What is Photography (Revisited)
I recently gave a presentation where I attempted to answer the question, ‘what is photography?’ In a previous blog post I gave a more generic answer I wasn’t too happy with, I didn&#... Read More
Landscape Study
When I think of landscape photography, my mind thinks of picturesque scenery. Places I’d want to visit, places I’d want to live in. I think of trees, or mountains, or rivers. I picture a s... Read More
Compare & Contrast
Weegee was a paparazzo photographer, and paparazzi are typically very invasive. In this photo by Weegee we see onlookers at a murder scene. A grieving relative overshadowed by the neighbourhood childr... Read More
Colour Tinting
Colour tinting is a technique in Photoshop where we can add, or change, colours in an image. Last time, I used the technique to turn a photograph of smoke into an artistic piece full of vibrant colour... Read More
Smoke Photography
Photographing smoke on its own doesn’t look all that appealing. With the help of Photoshop, however, we can create abstract art full of vibrant colour that would look great hanging on our walls.... Read More
Adding and Fixing Noise
As you can see from the image on the left, there is quite a lot of banding. To fix this, I removed the air balloon and the foreground using the select tool and deleted it using the “content-awar... Read More
Photography in History
Looking at photographers through history and this particular piece caught my attention. There are many people who dislike and/or distrust contemporary photography because so many images are manipulate... Read More
Reading an Image
This is a colour photograph taken from a very high vantage point; a tree towering a forest. The camera is aiming down towards the trees below and we see an orangutan climbing towards us. The towering ... Read More
What is Photography?
In our critical and contextual studies, we were asked to answer the question, “what is photography?” There is no definite answer for this question, for photography is many things to many p... Read More
Feedback Task
We were tasked with making some minor edits to these images and to merge them together. I did this using various tools: spot healing to fix some minor blemishes and layer masks to cut the model out fr... Read More
Radial Filters
For me, this image is underexposed. The background is too dark and my model needed more light. To fix this, I opened it up in Photoshop’s Camera Raw filter and adjusted the exposure by about hal... Read More
Changing The Channel
Here’s an image I recently took. It’s technically a perfectly fine photograph but it wasn’t to my taste. So I took it into Photoshop to make some changes. Adding a curves adjustment ... Read More
Mask and Montage
Using layer masks I was able to cover the bin bag in the corner of the stairway using another photograph of an orange. This is a technique that can be used to add objects or people to a photograph tha... Read More
Opening Our Eyes
Sometimes when we have a large gathering waiting to take a photograph, such as at a wedding, some of the guests might blink or look away at an inopportune time. As photographers, it is part of our job... Read More
Does Changing Colours Mean Changing The Truth?
Photoshop is an effective tool that can completely change a scene, prompting the arguments that nothing is real in photography anymore (a topic I am keen to go deeper into at a later time!)However, as... Read More
Advanced Cloning and Does Photography Speak The Truth?
SPOT HEALING My first task was to retouch this image. It is a simple retouch which uses the “spot healing brush”. By adding a new layer, I could do this non-destructively so any mistakes c... Read More