Wedding by TJ

Firstly congratulations to The Brunette on her recent marriage to Ryszard at Denbies Vineyard in Surrey. I was so happy when I was asked to take some informal pictures of the day, although there was still a little bit of pressure as I wanted to do a good job for the happy couple. Yet the photo I have chosen is probably one of only two taken during the day when I actually got the couple to pose for me, as most of the other photos of the day were ones I took when people were unaware of the camera. I had decided that for this topic I wanted a picture of the couple together and this one was taken after the afternoon festivities came to an end. There was some lovely sunlight shining on them and the amazing background of the vineyard gave me a great photographic opportunity. The image was sharpened, converted into black and white in Paint Shop, and then I used Picasa to add some warmth and boost effects to the photo before using the cinematic effect to give the image a more dynamic and classical letter box finish. In my humble opinion I think I captured the magical chemistry and unconditional love that my two friends share.

In my other photos I captured the couple having their first dance and was so very close to using this one as main photo as it also shows two people happy in love on their wedding day. The photo top right captures a radiant bride looking beyond the camera at something that has certainly brought a smile to her face, a smile which was a common theme throughout the day.Bottom left is the original photo that I edited for the main shot, and bottom right was another lovely photo capturing another happy moment shared by the couple.

Honeymoon by The Brunette

I am guessing that I know which one of us will be posting a wedding shot and which a honeymoon shot *wink* I of course was the subject for a day of photos on my wedding day! Let me tell you I much prefer being the other side of the camera!! For our honeymoon we went to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains and then Krakow, both in Poland of course (because my husband is half Polish!) And although I fell in love with both places, and have some fantastic mountain landscapes, for me Krakow was just so romantic, I just knew the shot for this post would come from there. We were lucky enough to have a hotel room overlooking the main square and it had a balcony, so every time of the day or night I looked out, because of the changing light and weather  I got some amazingly different views of the same place. The shot I choose is actually from my first group of shots I took as soon as we arrived which was at dusk, the light is amazing, the soft pink glow from the setting sun lighting up the buildings with a rosy glow. I thought it was just so appropriate for a honeymoon vista! The filmstrip shows two others I loved, the left hand side a candlelight procession to St Mary's church at about 10pm, there was beautiful singing by a choir for about an hour - very evocative. The second one early morning with the square full of mist, again very moody and romantic. It's a fantastic place to visit! I can't wait to go again -  for much longer than two days as well!!

29) Weddings & Honeymoons

As you may know if you follow either of our other blogs, I (The Brunette) just got married two weeks ago!! You can guess who my photographer was :) So we thought to maximise a period of time where we would both be taking lots of photos we would make "Weddings & Honeymoons" our next topic! Pretty self explanatory subject wise, but I will comment on the fact that I really like the trend in recent years re Wedding photography in becoming alot more documentary style and less stiff formal posed groups. It's now much more about capturing moments and expression of emotion, which I think make for photographs which evoke real memories for everyone that was there as opposed to just a "recording" of the day.

Night by The Brunette

I was in several minds as to what to shoot for Night and had a few ideas, none of which manifested! I blame it on having the busiest two weeks ever leading up to my wedding, so when I looked out the window one evening and saw the most beautiful autumn moon, I decided to strike while the iron was hot! I set up my tripod and tried ALL kinds of different exposures. It's not easy to get it spot on without over exposing, to retain detail and not get too noisy, and to make it interesting. I was lucky as it was a cloudy night, and that combined with the fact that the moon is not yet full gave a mysterious ghostly feel to the shot. I tweaked colour saturation in editing, but that's all, the rest was all there, nothing added, i'm pretty pleased with it! And know it's something I will want to try shooting again and again!

Night by TJ

I found Night a fascinating topic as I really had to get to know my camera and is functionality to get the best shot possible. I remember trying to photograph the moon almost a year ago just after I had got the camera, and how poor my first attempt was. I made elementary mistakes such as holding the camera by hand and using the intelligent auto feature, so this time I planned the effort in much more detail. Using my trusty tripod meant that there would be no camera shake giving me a much better chance to get a shot in focus. Although my Lumix FZ45 doesn't have a automatic shutter cable option, I was able to use the timer to make sure the camera was perfectly still when the shot was taken. I attached my tele-conversion lens, which allowed me to get a good close up shot. I read up and then  experimented with shutter settings so as not to over or under expose the picture, and took the photo with an exposure setting of 1/60 second and an ISO setting of 100. The picture was taken 24 hours before the actual full moon. In editing I used a slight blue tint on the photo which added that final missing piece to the picture.

I had so many ideas for this topic and even bought a high powered hand torch to try out the idea in the top photo of photographing the woods at night. To do this I used a 15 second exposure setting giving me time to wave the torch around filling the foreground with light. The second photo was my attempt to capture car trail lights, which I achieved by setting the exposure time to 6 seconds.