The Space between

In photography standing out from the millions of photographers is near impossible nowadays. Everyone and their mum is a photographer.  You have to do something different. 

I then searched the web and was seeing great photos but mainly nighttime landscapes. Though they were taken up very tall buildings and well that's not for me. The photos produced look amazing but the portraits were all the same. I get it if you're selling an object and you have a model you don't want some crazy colours distracting from the product. 

I thought I'd try some effects on my portraits and see what happens. The response has been good, I've gotten about 100 new Instagram followers, which I know isn't a lot nowadays but it’s a start. 

I think the new style stands out more and is something that I'll keep doing for now.

Why use Photoshop?

Adobe Photoshop is the tool in your camera bag you don’t bring with you.

Before taking any photographs go into your camera settings and make sure you’re shooting in RAW. RAW is a file format that captures all the image data recorded by the sensor, not like Jpeg, which is compressed. Raw gives you the best quality and with the Adobe cc, you can take a photo you thought wasn’t exposed correctly and bring back what you thought was lost.

RAW setting on a canon camera

Be organised with your photographs. Keeping your photos organised is very important, each digital photograph there will an imprint of metadata, this is the RAW information about the photograph. Depending on your camera you will have, shutter speed, aperture ISO, lens and focal length and sometimes location the image was taken. In Lightroom, you can create collections. Collections pretty much are an album, label the collection and drag and drop the photos you wish to be apart of that collection keeping your photo organised.

Before Lightroom

After Lightroom

Before Lightroom and Photoshop

After Lightroom and Photoshop

Straight from Camera

After edit

Be Creative

You can be very creative with photography, either in-camera or in post. Long exposures, double exposures, light painting. They are the kind of things you can do in-camera. in post you can do all that in theory and then some. 

This is both light painting and long exposure. Very simple really, just make sure your camera is on a tripod the room is dark. With a touch while the shutter is open light paint. Going over areas you want to stand out more. 

Shot with flash and low ambient light to bring out the subject. I then moved the image into Photoshop and edited in the sparkle effect. You can do sparkles in the camera but that would mean doing a long exposure and overexposing the subject, not the look I was going for. 

In photoshop you can create actions and even purchased action from the website. This image was created by using an image from Unslash.com and the Energy action by Seven Style. You can see and buy more actions by Seven styles by clicking here. With all actions, you can tweak them to your own style, add things and so on. 

Photoshop has changed photography for the better. Be it removing spots to doing extreme things like above. The best photographers now days must be good at photoshop. 

What camera should I buy

When you first start in photography it can be a little tricky to know what to buy. Well here are my tips that hopefully make it less stressful for you. Firstly the make does not matter, get that out of your head. If you like Canon you're going to get a Canon if you like Sony you're going to get a Sony. What matters is, does it have a manual mode. Thats it. If it has manual mode great. Firstly if you don't know about photography and modes best thing to do is, put your camera in Shutter priority mode or Program mode and see what the camera's light meter is telling you. Normally the flashing lines will give you the information, then switch it back to manual mode and mess around with the settings. Thats the beauty of digital photography you can change all the setting and keep snapping until you're happy. Photography is a form of art so a really under exposed photo could look great compared to the "correct" exposure. 

 There are lots of things in photography you might need to know at some point but at the start as long as you get a correctly exposed image thats all that matter. It sound be fun not stressful. 

The thing I'd buy if I was starting fresh with photography 

1. Camera with a standard zoom lens say 24-105mm or 70-300mm 
2. Tripod
3. Spare battery 
4. Memory card
5. Bag

That's about it really, you can pick up good starter kits from most camera manufactures, they will give you camera and a lens and I'm sure whatever shop you buy them from they will do you a good deal on spare battery and memory. 

Try SRS Microsystems in Watford,UK. Not only will they help you  on what camera to buy but they will help you set up your camera so you'll have no problems starting out. 

 

Watch photography

Now-a-days if you want to tell the time you'd look at your phone. The smart phone has changed everything from taking photos, filming videos, browsing the internet and telling the time and so on. Well, people still wear watches, and people still pay crazy sums of money for them. As a person who doesn't wear a watch but is still fascinated by the repair process, Jewellery and Watch photography are on the same line. They are both small products that need good eye catching images to sell. The more detail in a photo of a watch can definitely increase the potential of selling the item. 

The best way to shoot a watch is on a photography table, having a main light and then a few other lights to pull out the detail. Always find out what background the client wants first. In each shot you need to highlight the brand, making sure it is visible and if you need an extra bit of light and don't have any more lights, then you can use a reflector and if you don't have reflectors a white card will work nearly just as well. All product photographers have white card. It's something you'll use for the first time and think why wasn't I using this all the time. Like all products you photograph you should always focus stack the images. You can use Helicon focus or photoshop. I recommend Helicon Focus. 

I took some shots of a watch repairer, or horologist, to use the proper term.