Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France: Recently Added Galleries and Collections

Portraiture/Portrait

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Boudoir/Boudoir

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Homes/Maisons

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Wedding/Mariage

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Snapseed

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Snapseed is a smart phone and iPad app for photos that has been developed by Nik Software - now owned by Google.

You open image in Snapseed then, select from about 15 effects and the apply it by sliding your finger from left to right across the phone's screen - so there is some degree of user input and control in the editing process.

All these photos were taken using my iPhone, which then I edited using Snapseed. The whole process was great fun and I recommend you have a go. I will almost certainly use some of the texture images in the bottom row in future Photoshop-based projects.

Speedlite Set up

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Street Life

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>This gallery contains photos of rural street life near Studio Lavalette. They have no other merit except they amuse me!

Towns and Villages Near Studio Lavalette

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Home Page Offer

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Charente, "Don McCrae", France, "Lightroom courses", "Photography courses in France", "Photography holidays in France", "Photography workshops", "Photoshop courses in France", "Photoshop workshops", "Studio Lavalette", "Villebois Lavalette"

Food

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Panoramas

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Panoramas are enormous fun to take and make - even if you've no idea what a "nodal point" is! And the great thing is there's any number of fantastic vistas near Studio Lavalette where we can go and shoot panoramic images - and the really great thing is, you don't need a special camera: a regular point and shoot will do nicely!

If you're just starting out with a digital camera, why not come on our Photo HERO photo holiday course and I'll show you exactly how to take and make stunning panorama images - to learn more, please follow this link.

Making Magic

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Hommage to the Dutch School

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>I have seen many paintings by the 16th and 17th century Dutch School and confess that I have a deep admiration for the way in which these artists lit their subjects.

Rembrandt, of course, was the most famous, possibly the master of them all and I was lucky enough to see 50 of his pictures at an exhibition in Minneapolis this Summer. Typically the backdrops are a dark grey, brown or near black and what little light there is, is tightly controlled. But there are always some white (collars/cuffs/ruffs) involved to counteract the heavier and sombre backgrounds – the use of the white literally ignites the paintings.

Anyway ….in homage to the amazing Dutch Schools and their influence, here's a growing collection of fine art nudes: interestingly a subject they rarely painted.

Doors, Shutters and Windows (Before & After)

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>There’s something about the aging of wood that adds to its visual interest. And when the paint on it also starts crackle and split, then the surfaces really begin to excite me. I know this all sounds a bit daft, but bear with me!

So often the photography you see in the media thrusts the ‘shiny-new’ at you and more often than not that ‘shiny-new’ results in a bright, ageless, plastic finish – it’s all a bit in-yer-face.

This growing collection of doors, shutters and windows, (all shot near our media centre for photography holidays in France), are the antithesis of the ‘shiny-new’, as they perfectly describe the aging process, or rather the passing of time. Their current state of repair, or disrepair, is not what the maker originally intended, as time and the elements have taken its toll.

A collection of brand new doors and windows would look like an advert for a building supplier, as there’s no narrative, whereas these have a separate poetry and tell quite different stories. I’ve included the “before’s” to show you that that story is there even before I started to edit them.

You can see/read how I processed the Blue Door and Handle, (the second set of images below), in a Step-by-Step Guide which you will find here .

I'll be demonstrating how to make images like these on our Photo MAESTRO Courses - to learn more about our photo holiday courses and workshops please go here.

Artographs (Before & After)

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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New Skies (Before & After)

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Through Works In Print Ltd., (a UK office art supplier - see here), I'm lucky enough to have sold hundreds of my prints. And sometimes we get requests for a very specific place, statue, harbour, town square....whatever...

Usually these are easy enough to shoot, but occasionally they prove to be an image-editing challenge and this Photo MAESTRO gallery focuses on instances where I've had to seriously edit the original photos to give lack lustre skies some punch.

If you think you'd benefit from knowing how to bring your photos back to life, just follow this link.

Canon Ixus 210

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>I've put this gallery of Canon Ixus 210 photo's up here to demonstrate that there's lots of great photos you can take using a point-and-shoot camera.

The colours are not as deep and as rich as I'd like them, so I've edited them in Elements. And... that is the point of the Photo HERO Course - get the composition of the photo right in camera; take a good steady shot; then fine tune the balance of colours, shadows, mid-tones and highlights afterwards.

To learn more about the Photo HERO Course please click here.

Villebois-Lavalette

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Which shot works best?

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Often I am presented with a scene and take several shots of it from slightly different angles, thus leaving the decision on composition to later.

This gallery contains images that show an example of this dilemma. Here's four shots of one of those vast water sprayers that straddle the fields and these are my views on each image:

Water Sprayer 1 - the horizon is in about the place and I like the tubing that stretches top left to bottom right horizon. You really get a sense of the enormity of the sprayer. The problem is the left hand wheel is too closely framed against the left vertical edge of the photo.

Water Sprayer 2 - if I'd been able to stand about 30 foot taller this would have been interesting. The issue here is that the sprayer's tubing and wheels get lost after the third set of wheels and the huge span of the sprayer is, (visually speaking), folding-in on itself.

