Gothic

  • memories

    Memories

    It seems a long time since I had such fun creating an image. I’ve had a quiet autumn in terms of new work. Perhaps in the aftermath of my PAGB submission in the late spring, I needed to take a break. The other totally absorbing event in the last couple of months was the arrival of our Bengal cross kitten, who has been both a delight and a photographic distraction. Meanwhile I have amassed hundreds of new RAW pictures that just need me to find time to select and edit them and, of course, a creative idea or two would be good! Someone said to me on Saturday that the…

  • monochrome2

    Building an Image – Monochrome conversion

    This is an image of Mike that I processed last month for Impact Group. The first shot is the un-manipulated RAW file from which I decided to make a monochrome image. I wanted to make a strong monochrome image from it. For the first stage, I tone-mapped in Lightroom using the Lightroom develop module, then vignette, and local adjustments with the adjustment brush. I then imported into Photoshop, applied a transform to reduce the convergence and then slightly enlarged his eyes using the Liquefy tool and lightened the eyes on a mask. I think it’s looking more “powerful” but the beard is brighter than the face, so further burning and…

  • Building an Image – “The Lair”

    My club lecture “Building an Image” deals with my method of working and how my images are created. This snippet shows the building of a recent image and I’ve picked out some key stages, though not all the layers are shown. The working title of this image is  “The Lair”. The starting point is a trompe-l’œil. Most of the building is real and three dimensional but the hole in the front is faked. The enticing message “this is a photo-opportunity” means you can’t really walk past it without being tempted to take a shot! The building was shot against a bright sky and didn’t have much light on it, so…

error: © Christine Widdall - Kirklees Cousins