Some beautiful crafts made in Ireland !

I'm a lucky devil, I got to assist Trevor in the Craft Council's creative showcase shoots and saw what Ireland craftmen had to offer. 

Here are my favorites so far, that I shot for my own pleasure ! In order of appearance : Rachel Quinn Ceramics , Ceramic Art & Sculpture and Radek in Touch Design Ceramics. There's a linky link to their websites on each of these pictures if you're interested !

Silly tea shoot

A few days ago, I was admiring the red swirls coming out of my berry tea and invented stories about an elegant waltz dancer that didn't have a partner so she kept swirling on her own...daydreaming...anyway I didn't have any red berry tea left which is a real pity because they are the most photogenic but I did have another Lipton citrus one (and I dont want to know what they put in it for I know that taste can't be all natural but hey the colour is nice) and I played around with it.

For the purpose of the shoot, I did things the other way around, first the hot water, then the tea...

Lipton Citrus...so hot it can't handle its own heat :-D that'd be a good continuity for my silly ad series...

And what about that one below, Lipton V Barry's tea in a jacuzzi, who can sustain the heat best ?

Cara Magazine feature on horse racing

I was thrilled to assist Trevor Hart on the 2 day shoot that he was commissioned to do for the August edition of the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine CARA and just as thrilled to see that not only was he credited but so was I for my tiny role in the making of these beautiful imagery., which tells a lot about how the publisher Image appreciate and respect their contributors. I particularly love the look (grading) that Trevor chose for these. They really look stylised and the lighting on location really made a huge difference. Have a look at his blog on this assignment, there's a cool behind-the-scene video that I put together too.

Playing around with perfumes and creams

Expired Ektachrome just developed

Lorna, a good friend of mine recently gave me a couple of rolls of Ektachrome 64 that were expired in 2007... a perfect toy to go back to analog for a day or 2 ! 

I have to say I looked at the back of my camera right up to my 36th exposure :-D

I love the quality of slides though, very vibrant colours and a film you can look at as it. My dad mostly shot in slides and we have boxes and boxes of slides with their cardboard edges and plasticky ones for the later ones (just above and left are some from my childhood :-D ). I loved them, they look like miniature framed pictures ! 

I haven't printed any of the pictures yet, there are a good few that I will print, but these are pretty beautiful colour wise and contrast wise as they are. Can't wait to see how they look larger.

Portrait photographer, Dublin,   videography, event video, boudoir photography, portraiture, studio photographer,  romantic photoshoot, baby photoshoot, corporate headshots, creative photography,   Ireland, advanced photoshop retouching, baby pictures, irish portrait photographer, female photographer,family portraits, HD DSLR video

Playing with Photoshop in a sustainable way !

A few weeks ago I followed the Doug Landreth tutorial on photoshop that Creativelive broadcasted and it made me realise that I use photoshop the same way whether I do advanced editing or a quick retouch work. Gigantic creative potential aside, what I learn from Landreth was a way to work on my pictures that was completely flexible and re editable to infinity. No more saving as a different name or having to start from scratch again just for one additional adjustment : using masks to show and hide parts of a layer and playing with blending modes like so :

This is a fun collage I did for the Bear Bicycle's art competition  (If you see my pic on that page at some point, please put some nice comment on it...I really need a new bike...well, not really but I mean...I'd love to !!)
The technique of applying a mask onto a layer was particularly handy when I started to move the position of the bike and the pin up around, all I needed was to brush the masks white if I wanted more to be shown, and black if I wanted to hide some parts...which means anything could be undone ! Once you've created your layer, just drag it to the button next to fx at the bottom of the layer tab and it will create a mask. Then check all the time whether you're applying a change on the mask or on the actual layer and you'll be flying !
I found that multiply was the smoothest way to blend layers together.
Finally Landreth inspired me to play around with textures and frames, which I wasn't really doing before. It does help bringing the vintage look together.
Some words of warning though : 1.name your layers or you'll soon be lost and 2. this is seriously addictive !! be prepared to spend hours on photoshop to get things right. I tend to work for 1 or 2 hours and go back to it another day, just to keep a fresh eye to what I'm doing.
Wish me good luck on that bike competition !!!

