Richard & Caroline's Blog

Photography, means painting with light.

Light is key, it will make or break your photograph.  Warm soft light illuminating a landscape at dawn or dusk.  Harsh direct light acting as a spotlight at noon.

Choosing the right time of day, the right conditions is 90% of the battle.

In the studio with modern flash equipment and modern light modifiers one can create what ever lighting effects you can imagine.

My studio work is a mix or portrait, glamour and art-nude.  For these styles of shoot, I often want soft gentle light.

I have used a variety of brollies and softboxes over the years and have always been impressed with the Elinchrom Rotalux range.

It is because of this I have purchased a medium sized Rotalux for use out on location.

With the front diffuser left off, it can be used as a brolly, giving a slightly softened effect but with a bright edge suitable for fashion and glamour.  With the front diffuser fitted it is simular to most other diffusers on the market, soft light but with a slightly hotter centre.  This particular model also has an extra inner diffuser that can be fitted to stop the hotter centre and provide an even soft light over the entire surface.

A fairly quiet week photographically but I managed to get all my studio shoots for June all booked up. If your after a portrait session for July feel free to drop me an email

Today I spent the morning with Chris Bennett photographing the local birds round the lake at a local park.

As usual when you plan these things, the light conspired against us but we got a few nice shots.

What was nice to see is that the Coots that were building a nest on the far side of the lake now had young.

HDR.  Usually used when the dynamic range of the view extends beyond the range that your sensor or film can capture.

Its also of use when you want to give a real boost to an image.  If you look at the image above, it has a lot of potential but the light is not right.  This is where HDR can be used to really give your picture a boost.

That boost that can give an unearthly feel to an image, or a cartoony feel to an image, depending on how you process the files.

When I saw this view I knew that the unearthly feel that HDR can give would give a fantastic looking image.

For my HDR work I use a product called Photomatix2. I make basic adjustments in Lightroom first then, export the files into Photomatix to combine them and produce the HDR file. It is then imported back into Lightroom.

Photomatix has a number of presets such as Normal, Smooth Skies, Painterly and Gunge. For this I picked Grunge, the most over the top option.

The downside of this option is that while it is capable of fantastic and dramatic images, it really makes the greens go completely outrageous.

After giving the image a few tweaks to make the best out of it I then saved it and took it back into Lightroom to fix the Greens and apply a couple of grad filters to darken the sky and the bottom of the picture. All in all just a few minutes work to produce and image that reflects more closely the emotion of what my eyes saw and not what the original capture produced.

Sometimes arranging a photographic shoot seems like one big complicated jigsaw.

My availability, the Studios availability, and the models availability; getting it all sorted can sometimes take days.  Lets not forget, prop’s that have to be sourced, and sometimes a hairdresser and makeup artist.

One my photographic shoots that I am arranging currently feels just like that complicated Jigsaw.

Luckily I am dealing with a very professional model who understands these things.

Sometimes I think I should just take a pretty girl into a meadow and just shoot with natural light, but then you get weather issues.

99% of photography is nothing to do with taking the actual pictures!