Didn’t think much of Week 7′s photo (kind of boring), so no write up. I’ll chuck a link in for you though:- Flower.

So, on to week 8. A bit of fun this week. A nice photo of some champers!

One thing I really have to work on is paying attention to my backgrounds. That damn fork drawing the eye. I could clone it out, but it would be a fair amount of work, and may look dodgy around the edge of the glass. That said, I have cloned out a napkin that was at the bottom of the image (you can probably tell if you look at a full size version of the picture). Patch tool was failing me, so had to jump to the clone tool, which on this background, it seemed to work “ok”.

I don’t know what it is, but I’m loving Vignetting at the moment (dark borders, traditionally caused by the lens, but I’m artificially adding it here). It’s something I never really used to like, but when done fairly subtly, I think it adds a lot to the image to draw the eye to the main subject. It’s quite easy to go overboard though, and I may come back to this image later on and find it’s slightly high still.

As for other things, I think the shadow is a bit sharp here, I really need to buy/make a diffuser for my flash. Surprising thing was that the photographer at the wedding this was shot at, didn’t use one at all, and wasn’t bouncing the flash either (had the same flash as me, which doesn’t actually come with one, but can be bought). Maybe he knows something I don’t, but I think it’s a sign of a photographer that doesn’t really know how to do nice indoor shots – will be interesting to see the quality of the photos. That said, I HATE shooting inside churches. I wasn’t using flash myself, just a high ISO (640-1000) and a wide aperture (f/2 – f/4), but the lighting is horrible. Something I may need to work on, learning the best way to do it.