Silly fake ad project

What do you do when it's friday morning and there's not much going on, you're in a studio with plenty of toys and props to play with ? Yeap, me too, I totally would !
So I used some beans that gracefully preserved from the previous shoot we did for Dr Oetker (some great healthy tasty recipes to accompany their Ristorante pizzas coming soon) and pretended the beans have had a party and like any party, there are some that are slower to move out or to go to the next place, so some are still there and the Heinz bottle just arrives too late...typical...

Anyway after doing that, I thought of a few other silly ads so I ll be doing some in the next coming days using the same ideas that we see in ads ...like humanising food or pretending some liquids are alive... you know...
Here's what I have to show so far !!

Hamlet by Plastic Theatre

I'm always up for a challenge and a bit of stress sweat, so when I heard my friend and actor Sharon Sutton was playing in Hamlet, I asked if I could come and video the play, only half aware of what was going to happen that night ! 

They were playing at Pearse Centre on Pearse St, near the Trinity Hotel. It's running until the 9th actually, from 7.30pm.

It was all at 200%, all the excitement and energy from the cast like palpable euphoric bubbles in the air, simply a magic moment !

Shooting a long, rather continuous and moving scene(s) with the 5DmkII is a tough one, and I think I handled the challenge well but there were so many factors to think about, it certainly takes a good bit of experience until I absolutely nail it. 

I still had vivid memories of a crazy 2 hour long talk where the speaker (an IT super duper expert in his field AND the most focused and continuous talker I've seen in a long time !) which made me hang on to every words  and intonations, waiting for the right time to cut the video before it would be too late (from my experience, the max clip length on the 5D is anywhere between 12 and 13minutes...). Since then, I bought a 32GB card it ahah in your face long scenes! well, that resolves the problem of having to change cards when really you dont want to but not the length of clips.

I had my usual camera...I could have taken a second 5D mkII but realised it wouldn't be manageable with the amount of memory it consumes. So instead I had a Q3 HD next to it and a H1 on the edge of the stage to get a nearer sound as I was set up at the back of the room. I have to say running through the different light set up with the light designer was so helpful especially when I didn't see most of the material before so there was already a lot of factors to adjust from on the spot, it was good to know what kind of range of exposures I'd have to go through and what were the best combinations. 

Now I have 3 hours of footage from 2 cameras and one recorder to go through :-D I ll let you know how I get on !

Portrait photographer, Dublin,   videography, event video, boudoir photography, portraiture, studio photographer,   baby photoshoot, corporate headshots,    Ireland, advanced photoshop retouching, baby pictures,  female photographer, family portraits, HD DSLR video, play recording, creative photography, romantic photoshoot, irish portrait photographer,

Just drums and pictures :-)

Ah for once, let's shut up ...before I do so, just to say that I got this baby to make me forget I turned 30 (nah, that's not true, I'm only 10, ask my mum...)

I've never played drums because but this one is very intuitive so after getting a nice tuning a bit of practice, I was quick to get something decent, great for an impatient mind like me & great to keep the flow of creativity going :-D Better performances here....

Friday I'm in LOVE !

...again with the cheapest of my lenses, the most demanding one that keeps me making concessions again and again...but always delivers something surprising and never bores me ...my Nifty fiftinou :-D
These look like stills from a movie, or a storyboard :-D
Feel free to click on them to view them larger...

Sun, Rain & Snow in 6 days in the French Alps !

Oops, 'been a while since I last posted. I've had a few big changes in my life lately hence the absence of any activity on this blog for a couple of months...but during that length of time I got to use Lightroom, which for a long time I considered as a sort of very light version of photoshop and kind of unworthy of being invested in. 

It's actually saving so much time on my workflow, it's unreal ! I mean it wouldn't be relevant on all my shoots but for the ones that need little work on but rather a quick selection and - very importantly - a fast way to get the same action replicated on all the pictures without having to open them all...that's just a brilliant tool. The other 2 good things about Lightroom are that you can always go back to the original picture, even after quitting the program, saving you the hassle of having X copies of one picture, and you have some funky presets that I love to play with.

