Those eyes ...

My daughter ... her hair wild from riding her tricycle and refusing to let me brush it; whose eyes I could stare at all day if she let me.

Photographing Coronation Street Star in a couple of weeks ...

Just been commissioned to photograph one of the stars of Coronation Street in a couple of weeks but not been told who yet? Cool!

Yesterday's shoot went well.

Did some corporate portraits yesterday ... shoot went very well and have totally fallen in love with my new Nikon 1.8 lens - it's awesome!

2 samples from the shoot:

(Note: The people have space around them so the client can play with the image's formats when compiling their brochure and website.)

Photography Tip of the Month!

Thought I’d start a monthly ‘Tips of the Month’ blog to help people take lovely photographs!

So here goes …


Oh ... and any of the shots below can be taken on a disposable camera ... the gear you use is irrelevant for this - it's all about knowledge.

I’m going to start these tips with ‘How to photograph the Sea’ (for two reasons):

·         The sea is a wonderful subject to photograph as it never fails to impress and create beautiful images for you.

·         What you learn here can be applied to photographing any landscape but it gives you a good foundation with which to start.

To begin with, imagine you are stood on a cliff-top looking out across the ocean. All you can see is the water stretching for as far as the eye can see and up ahead the horizon where the sea meets the sky.

Now raise a camera to your eye and look at that horizon, you are now looking at it in two dimensions because the camera's viewfinder flattens the world down: you have the sea, the horizon and the sky … just three elements to worry about … (possibly the sun too - but we can ignore that here.) We don’t want that horizon in the middle (because that would be boring), so how about placing it here:

Or here:

Like this:

© Peter Creighton

If you look at the image above you can begin to see how and why I composed it the way I did (It was shot on my £50 pocket camera.)


You basically imagine the viewfinder is divided into three equal parts and place the sea or sky in one of the three horizontal pieces.

Other things to consider when photographing the sea are boats and their location in the frame, birds, planes, the sun, the moon, the way the water reflects the light, waves, stillness. (If you’re lucky enough to have access to a polarising filter you can use this to reduce flare and bring back the colour saturation of the sea and/ or sky too.)

Here are a few more examples to give you an idea of how you can place elements in your ‘sea’ shots whilst keeping the horizon to one of the 'thirds' that I just mentioned.

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

© Peter Creighton

"Simples!"

Now go and have some fun ... and let me know if this helped?

Peter x

Hadfield Hall Art Exhibition

The art show I took part in last weekend went very well. There were 40 of us 'artists' that took part and the Preview on Friday night with free wine, nibbles and the official opening by the Mayor was very enjoyable. Pictures always look better and more meaningful after a couple of glasses of wine for some strange reason ...

It featured over 150 individual pieces of art and my little girl enjoyed scaring me by constantly threatening to pour her complimentary cup of juice over them.

Here are the pieces I featured:

Hope you like them?

petercreighton.co.uk

'Card not Initialised' on Fuji S2 Camera!

I received a nice shiny new 4GB Kingston CompactFlash card today only to discover it didn't work on the Fuji.

The reason: They are 32 bit format and Fuji S2's only accept 16 bit format cards of less than 2GB in size.

The Solution:

Three things to be aware of with this solution:

• Any existing data on the card could get wiped off.
• You will lose (for now) 2GB of your card (It's hidden as a second partition.)
• I'm assuming you're using Windows on your PC.

The fix:

•  Download free from the internet (Google to find it) the following Open-Source (Free) Partition software and install it: 'MiniTool Partition Wizard Home'
• Stick the card into a USB Card-reader attached to your PC
• Open the software above
• Select your card from the drives shown
• Click on 'Format Partition' (on the left menu)
• Under the 'File System' menu select 'Fat16' then click OK
• Click 'Apply' (top left)
• Now select 'Move/Resize Partition' (on the left menu)
• Under 'Partition Size' type in '2000'
• Click 'OK'
• Click 'Apply' (top left)
• Close the software
• Take the card out and put it back in your camera
• Voila! It should now work.

Job done.

petercreighton.co.uk