I’ve been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to move my Photoshop skills forward. Part of that is picking up some additional reading material in the form of Photoshop magazines.  A couple of months ago, one of them had a fairly detailed tutorial on how to modify a portrait to make it look like a Japanese animation character.

Being a fan and really liking the look of the end result in the article, I thought I’d give it a try.  My initial intention was to get a shot of Jo in a standard, well lit portrait position and try to work on that, but I completely forgot during our shoot. Fortunately for me, I have a lovely, understanding and best of all: photogenic wife who was willing to step in.

I spent about 20 minutes getting the lighting set up and just right for the look I wanted. It was fairly standard lighting, but made tricky by the fact that I wanted a large light slightly overhead for the catch lights in the eyes and I don’t have much room in our low ceiling flat. We managed just by getting Danni to sit fairly low.

My intention was to show the before & after image as it’s quite a transformation, but the before image was kiboshed by my (at the time) non-make-up wearing wife.  Anyway, that’s a fairly long preamble for a single image so here it is.

It’s very possibly the longest amount of time I’ve spent processing a single image, but I’m quite happy with the result. There are still a couple of minor things I want to fix before I post it to my 500px account (namely some patchy skin), and I’ll re-upload the fix here when I’m finished but I was getting too impatient to post the image to wait any longer.

The idea was to do an additional image of myself, but after the amount of time it took to complete this one that may not happen.  We’ll see.

Thanks again to my lovely wife for modeling, as well as providing feedback on the image as I was working on it. I don’t usually like having a back seat Photoshopper, but in this case her opinions proved invaluable and contributed greatly to the final image. Xie Xie Lao Po!

Update – I’ve finished the changes and uploaded the final copy to my 500px portfolio.

After a lot of planning and a few models falling through, Rob and I finally managed to arrange a springtime photo shoot.  We had a loose idea of a few images we wanted to do and after a quick scout of the area (near Ashdown Forest) we met up with our model for the day, Jo.

Our first stop was Chidingstone Castle, which had some lovely grounds and lots of early blooming flowers. It was rather open to the elements and the day was cold and windy, so we fired off a few ‘standard’ shots here and moved on to the next location in fairly short order.

I’d had a couple of ideas for images I wanted to do on this shoot which is a bit unusual for me.  Generally speaking, when we go out shooting photos with models I just kind of wing it as each location is different as are the models.  Since we’ve been talking about this outing for a while, I had some time to envision a few images that were slightly more staged.  I even drew up some prototype sketches (which are embarrassing and won’t be shown here) of what I wanted to try.

This first is this image.  It’s fairly close to what I’d had in mind, with a couple of exceptions.  I’d hoped to have the ‘axe man’ smaller in the image so he appeared to be further away.  Unfortunately, even really stopped down he was blown away by normally welcome bokeh to the point where he just appeared to be a dark blob.  Also, my radio triggers were having issues with the distance for some reason even though we were well within their stated ranges.  The other issue I had was I was hoping for a brighter backlight, but this was down to just having a single flashgun firing off in the middle of the day.  I just didn’t think that one through enough.

This second planned image turned out ok, but looked quite different in my head. The clouds are a bit too dense to look realistic and I’m not 100% happy with how the light turned out.  It’s alright though as the whole thing was sort of a learning experience and anything that pushes my photoshop mojo (or lack thereof) is a good thing.

These four shots are all of the images from the day, so no need for the usual gallery link.  We’re hoping to get out again before the end of the month to get some images in the bluebell fields.  I’ve been saying every year for the past five years that I’ll get out and shoot some bluebells, so fingers crossed for this year!

After almost 4 full years, I finally made it back to the BVI for a couple of weeks.  To be completely fair, it was a work trip so I saw very little of the island during the daylight hours, but it really hasn’t changed much.  All the same bars and restaurants, some under new names & management, but things don’t move along all that quickly on Tortola.  Lots of strange faces though, which is sad but expected given the transient nature of the island.

On my one day off (where I wasn’t gorging myself at the Tamarind club) I spent my time circumnavigating the island and taking photos of all my favourite spots.  My first stop was Josiah’s Bay beach, where I spent the majority of my beach time in the first few years on the island.  Like everything else, the changes were minor apart from a bit of welcomed polishing. The new beach huts were solid and vertical, two things that couldn’t always be said about the coverages of the past.

