Monks

The holiday I returned from a couple of weeks ago was wonderful for indulging one of my favourite photographic subjects- monks. I love photographing monks. The colours, the activities and the sense of calm makes them ideal subjects. Here's a small selection of photos I took of monks with every lens I took with me (50mm prime, 16-28 f/2.8 wide angle, 28-300mm telephoto).

Halloween 2012

I was invited to a Halloween party held by a colleague this year and this allows me to indulge my love of fancy dress that appears to have developed in adulthood.

I had an idea for a two-tone approach of a black and white based around a suit, white facepaint and contacts. This did mean that I had to remove all of my hair, however, since it didn't comply with the colour scheme.

Quite pleased with the end result since there were a lot of unknowns (never used contacts, glued on prosthetics or shaved my head before) but the whole outfit only cost me £7 since I just had to buy the glue and the contacts, the rest of the outfit being recycled from previous work events.

Zombie

One night last week I attended 2.8 Hours Later, a 'zombie chase game' through the streets of my home city. Essentially, you report to an abandoned mill (something we have in abundance) and are sent off in teams at 80 second intervals with a map and a grid reference to get to next. There will be a scenario with actors at the grid reference the outcome of which will include your next destination and there are zombies en route/at said destination. The zombies got me right before the end and thus I was made up as a zombie for the party at the end. The resultant drinking assisted me zombie impersonation for this portrait I took when I got home (taken on my wide-angle lens, no less) but assisted my photography skills less. Nonethless, it's a decent self portrait, augmented with a vignette in GIMP. The event repeated every night until Sunday but unfortunately I was atypically busy and so didn't get to lurk and take photos of others playing the game. Here's hoping they repeat it next year.

Sounds From The Other City

I was at a festival over the weekend- a local affair centred around the pubs at a major crossroads in my locality's sister city over the river. Challenging photographic conditions with the low light and the movement etc. It didn't help that I set my focus to use the wrong setting but the photo of this gentleman, a Mr. Cole Moldy, came out ok.

Just Jones on holiday

I wouldn't normally post twice in a day but I do have to share this wonderful portrait of my long-term friend and former flatmate Jones. This was taken on my Spanish holiday I'd mentioned in the last couple of posts which was Jones' stag do. You would think that this would perhaps explain the dress but for the fact that he packed it himself, unprompted. One does wonder if his bride-to-be understands quite what she's getting herself into. Regardless, it is one of my better portraits.

Au revoir Picnik

I'm meant to be revising for a series of Japanese exams and this, of course, means that I've been doing anything but revising for my Japanese exams. Procrastination breeds portraiture.

This picture was also a first experiment in Flickr's new inbuilt browser after Picnik integration was discontinued following it's purchase by Google (rival to the Yahoo-run Flickr). I have to say, I'm far from impressed. Picnik had a decent variety of features and filters but its replacement, Aviary, is not much more than Instagram in terms of variety. The most important omission (for me, anyway) is the ability to vary the strength of the effects- maybe I like one of their filters and it'd really bring out a photo if applied at 30% but ruins it at 100%. No dice; it's all or nothing.

This a dealbreaker for me and I don't think that I'm really left with an alternative other than looking into Photoshop which I'm reluctant to do. Picnik was a perfect tool for me as someone who took to post-processing somewhat reluctantly; it offered a decent variety of simple but potentially profound and scalable options with sensible options and parameters which supported versioning in the browser. Photoshop, by comparison, is an infinite, cumbersome tool and a technical can of worms I'd rather not open.

Cat

I'm looking after a friend's cat for a while. She proves to be an entertaining portrait subject.

Flickr has stated that it's going to be undergoing some pretty major changes, including discontinuing built-in editing via Picnik (which is now owned by Google, as opposed to Yahoo's Flickr). I've got pretty used to being able to make little tweaks post-upload (contrast with me borderline anti-post-processing entries earlier in this blog) so depending on what they replace it with may determine whether I stay with the service at all, or whether I just bite the bullet and take up something like Photoshop to handle post-processing. Picknik disappears around mid-April, we'll see what happens then.

Christmas party

My work Christmas party was on Friday and I think the unspoken understanding was that I would be taking photos. This is more than fine by me as it gives me a license to both take sneaky candid shots and also pester people to pose for me. Additionally, I've had a couple of drinks so don't mind pestering people and they've had a couple of drinks so they're more amenable to having their photos taken than usual. The party itself was very pleasant and was fancy dress so there were some good costumes on display. Admittedly the majority of photos were more of the Facebook 'Woooo, look at us having a crazy old time' style but I did get some nice portraits out of it, both candid and posed.

Sadly the batteries for my flash gave out part way through the night (lesson learned there) and the club we moved onto later wouldn't let me use my camera there but still, practice and some good photos. A net win.

Self portrait

I'd been taking more portraits of people at work and, being in a portraiting mood, took one of myself when I got home. It's probably one of the better of me and one of only two that features my Movember moustache. As I've mentioned before, I'm pleased with the portraits I've produced from a crispness and subject POV, I think next I need to work on varying composition and pose.

Movember

As you may or may not have been aware, last month was Movember and many of the men in my office grew moustaches for the occasion. Not only did we raise £1,400 for the charity but I got to photograph the results. I found this was a really difficuly shot to take; poorly lit corridor, large group and a single flash. Yeah, the composition could be better too; I should have told the guys to spread out a bit more since I was using my wide-angle lens (that shot's cropped quite a bit) but that would only have exascerbated the lighting issue really. Anyway, any suggestions as to how to best light a scene such as this with a single flash?

Comparison piece

The portraits I've been taking at work have also been a good platform to try a bit more post-processing. Portraits tend to call out for it a bit more than, say, architecture photography. I've tried not to be too heavy-handed with it, especially where the raw image (above left) is nice and sharp to begin with. Let me know what you think of the post-processed image (above right); is it an improvement or no?

Co-operative Models

My boss at work asked if I could take some portrait shots of our managers and new starters for an end-of-year newsletter. I was delighted; I've never had models I could boss about before and I got what are easily some of the best photos I've ever taken. Including the one of Leah, shown here. I actually forgot to deploy the diffuser for this shot but I love it the result. Beautifully sharp.