware that the more I was stretching and lightening and distorting the image, the more degraded it was becoming, but I did some denoising and kept going, happy at least that I had an image already more interesting than the originals.

The main thing bugging me now was the stupid lighting. The horrible dark patch of wall behind my midriff area, which was looking even more like an anomalous stripe after bringing fresh new wall to one side of it.

The more I lightened the image, the more it seemed as if I would be trying to make it look as if it were shot in a clean backdrop, when it wasn’t. And yet darkening it didn’t work: that further exaggerated the inconsistencies of the background.

I decided to go down the route of lightening the image, unsure as to how it would look in the end. Pressing on, I managed to even out the lighting with some selection paths, feathering, adjustment of Levels and Shadow & Highlight, and erasing. And some cloning tool to finish up. It was getting there. I can usually always tell whether it’s worth pressing on, or giving up. If small things can be fixed, then have a go. If the whole thing looks fake, don’t bother. I was happy enough with how it was looking at this stage, just knew it needed more and more tweaks. Of course, my judgement will only always be an opinion, others might disagree. One thing I hate about creating images in this manner is the uncertainty, the peaks of hope that can be followed by troughs of disappointment.

Ok, looking good, now what? What to add to the image to complement that open space? I can’t be holding that remote. Well I could, but the floor looks empty. In fact, is that the floor? Should that be the ceiling instead?

Flipped it 180 degrees: hmm, but how would I insinuate to people that this is the ceiling? Photoshop in some wallpaper? Checked iStock. A load of inappropriate images of rooms, shot from conventional angles, came up. No, don’t want to go down that road. Flipped it back.

Ok, the playing cards – let’s grab some virtual playing cards and give the image the same theme as my last one, to advertise the new website. Besides, the shape of the remote would match a playing card that can be easily inserted in there.

Adding playing cards

Cue a couple of hours of fiddling with selection paths, transform tools of various sorts (‘Distort’ was best for the cards) opacity and levels changes, for each playing card. One by one, cut from a screengrab of my website, they were in. Added drop shadows (handy – click FX in the little icons at the bottom of the layers palette). They looked fake, but I liked it. Not fake as in ‘crap cut-paste Photoshop’, but fake as in ‘glossy computerised Pin-up scene that is more exciting than real cards over the floor’ (at least, to me!) Maybe they actually look shit (and maybe they still need more work) but as an accessory to the wider image, I was happy.

Was that it?

Hmm, everything looks a bit floaty and groundless. Matthew passed by again and said he liked it, but I thought it was too contextless, it was again suggesting that ‘I am pretending this was shot in a studio but it obviously wasn’t, so what’s the point’ look. What about marking out a shadow where the skirting board would be behind me? No – how about more, how about an insinuation of a carpet or at least a different coloured floor ? Selected the bottom half of the image, altered Colour Balance, added some vignetting to top edges of this area. Then erased the parts where the effect was colouring unwanted areas – head, cards, tip of foot etc.

Then knew I had to bring a skirting board into the image, as you don’t generally see carpets without skirting boards… that bit was easy.

Dragged in a photo of a skirting board, lined it up, stretched it all across using the Transform tool, zoomed in close and erased the parts it overlapped. Done!

Now some extra touches: cleaning up the edges of the legs, dodging and burning here and there, replicating bits of hair to cover the darker area at the base of my head, bit of dodging and burning, slight rouge and lipstick saturation. And that was about it. Left out vignetting and any Curves adjustments because they didn’t add to the image much – the image was best left pastel-like and fresh, I felt.

Et voila…

When I look at the image, I see a kind of allusion to the colours and skintones in Elvgren’s Pin-Ups… I liked it because, for me, it reached that point of balance between photograph and illustration/painting, where everything is bold, and yet real. You can see the creases in my foot but not the banal clutter it was once propped up on. I felt I had entered my body and face into a kind of virtual environment without creating too many ugly hanging seams.

Very long task I would not like to do for every photo, nor set out to do. But it shows you can do it to some images, if you really want to!

Next time – I want to explore what ’self-taught’ really means. I’ll be chatting to two photography students. See you then!