Here are collages of 3 of them...helps creating a mood and unity in your selection :

These are my 6 days in the French Alps, in a nutshell...3 gorgeous days, 2 miserably rainy days where we had to take a walk and visit the Grande Chartreuse monastery to avoid boredom in the chalet, and 1 snowy day!

I took a few videos too, managed to make a montage out of it. My brother, living in the region, flew (paragliding..) twice during that week. I wanted to mount my action camera on his ankle to get another angle of the flight but unfortunately it was out of battery, didn't have the spare one so I guess that's just going to be a static view from the ground :-(  I played with a few Magic Bullet filters on this one...hope you like it and hope you like the song too (that was a birthday present from my bro, fab cover, one of those that are "better than the real thing" :-) 

Music is EVERYTHING

As I was doing a quick video for reviewing website Yelp's fun event, I was looking for an appropriate music and came across these guys, Brassroots, who were playing in the venue where the other event was happening. I didn't get a reply from them in time so I ended up using another music. I just love  their main track Good Life, it could be  just fantastically appropriate for a lot of short videos.

The band sent me 3 copies of their LPs, which means I had a copy on every possible disc player and last sunday, while driving and looking at the gorgeous sunny landscape passing through me, I listened to their cover of Misrilou and thought the desperate madness and joyfulness of the song had something in common with the music from  Underground by Emir Kusturica... 

Well actually most Kusturica's movies have that mad feel in which music is SO appropriate and in tune with that madness (thinking about Arizona Dreaming for instance). 

Kusturica is a musician himself too and I've always been amazed at how the soundtrack choices fitted perfectly his movies...

Music IS a big element of a film or a video, it brings the visual to another levels if carefully chosen or can make pictures look duller than they are when the music is just wrong...



Portrait photographer, Dublin,   videography, event video, boudoir photography, studio photographer,  romantic photoshoot, baby photoshoot, corporate headshots, creative photography,    baby pictures, irish portrait photographer, female photographer,family portraits, HD DSLR video, commercial photography, advanced photoshop retouching, commercial videos, portraiture, Ireland,

Colour or Black and White ?

Black and white is really used for specific purposes, often to give the landscape or portrait a timeless feel, or to really stylise a picture that otherwise can lack dimension.

I don't use black and white frequently. I normally desaturate and add more contrast to my pictures or just leave the true colours in. 

But as I was working on a selection of shots that I took during a recording session, i realised that I do use black and white when colours and their variety are too distracting and take away the actual content of the picture. For instance I shot with no flash since I had a video light on my hotshoe and I just took a few snapshots every now and again, I didn't want to switch from the video light to the flash. So the colour balance is less than perfect and I tend to look at that flaw more than I look at the actual picture. Turned into black and white and your eyes aren't distracted by the colours, their richness and clashes. You can only see the shapes, the range between light and shadow, and in this picture, the face and the scene. 

Also when talking about a series of pictures, if the colour balance is very varied from shots to shots because they were taken at different times / conditions, then black and white would be a quick fix option too, though it is sometimes worth spending an extra time neutralising all the pictures.

 Here's another example of a picture that I'm not crazy about in colour, but when turned into black and white, the colour imbalance is removed and in a way it is about revealing the true nature of the picture, what it is about, just like when you shoot you remove so many elements of the reality in front of you to reveal just what matters to you at the moment.

Sometimes I am torn between the love for colours and the flawlessness that black and white bring to a picture. A while back I took a series of portraits of a Russian poet, Mary D. A brave woman who fought strong all her life and she asked me to take a flattering portrait for a funding application of some sorts . 

One of the pictures that she chose was this one because we both loved her eyes, very innocently blue and lighting her whole face, and the touch of red from her top. 

As you can see on the unworked picture on the top, there's also an awful lot of red cast and red on her cheeks that compete with the beauty of her eyes. 

I had worked on that (quite brutally I think now that I have a second look) but despite the fact that I love the colours on the picture, I still think a contrasty black and white does her more justice and the colour one because suddently we just see the intensity of the eyes first.