Light and Sense

Light is a mysterious and wonderful ally, and sometimes foe.  Ultimately, photography was born of experimenting with light and what can be done to it and how to capture it to specific effect.  Especially in digital photography, light does all kinds of strange and inaccurate things.

Light does some strange and inaccurate things to our memories too.  How the scene was lit, or how intense the light was is the hardest aspect of a moment to remember.  As photographers we can use that incongruence as a tool.  

Sense is my term for the feeling of being "in the photography" or being present in the scene but not the frame.  Getting the lighting to be the great descriptor is usually the key to giving the viewer that Sense. For instance in the first image below, the lens flare and blinded upper right corner of the image is an artifact of the picture being taken that describes the scene, perhaps as much as the content.

Photoshop is becoming a more and more powerful arena to manipulate how light is displayed and in many cases the scene in the final product is much more stunning than the scene was in reality.

Drawing out the Light and Sense of a photograph is what makes the final sale of a photograph to the client.  Using the entire skill set of a photographer is what produces the most images that have the Sense of being there, even though the original scene might not have been quite so impressive.

Dynamic / Movement

Taking a photograph freezes a moment in time, and with that in the back of people's minds they tend to freeze for the shot.  That is great for reducing blur and letting that practiced pose out for all to see; however, people are more natural when they aren't posing, and often the better photograph is one that captures them in their natural state rather than posed.

This presents a challenge for photographers; our goal is to capture a reality that is both natural but also posed in the frame.  Choosing the right moment to snap the picture is crucial, as well as the ability to creatively deceive the subjects.

But the most enticing aspect of dynamic photographs is to bring a frozen moment in time to life, activating the viewer's imagination to relive the moment in the photograph.  Images of a great laugh, dance, run or jump can entertain the viewer while making the subjects look alive and engaged.

Additionally images can show evidence of movement, either a record of such, or movement that is implied.  Sometimes processing can highlight and exacerbate a sense of movement, such as in the first image below of sand showing where the tide left a record of the pattern as it flowed back into the sea.

Dynamic photography might be the toughest kind to master.  Where composition is lesson one, great dynamic photography is the product of a level of mastery that not every photo-bug can accomplish.

Composition

From the taking of the raw photo to the sale of the finished product, composition must be carefully captured and maintained throughout the editing process.  Basics of composition are taught first thing in any art class, and at this point I consider composition to be second nature.
Early on in working with black and white photography, composition drove most of my best photographs, especially since there were no color considerations to think about.  I favored, and still do, a geometric flair in my composition style.  I use the dramatic features of the view to anchor a geometric spread.

Most of these examples are strictly composition driven photographs.  While I don't quest for composition paramount shots as consistently anymore, I do take it into account for every shot, and I love that often the least interesting content is wildly entertaining in a skillfully composed photograph.

Color Management

Some of these examples include Vanity Retouching, Shadow/Highlight edits, and more; however fixing color issues resolved more issues than anything else.  This is one of the first steps in preparing an image for more drastic effects yet to be added.

In my experience, color management often makes the salable difference between an unexciting shot and a beautiful and realistic capture.

The yellow in this shot washed out the reds, blues, and browns.  Take note of the clothes and carpet to see how dramatic this seemingly subtle difference makes

Red affected everything in this image.  Correcting for it helped the clothes, skin, and background seem realistic and striking

This shot started without any striking color, but zeroing in on the red of the bench pain and accentuating it gave the image a spirit, or "Gestalt", that wasn't present previously.  Now the age and neglect of the bench is palpable, and the image has a message, or meaning that it didn't before

Close shots of flowers are common. Even though they are often beautiful, their nature is often benign and it can be tricky to get a flower image to stick in a client's memory.  I have noticed that too often in post processing the flower gets desaturated in an attempt to achieve a classic, timeless look.  However, people usually admire a flower for the color, and the small details that make it unique.  Definition of those details is lost or visually reduced once the image is desaturated or covered in a sepia filter.

This is a very old image, one of the first I took with my (then) new digital camera.  The content is less than spectacular, but I have found it a very satisfying or even entertaining image to work with in terms of Color Management.  The image is of a friend's painting extremely close.  The appeal of both the painting and the image capture is the three dimensionality of the paint on a two dimensional surface.  Accentuating the color differences in this mostly red image draws out the three dimensional aspect of the painting.

Green is an interesting color to work with when it is beyond dominant in the image.  This is one of my favorite examples of the rare case that green in the only impressionable color in the image.  The impulse is to draw out the greens to an unrealistic extent.  In this image, handling Shade/Shadow expertly went hand in hand with Color Management to achieve the desired effect. 

This is an image in which the incandescent lighting of the streetlamps mixed with the natural, overcast light to sublime effect.  The camera's confused white balance brings out an unnatural orange in the foreground and mixes it with an unnatural blue in the background.  The serendipitous nature of the shot made Color Management of this image tricky as well as the most important feature in this shot.  I could have chosen to eliminate the blue and tone down the orange in aid of reaching a more realistic, natural finish.  However, that would have killed the allure of the image, taking the "Too-Hot" and "Too-Cold" and revealing a lukewarm result. 

Color Management's function is to recognize how colors within an image work together, which are dominant, and which are merely distracting.  When I started photography in ernest, I was working with black & white and found color photography to be an unwanted challenge.  With the proliferation of digital images I began experimenting with color- rather blindly groping towards a balance or harmony I enjoyed with composition driven B&W photography.  After taking several courses in architecture school that focused on the fundamentals of color I achieved nothing short of a fetish for color photography.

I am somewhat dismayed to see desaturation and sepia becoming prevalent not only in the desires of the public but also in the experimentations of photographers.  My personal belief is that a "classic" look, which I assume to be the goal of these experimentations does not need to be achieved at the expense of our colorful world.

However, if that is what they want... I can do that too:

Vanity Retouching

Vanity Retouching is about removing minor and sometimes major flaws, but is really about making people look their best in that important memorable image.  Usually that includes teeth, eyes, and skin; most of the time the changes are very minor such that even the subject of the photo couldn't tell the difference between what they remember, and what they look like in the finished product.

Additional skills not represented here include improvements like:

Muscle tone
Body fat
Eyes: (color, definition, alignment, veins etc.)
Facial features: (lips, brows, wrinkles, bags, etc.)
Hair: (volume, highlights, color, etc.)
Body shape: (height, hips, legs, feet, etc.)
... and willing to try whatever else.

This first example is for when drastic measures must be taken to produce a result where that original image falls short (in this case the subject on the right has her eyes closed).

Original Image

Opened eyes of subject on the right

Slimmed face of subject on the left, whitened teeth and retouched skin

Final color correcting

Before and After

Additional Examples of Vanity Retouching:

Zoomed in example: Removed Skin Blemishes and added some very basic Shadow/Highlight edits while being careful to leave freckles alone

Skin Retouching, Shadow/Highlight, Color Management

Zoomed in example: Removed Wrinkles, Skin Blemishes, Red Eye and Iris Definition (No color or shadow edits)

There is an interesting moral dilemma that arises when versed in Photoshop; how accurately is the photographed scene to be represented by the final product?

I personally feel that as close to representing reality is the first goal of photography, but that doesn't make for engaging photography most of the time.  The camera does a poor job of capturing light and color (think Red Eye) and so it is up to us to use creativity to not only bring the raw image back to reality, but to give it a magical allure that makes photography art.

As far as "Vanity Retouching" is concerned, not only do clients like it (therefore a necessary skill) but making people look their best falls into the realm of "magical allure" that makes a good shot a great picture.

HLL Photography Portfolio

Hi, my name is Andrew

Please email me at: hllewellyn18@gmail.com

Personal Statement:

I am a semi-professional photographer and digital editor looking for work in Savannah, Georgia.

I first got involved with B&W photography, hand developing, and digital editing in high school.  I am now 29 years old and have been working with the subsequent versions of Adobe Creative Suite for the last 15 years.  I took college photography classes at UNC-Chapel Hill, and went to the College of Arts & Architecture at UNC-Charlotte where I used Photoshop extensively and used the Apple operating system exclusively.  I can work from home or come into the office as needed.  I don't mind working overtime on short notice, or doing any other tasks required of me, even if they are outside the bounds of the job description.

Goal:

I am looking for any work, part-time or otherwise, where I can exercise my skill set.  That includes being the back-up photographer at photo shoots, weddings, functions of any kind, as well as studio work environments.

Creative Focus:

I can help with photo retouching.  I am skilled in what I call "Vanity Retouching" which includes skin retouching, dynamic eye touching, blemish removal, tooth whitening, body slimming, and much more.

Having extensive training with color management, I can take your RAW photos and immediately improve color consistency, realism, and balance.

Naturally, exposure, shadow/highlight, contrast and brightness, and many other common tools that improve the feel and depth of each photograph are included in my skill set.

I have a highly trained eye when it comes to composition, including positive/negative space, scale, linearity, proportion, framing, and mass.

Work Examples:

I have broken my showcase into five main "modules" that emphasize specific skills.  These are: (Click Links or use toolbar in the upper righthand side of the page)

• Vanity Retouching
• Color Management
• Composition
• Dynamic/Movement
• Light and Sense

 In some cases the content of the image might not be stellar, but I've included it to point out a specific skill.  Also, many examples might fit well into multiple modules, but reside where they are in order to focus attention to that particular aspect of the shot.  Also, some of the images lost some quality as well as file size in being uploaded to blogger.com and some noise might be visible.  This is a job hunt portfolio assembled in a short period of time, so content is valued over presentation.  Otherwise I would have used another forum.  Thanks, I would love to work with you!