Kirsty and Jesse

Sean & Alice’s Wedding

Sean and Alice

Saturday 23rd May 2009

The Day Started out very windy and looking wet, things looked bleak for Sean and Alice’s wedding weather. However come late afternoon the clouds retreated, the wind disappeared and the sun came out for a beautiful Moreton bay evening. Ceremony in Clayfield, Reception in beautiful Shorncliffe at the Full Moon.

Baby Ben

Baby Ben

Shot at Home, 1st April 2009

Claire & Dan

Claire & Dan

28th March 2009

 

Always a memorable moment!

 

Powerhouse, New Farm

Teneriffe

Lilly

Baby Lilly

Photographed at Home, 24th March 2009

Dan & Olivia

 

Dan & Olivia

21st March 2009

 

One last hug before one become a wife

 

 

Hair and Make-up

 

It's nice to have a helping hand

It's all about the shoes

 

Botanic Gardens Brisbane

 

Fix wine room

 

Fix Restaurant

Judy & Alan

Judy and Alan

13th March 2009

Judy and Alan were married at Hillstone, St Lucia a great place for a wedding.

 

 

Judy and Alan

 

A lovely evening surrounded by friends and family

Removing a Pesky background in CS3

Removing an annoying or unwanted background is not something that I have to do very often; I try to get it right in camera. This job however was different. I had intended to use a neutral wall and blow it out to look like a white wall. Upon arrival to the gig however it became quickly apparent that there was no neutral wall, all had patterns and texture. “Its obvious, do it in photoshop” springs immediately into my mind……. Not as easy as I had previously experienced. Because the wall was close to mid grey with lighter leafing pattern on it, photoshop responded poorly to my previous methods, the background eraser would erase parts of her hair/head (no matter what tolerance I tried or it would leave elements of the background, especially the lighter parts), it was hard to isolate the background by colour because the background colour was dispersed through the whole image and so on.

 

Quick Selection Tool

 

After much consternation and trial and error I settled on this as my preferred method. Firstly I used the quick select tool (see left) to select the gray background. Taking my time to select the background (deselecting if the tool spilt over-cmd click). This was made harder by the background being in the mid grey range. 

 

close up

 

You can see in the close up that the background of this wall varies from midish grey to a very light grey. I found that it is best to leave more than less out of the selection (I will deal with why later) Make sure you get all the image that you want to keep outside of your selection. I was quite happy to loose a few fly-aways.

 

 

 

Now I have my full selection it is time to erase. Feather your selection a couple of pixels, then simply erase everything within it. Deselct and erase the edges of the image which have been effected by the feathering.

 

erase

 

Now here is the really fun part and why I left a little more in than less. Zoom in very close so that you can see the background through the hair. I was using the background eraser tool (by holding down your mouse button on the eraser tool and select background eraser). The background eraser toll works by sampling the center of the cursor (the cross) and deleting everything outside of a specified colour range of that point. I set a tolerance of 30% but play around with it until you get it right. I also recommend setting the eraser to discontinuous which makes your initial click the finite value (rather than sampling continuously as you move the cursor). 

Sneak around to all the bits of background, selectively erasing them from your image. It does take a bit of time but the net result is fantastic. To finish it off I snuck around with the regular eraser “cleaning” up the edges of the images.

Final Image

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toby & Rebecca

Toby & Rebecca,

Married Saturday 7th March 2009 at Sacred Heart, Sandgate, Qld.

Preparing for the walk

Last instructions from above

Sacred Heart, Sandgate

The lovely couple 1

Lovely Couple 2

Correct Exposure, In Camera Metering – Methods and Motive

Correct exposure is key. As photographers, the most important thing we do is control what we do in the image making process. The control we maintain throughout our work will give us the very best end file possible, therefore allowing us to have the most information to make our final image. Even before you release the shutter you have a chance to affect everything that follows. Exposure is paramount to producing fine images. In a modern era of ‘auto’ and ‘point and shoot’ some of the most important facets of photography are lost or a the very least misplaced. 

How it works

The meter in our cameras works solely on reflected light. Light ‘bounces’ off surfaces and enters our lens. The nature of those surfaces has a huge impact on the amount of light that is reflected; black surfaces reflect less light than white surfaces. Moreover colours reflect light according to tone: bright green reflects more light than dark red. As fantastic as the technology is in modern cameras it still does not have what most of us have, a brain. Simply put, the computation in our camera works on a fixed set of parameters, it looks at the overall scene treating all scenes as equal; it treats a white dress in the snow exactly the same as a brown box on a black background, which we know is not the case. It operates on the presumption that over the range of the scene the ‘average’ is mid grey, once again something that we know not to be true. Here is a great article on reflective metering that delves a little deeper into the way it works.

When shooting weddings in particular we are faced with dilemma, often we are shooting the two extremes in the same image with a white bride with a groom in black tuxedo. Lets look at the tools available to us which help us make our decisions.

Modes on our Camera

There are two modes of metering that I will discuss today that we can use:

Center weight – centre weight metering evaluates the with more importance placed on the center of the image. This aims to and can sometimes overcome extremes within the frame. However is not always the answer.

Spot – spot metering, by the very nature of the name meters a very small area. As a photographic tool it allows us to choose which surface to use. We could also take a series of readings and chose an appropriate setting.

What to do?

As our skill level increases and our knowledge of light does with it, we get to make informed decisions about how we meter for our images. However until it comes naturally to us one way which is ‘old school’ but fool proof is to carry a grey card with us when we work and metering each different lighting situation we encounter. For example in the church you will have one reading, for direct sunlight another, another for in the shade. Then you can adjust your aperture and shutter speed as they did in the old days, if you wish to open your aperture by a stop (to alter the depth of field) then decrease your shutter speed by a stop. Then you can have full confidence that your images will be perfectly exposed every time.

Why it Counts?

Like many things in photography it all comes down to time and quality. If all your images are exposed correctly it will save us countless hours of processing time. More importantly however we meter correctly for quality. If we have correctly metered we have the maximum amount of information present on our files. Sure you say ‘photoshop can fix anything’ but the reality is it can’t put back into the image stuff that was never there to begin with. Overexposed images will always be slim on highlights and underexposed images will never have detail in the shadows no matter how good at photoshop you are. Mark my words, correct exposure is key.