Richard & Caroline's Blog

Our friend and fellow photography Paul has just finished a major overhaul of his Website. Check it out at www.lauter.co.uk.

A pleasant morning was spent at Hartsholme Park yesterday before I headed to the gym. There was three of us shooting, Chris Bennett, my lovely wife and myself.

It was fairly quiet, as usual a few Heron’s but not as many as usual, Greylag and Canadian Geese, but still not as many as usually flew in to visit the lake.

We walked around the main lake heading for a Coots nest when we spotted a rather tame Robin.

He seemed quite content while three photographers pointed their long lens at him and snapped away!

To get to the Coots nest you have to cross over the lake via a bridge at the southern end. As we approached Caroline spotted a couple of adult Coots diving for food, and feeding it to their young who where swimming nearby. Then a couple of Great Crested Grebes also appeared, one diving for food while the other stayed on the surface. The one that never dived looked a little odd, and it took a while before we realised that one had young tucked away on its back.

The Coots were mainly feeding under the bridge, but the Grebe’s were wandering all over the lake.

Once they had disappeared from view we crossed over to the West Bank of the Lake and headed to the Coots nest that we had been watching for a number of weeks now.

We had seen it being built and now the young were getting bolder and briefly leaving the nest.

A fun morning, certainly not as many birds as usual but it was great to see how the Coots were getting on, and good fun spending the morning photographing with Chris and Caroline.

Editing and post production has always been part of photography. The early glamourous, portraits of 30’s, 40’s and 50’s movie stars were just as highly edited as today.

Today in the modern digital age, we use tools like Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, back then they used to employ specialist retouchers, these skilled artists would draw on the actual negatives, often large format negatives 5 x 4 inches. Skilled use of a scalpel would remove any spots and blemishes. Once printed, then careful use of a paint brush and paint would finish up the touching up before the final prints went out.

I use Adobe Lightroom for all my images to process and manage my images, and I occasionally take some of them into Photoshop.

 

Charlotte is a wonderful model who needs very little post production, but a little skin softening in Photoshop plus a vignette and tint in Lightroom finishes the image off nicely.

I’ll have to write some posts about workflow and editing.  Its not as hard as you think but does require the right tools and some patience.

Officially I am all booked up for June now, but I hate to let charities down and always do my best to squeeze them in. I offer either a free shoot or one at cost depending what is involved.

So now I have an extra weekend studio shoot squeezed in.  Some simple studio Portraits, but should be fun.

While I have the studio I might try and fit in a tfcd shoot, so if your a local model and want some simple portraits, drop me a line a line at the usual email address (see RBPhotographic).