Photography

My sister-in-law’s daughter Clarissa celebrated her First Holy Communion recently and I had the pleasure of shooting at the reception party. They also wanted a studio type full length portrait of Clarissa to use in the background at the party.

Not always easy finding models when I have the time to practice in my tiny home studio. After a lot of coaxing and nudging I sometimes manage to persuade my beautiful wife into throwing some poses together while I bore her with flashes of light and funny direction.

Here are a couple of shots I liked out of the bunch we did before heading out for a valentines day dinner.

Playing around with a couple of perfume bottles working on product photography. Both setups are very simple and easily achieved with limited equipment.

In both shots I’ve used a wooden cutting board that was lying around. For this first shot, the CK Free bottle is placed on the cutting board and flash is at about 1/32nd power into 60cm softbox placed directly behind the bottle. The white blown out background you see is the face of the softbox. For a simple product shot like this with barely any opacity there was no need to fill light.

The Royal Opera House Muscat is an architectural marvel. It is one of the most beautiful buildings to look at here in Oman and there are quite a few of those. I have yet to be able to shoot inside the building which is not openly allowed. A few weeks ago I decided I had to shoot the Opera House from the main entrance and I’ve re-worked that photograph, stripping off its colour and adjusted it for perspective.

For more information about the Royal Opera House muscat, visit their website: www.rohmuscat.org.om

Tried to do an early morning shoot at a new found location the last time I visited the Muscat corniche. Unofrtunately by the time I pulled myself out of bed I was a bit too late and just a couple of long exposure shots in the sun was over the mountain across from where I was and it was harsh light time. Just managed a couple of long exposure shots this time but had long exposure noise reduction on, so while that meant double time on each shot, it also gave me some awesome shots free of any hot pixels. The difference between my previous shots without this feature activated was night and day!

I wanted to do these in black and white but whole playing around with curves I like this mono colour hue which allowed to keep some highlights up without looking too low on contrast. I’m also continuing with work on more minimalist type photographs.

Here are my two shots from today: