Marcus' blog

August 23, 2010
by Marcus
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Dave Hill Photography

Just when I needed a dose of inspiration, it hits me like a kid playing on the train tracks! Dave Hill is a fantastic photographer, but more than that is his heavy use of post processing that makes his photos so astounding. After watching a couple of his “Behind The Scene” videos on Vimeo, I can kind of grasp the way he does his shoots, shooting each element separately from each other, cutting them out and then manipulating them together along with some other post processing techniques.

I love Photoshop and I’m getting into this Photography lark quite a bit so I may take try to make some pieces like this. It doesn’t compare, but my Self Portrait attempt, it seems (due to the cutting out of elements and heavy post processing photo manipulation) is a very small scale version of this manipulative photography. I have tried this before for a few things, but half the techniques I know now, I didn’t back then. All I need is some more equipment and an idea for a shoot, then maybe people will be blogging about my photography too!

Check out more of his work here, or click the images above.

August 20, 2010
by Marcus
4 Comments

Self Portrait: Who Needs Lights?!

I’ve recently been wanting a super cool, awesomely epic and badass self portrait. Tonight I tried my hand at it. This, from the start, was obvious that it wasn’t going to be my prize and glory, but I thought fuck it; I’ll give it a go.

Of course, with no natural or studio lights, I could only hope to learn technique rather than be left with a kick-ass final image. I had a tripod, a chair, a blank wall, a standard lamp (which you can see in my glasses) and the room’s ordinary ceiling light. I also had my trusty Olympus PEN.

This is the image I captured with manual focus and the 2 second timer:

This is what using some basic and intermediate photoshopping techniques achieved:

But then I got bored of being on the computer so I went and hung out with some girls. I was excluded.

August 10, 2010
by Marcus
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A Spider’s Lunch

I saw the most intriguing spider outside as I was taking out the bin bags so I ran back in to get my camera but by the time I got back, it had gone into hiding. Not 5 seconds pass until I see a commotion on my front door between a different spider and a fly! I took some pictures using the Olympus E-PL1′s kit lens (14-42mm). It’s not a macro lens, but it did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the detail quite vividly. (click any image to see it larger on Flickr)

August 1, 2010
by Marcus
2 Comments

Stereoscopic Photography

I thought I’d give this a try seeing as I had the Olympus PEN out. Stereoscopic photography is the art of making a photograph appear to look 3D by simply showing 2 photos of the same picture at a slightly different angle really fast. I did it with Charlotte being the subject of the photo.

After exporting it as a GIF file, thus the lack of photo quality, here is the end product. It’s not the best attempt, but i’m planning on doing some better ones soon.