articles/Nature/getfreshwithyour-page1

Personal Work - Get Fresh With Your Camera! - part 1 of 1

Published 01/04/2010

Richard came to our attention when he took the Landscape award for last year and we approached him at Focus, with a request to provide a portfolio for our occasional, Personal Work series. He flies (big) planes for a living and tries to use the regular stop-over times in pursuit of his passion for landscape photography. Talking to him, he is obviously frustrated by the flat lands of his home range in Cambridgeshire but his work carries a certain signature style through the skilful use of Lightroom, Photoshop CS4, Nik Color Efex Pro, Photomatix Pro and Topaz Adjust. His award winner, shown on the front cover of this issue, is actually a combination of two exposures taken hand-held.

One exposure for the sky left the foreground too dark, while the second exposure, for the waterfall, burnt the sky out. The two exposures were blended together using Photomatix Pro which is able to align images by recognising features. After basic adjustments including some dodging and burning, the resulting image was then brown-to ed in CS4 using a sepia copy layer, blended with screen and overlay layers. A Gaussian blur has also been applied to add a sense of mystery to the scene. It certainly caught the judges' eyes and the rest is history!

We have chosen images from the portfolio Richard provided to, hopefully, blend nicely on the page. Many of the pictures are taken on visits to other parts of the country and he turns to the internet for research, using Google Earth and looks for likely locations. Mountains, boats, castles and ruins all feature highly in what he looks for and while he would like to say that his pictures are the result of trekking for miles over wild terrain, Richard admits the truth is that his car is never far away. He carries a Nikon D300 with both 12-24mm and 17-55mm Nikkors.

• Personal Work - Get Fresh With Your Camera! page 1
  

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