I drove up the ridge road though the east end of the island and around behind the local prison to capture some great views of Guana Island.  The stretch of dirt road along the north eastern most point of Tortola has long bit a favourite area for me, with great views, very few people and often lots of roaming goats to keep you company.

From there I continued around the eastern tip and made my way back towards Road Town, following the ridge road again for it’s stunning northerly views.  I made a stop at a very popular pull over point high above Brewers Bay for some iconic imagery.

I skipped through Apple & Carrot bay in order to make my way down to another favourite spot in Smugglers. It used to be an out of the way, hidden beach complete with an honour bar that was almost always empty apart from a few other locals willing to drive the rough roads to get to a secluded beach. Now the roads have been cleared, signed have been posted and the once exclusive beach was overrun with people.  I even spotted a pair of local life guards, something I never experienced on even the busiest of beaches during my six year stay here.

There are still a few hidden beaches however, but with the increase in housing development that I saw they won’t stay that way for long. I dread that my next return to the BVI will find the road down to Little Elizabeth Bay paved and the small parking space full of those terrible tourist trucks.  It’s only a matter of time I’m sure.

I realize I sound like an old man complaining about how things used to be. Maybe that’s just who I am now? I hope not, I’ve still got a long way to go before I can collect my pension and shout at kids to get off my lawn!

More tropical island type images can be found in the gallery, if that’s your kind of thing.

After an afternoon at HyperJapan and not taking many photos, I was itching to use all this camera equipment I’d unpacked.  Fortunately, Danni was all done up in a cute outfit and willing to be my lovely model.

It was the nicest day so far this year so we opened up the patio to take advantage of the cherry blossoms erupting from the trees in the park.  Our patio worked out to be the perfect height to give us some lovely (if not a little busy) backdrops.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been hoping to do more of this year, but haven’t really gotten around to doing.  We’ve been busy with house hunting and that, coupled with a pair of photo shoots I’ve had fall through I haven’t done nearly as much portrait photography as I’d like.

Thanks to my lovely wife for being such a good sport, and to Pepsi for always getting involved whenever the lights and cameras come out!  There’s a couple more images in the gallery.

Having had a lot of fun at last years HyperJapan, I was keen to go again this year at their larger venue.  My only complaint about the show last year was there were just waaaay too many people, both in the queue and inside the smaller Olympia venue.  This year they traded up to Earls Court so there was more room to move about (unless you were hungry at lunch time) and everything was on a single floor which made things flow a bit better.

As last year, there were loads of little stalls and shops plus a sake tasting area (all you can drink for £20 I believe…dangerous at any rate so we avoided it) and a sushi competition.  You can’t really make it out in the shot of Mt. Sushi above, but there was a pool of water with some smokey dry ice at it’s base.  Far too glamorous to actually eat in any event!

We wandered around for about an hour looking at all of the weird and wonderful things, and even contemplated having lunch but the queues and cramped quarters of the food hall turned us off a bit.  It’s really too bad as there were some mouth watering smells and the dishes we did see looked delicious.

After we were more or less finished browsing we stopped to watch the Frills & Frolics kawaii fashion show.  It consisted of about a dozen or so guys and girls dressed up in various types of kawaii fashion followed by some interviews at the end.  We didn’t stick around for the interviews as we’d already been standing in one place for about 45 minutes (the seating for the stage area was limited).

I’m still planing on doing a kawaii photo shoot at some point in the near future, though I’m struggling to find a willing model.  Most of the girls who own this sort of fashion aren’t actually models, so it makes sense.  We’ll get there in the end though.

We had a good time again this year, though I didn’t spend nearly as much time there as I did last year.  I think that’s in part due to the fact that my nerdy cohort Robert is no longer in the country so there was no need to spend hours drooling over books, movies and toys.  I have the same complaint this year as I did last year in that it just seemed so packed.  I suspect they’re just victims of their own success as there aren’t many larger venues to be had in London.  At least there were no queues when we arrived around lunch time this year.

It’s doubtful that I’ll attend next year, but that’s more due to the fact that I very likely won’t be living in central London by the time it rolls around again.  We’ll see though!

There are a couple more images in the gallery, but not many.