Epsom Downs

Yesterday, I decided to take my five year old son to Epsom Downs, a famous Race Course that hosts the annual Epsom Derby, a golf course and its relaxing, panoramic views of London.
I also felt like taking along my camera for a shoot. Enjoy the images :)

Time of Photography Reflection...

Its been a long time since my last post, 19 months to be exact. During that time, I have been learning film photography alongside my good friend, Aristotle Liu, an old work collegue and Flickr contact. More on my film photography work later on in another blog post.

During these months of learning about manual exposure, film photography has definitely slowed me down. I now take my time to compose, even when shooting digital. Its become second nature to me, as I have discovered, looking back the past four years of shooting digital, I would just shoot something pretty, and keep pressing that shutter button until i have taken over four hundred images. Within those images, after editing, I would end up with around ten usable images, with maybe two or three images which I would post on Flickr, heavily edited of course using actions and presets. Those were the old days of Flickr.

Now, I realised that film has also changed my perception of tones and colour. Some of the professional film stock I have been shooting like Fuji Pro 400H and Kodak Portra 160, 400 & 800 have the most natural, beautiful tones which I have learnt to appreciate over the past year and this reflects in my digital work too. I now try to shoot as neutral as I can. Gone are the days of vintage tones, strong contrasts and extreme sharpening.

The work I post from today onwards is a new path which I have taken over the past year. Slowing down, learning photography all over again, manual exposure, metering light, and enjoying my passion.

Pentax Spotmatic F | Fuji Acros 100

The Snowfall Collection 2012

Hello peeps! Its' Monday and the snow is still here! Hope you all had a lovely weekend. I certainly did with all the excitement with the heavy snow which fell overnight. Shame the sun didn't make an appearance, would have been great to see some golden sun rays with the images. Having said that... There were five elements to the image; snow, foliage/subject and the dripping water, DOF and Bokeh...


The hardest part was editing the images. Each image had its own characteristics, the histograms are unique and the tones are equally challenging. trying to create a different or similar mood to them all as a collection took a considerable amount of time. How long do you take to edit a whole collection? Tt took me almost 2.5hours to do edit all 10 images, crop and place my watermark. overall, I am happy with the results. I hope you enjoy this collection too! 


Happy viewing! (Click on each image to see the larger version)


Feel free to leave some love on the Blog 

London Perspective Collection 2011

Hey everyone! This post has been long overdue since I joined Aristotle Liu
and Sam for a London photo walk last year in August. Finding the time to edit, buying a house and looking after my 3yr old son full-time simultaneously was a difficult challenge! lol 


Anyway, we started our walk on the Millennium bridge, and briefly met up with fellow Flickr photographer, Kwabena Agyei. We then moved on to Tower Bridge, Covent garden, and on to Leicester Square for some pie and mash for lunch! Yummy! :)

All in all, I got some pretty cool shots on the buildings, somewhat limited to the lens I was using. I could have done with a 70-200mm lens for far away shots to accompany the 12-24mm wide angle! Never mind, this year I really want to do a London Tube series, concentrating on the London underground's tunnels and escalators. Until next time...


Enjoy! 


PS. Next weeks Blog past will be featuring Jack Frost;s creations in my garden! Stay tuned!

Breaking Through

Well folks, its been a long while since I last posted on my Blog. What have I been up to? Well generally moving house, the past 6 months have been stressful to say the least - and having no dedicated time to go out, explore and capture photos is just a little depressing..however, I did try my hand at capturing interiors, real estate style..probably not for me, but it was an experience I certainly do not want to repeat for a very long time! :)


Anyway, enough of my blagging..here is an inspired shot looking upwards at the sky, taken in Perigeux, SW France, during my Christmas vacation with family. 


Enjoy!

La Cotinière

Some more shots from my vacation at the Island of Oleron, France. This wonderful little town is called, La Cotinière. Beautiful, small marine, full of little boats and a charming little lighthouse on the rocks. This place is great for a bite to eat out, lots of shops for souvenirs and the nightlife is not bad either if you have kids. My little one was here on the rides around 11.30pm at night! Shame I couldn't stay around for the sunset - the sky was turning an orangy-pink as I was leaving...

Isle of Dogs

Whilst on the Island of Oleron in France, I had some free time to capture some portraits of my relative's dogs. Not much posing required here - they were pretty much calm most of the day, so I had the opportunity to get up quite close. Again, using the sigma macro lens - the main focus point was on their noses! lol

I love the smooth focus of the sigma - and I am starting to get used to manual white balance and exposure now. With these manual settings, the images came out more natural, the tones were rich and I spent less time using Florabella Photoshop actions!

Thanks for stopping by!
Fabiela

French Lavender or Taranchula Legs?

Hey everyone! Hope you are all well and doing fine? 


Well this is my first post in a long time since April this year. Summer is almost over and Autumn will be here once again! So, last week, we flew off to France for a short vacation away from English soil and the thing I was looking forward to was trying out my new macro lens, Sigma 70mm f/2.8. 


On a full-frame Nikon, its a great lens - super sharp for portraits and superb for macro images. I just wish I had a ring-flash and tripod with me at the time of shooting these wonderful, French Lavender flowers in my Mother-In-Law's garden. 


The macro shots came out better than I expected, resembling 'taranchula' legs on the top of the flowers.
Fantastic details and even the SOOC was great quality.


More shots from France coming up soon....

I Like To Ride My Bicycle

This is a practice portrait session I did in the park yesterday using the normal 50mm 1.8 lens. Nothing special but it was challenging trying to get the attention and smile out of him. Never knew portraits were soooo hard to shoot!  More practice I suppose! 

Constructive feedback would be great. Thanks!