Above images: the MS booth. At this event three of my images (mounted on hardboard, 1m x 70cm) were on display on the Microsoft booth which was great. I managed to take two of them home afterwards.. I gave The escape to my sister and put South by southeast on my own wall, which actually looks very nice. I like being able to slap up a print on the wall without having to go and pay for mounting/framing first…

The presentations

Above three images taken by John Mathieu

My talks were 40 mins each, two a day for the whole 4-day event. They were similar to the presentations I did at Photokina, except since Photokina I have come to know the products much better and use them more intuitively in my workflow. Whereas the Photokina presentations were about communication being an important part of the photographer’s workflow, the thrust to the presentations this time was RAW, and getting the most from shooting and processing RAW before destructively editing your images in Photoshop, the latter being the stage with which I’ve always been preoccupied.
There are also specific tools in Capture One Pro which are great for my own methods: the colour picker, meaning I can tweak specific colours in an image like this before the original has even been converted from RAW:

Also, the prospect of shooting tethered. The first time I shot tethered was with Alexandra at Pravda studios in Seattle. With regards to self-portraits, I’m starting to tether up my shoots (at least, indoors) to be able to view my images as they come in, not only larger than I would see them on a camera LCD but also in a way that avoids me having to keep getting up to go to the other side of the camera. Instead I can turn my laptop towards me. Not only that, but process an image and set it as a style to be applied to the other images as they come in.
In the case of clones, the ‘Overlay’ feature, a referencing tool in the program, can reduce the opacity of one image to exemplify how it would layer over another.

This is great for any of my clone composites, the one I showed as an example in my presentations was The evening banter (below) in which the clones are particularly huddled. If this image hadn’t have worked out, I said to my audience, I probably wouldn’t have gone back to reshoot it. I’m interested in guaranteeing a better chance of success in my fine-art shoots, without surrendering too much of the spontaneity I enjoy so much….

I showed a range of work in my presentation, and as in my presentations at other events, alluded to the three ‘categories’ of processing in my work. It would be misleading to say I love the processing more than the shooting and that the processing is always more important for me. Some images take more processing than others, some barely any. So, I refer to three categories: the ones that take only a slight tweak of processing to be presentable, which have been composed almost completely in-cam, and for which the role of processing is to emphasise and enhance, not to ‘create’ as such. An example would be Life on the downs:

Here is the image with the original capture on the left:

Other examples would be The dance, Girl dreaming, Stretch, Pink & read.

The second category is what I call ‘50/50′, for images which aren’t dependent on neither shooting nor the processing, it’s an equal weighting of both. South by southeast, for example, may have taken on it’s filmic look through b/w conversion but no other shot taken that afternoon resulted in that same effect, so the original capture’s windblow hair and expression are just as important key components to the final image:

Original next to the processed version:

Other examples would be At Portland Bill Lighthouse, Light wielding, Memoirs of a woman of leisure, and The right way.

The third are the images, such as the clones, which are composites needing more intricate work, with more than one image, but several.

…and a breakdown of the original shots and the processing stages:

All the images in the Multiplicity category would belong to this group, but also, other kinds of composites, such as my recent ‘Trick’ images which do not use clones but use compositing to create the illusion of an impossible feat. I think one of the most interesting parts of my presentation was a breakdown of the processes used to create these trick images. I showed the original images and method I would use to create different levels of ‘tricks’ in these images, and a brief slideshow of the compositing in process (to see the full process of the trick images you’d have to attend one of my presentations)

Above left is part of the process of creating Sprung:

And above right, The smothering:

And… I met Lara Jade! You might know Lara Jade from flickr. She was with her boyfriend, Luc, whose does equally stunning work.
I was just a couple of minutes into one of my presentations when I saw Lara Jade in the audience, instantly recognisable by her distinctive hair and looks which i know well from her self-portraits. I managed to track her down afterwards and have a lovely chat with her, and introduce her to Drew Gardner, a fashion photographer who was also at the event presenting for both Microsoft and Phase One. Here is Drew pulling in the crowds:

Above: me with ‘the cavegirl and the naughty schoolgirl’, just a hint of the very cliched use of female modelling roles on other stands…
Above photo taken by John Mathieu

It was a great event and I had some interesting chats with people… some opportunities afoot, will reveal more later )