Water Sprayer 3 - this shot has the same issues as Water Sprayer 1, only worse....the right hand wheel has been cropped-out of the shot. The span of the tubing is, however, OK.

Water Sprayer 4 - this is the best shot of the four. The tubing span works well across the picture, the horizon is good, and the placement of the wheels is about equidistant from the right and left vertical edges of the photo. Altogether this is, composition-wise, the best image.

The "Which shot works best?" question is always an interesting subject to debate and one that I'll be covering in our Photo HERO Courses - to learn more, click here.

Flowers (Fleurs) - Up-Close and Personal!

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Our neighbours at Studio Lavalette are Trish and Dave Garside and Trish spends hours a day tending to the wonderful growing collection of plants in her garden. A few weeks ago she gave me permission, (and a cup of tea), to shoot her flowers for a couple of hours.

I confess I'm no flower aficionado so unable to tell you which photo is what plant. But....I can tell you I used a 100mm macro lens, a tripod and got down, deep and low to take these photographs.

Like children, you cannot shoot flowers by standing over them and looking down. You have to move yourself to their height. And if this means lying on your front to get the shot, then lie on your front you must!

Sadly the web does no justice to the clarity of detail in these images, however believe me they're pin-sharp. One the Photo HERO aims is to show you how to get your images pin-sharp, with no camera shake - I'll also show you how to crop your photos into a square format - like most of the images below.

Come to our Photo HERO photo holiday courses and I'll show you how to shoot up-close and personal and get the very best images from a macro lens - if you don't have one, you can borrow mine.

I'll also show you how to achieve the effect in Fleurs - 5 - it's quick, easy, loads of fun and doesn't involve complicated filters in Photoshop or putting grease all over your lens!

To learn more about our photo holiday courses and workshops, and the Photo HERO Course in particular please follow this link.

Special Effects (Before & After)

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>This gallery is dedicated to Photoshop plug-ins that are sold by companies other than Adobe.

The first set of three "before and afters" have been made using Exposure 4 from a company called Alien Skin - their website is here. The number of preset effects in Exposure 4 is staggering, (too many to count), and the permutations of all the variable filters is overwhelming.

However beware of repetition! Note that the painted effect in image 2 is the same as image 4, but upside down! And I had to process Image 6 three times before I got the amount of "distressing" to look good enough.

Countryside Near Studio Lavalette

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Home Page Slideshow

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Flour Girl

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>In order to have a moderate chance of achieving some cracking photos from a studio shoot you need to:
a) plan in advance and workout what how you are going to get the shots you want;
b) find an enthusiastic and energetic model; and
c) in the this case of this shoot, find a studio where you can make a huge mess and the owner doesn’t mind!

I went to Arles last May to Festival Européen de la Photo de Nu and the main poster promoting the Festival was of a nude model spinning, in what the photographer, (Olivier Valsecchi), called “Dust”. He had a set of 10 large square-framed prints in the exhibition and to put it mildly I was inspired...however I wanted to do things slightly differently.

So to business:

The Plan
The images below are shot in a 3:2 ratio thus allowing more left and right movement for the model and rather than having an out-of-shot assistant throw “dust” at her, she herself grabbed great handfuls of flour and threw it as hard as she could. I also lit her with two lights: on her right side was big beauty dish 7 foot above her, pointing 45 degrees downwards and the other on her left was a 6 foot tall softbox with a very fast flash light in it.

The Model
The model was Raphaella McNamara, a 5’ 6”” bundle of fearless undying energy. She worked and worked…. and then some…. Being a ballet dancer she moves with all the skill and grace that a dancer has. Thank you, Raphaella, so much for your spirit.

The Studio
I used the Works Studio at Croxton, (on the A428 just west of Cambridge) and the owner, Martyn Rayner, was really kind to let us make such a mess. There was only two bags of flour involved and I managed to sweep up 95% of it quite quickly….but the other 5% was everywhere and took an hour to hoover up. It gets everywhere: hair, clothes, camera bag, shoes, walls, ceilings etc.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Paris - Noir et Blanc (Black & White)

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>I’ve been fortunate to travel throughout most of Europe and North America but without doubt my favourite city, by many miles, has to be Paris. The arts, culture, architecture, history, and gastronomy all fuse together to wrap you in a blanket of riches.

It’s little wonder that Paris is, reputedly, the most visited city in the world, with the Louvre being the its number one attraction: personally I find the Louvre exhausts my senses!

We went to Paris for a long weekend early November 2011. Well it’s such a doddle from the UK. In less than 2.5 hours, (on Eurostar ), from St. Pancras there you are outside the Gare du Nord….slap bang in Paris. Utterly brilliant!

We usually stay at the more-than adequately comfortable Terminus du Nord Hotel, which is right across the street from the Gare du Nord. And has a metro station 4m from the hotel’s entrance.

I think a “visual” business, such as Studio Lavalette, which is based in France should pay homage to its capital city, so here’s three photographs each of four of Paris’s landmarks: la Tour Eiffel; Notre Dame de Paris; l’Arc de Triomphe; and la Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.

The three skies in the three l’Arc de Triomphe photos have been transplanted from my stock of sky photos shot near Studio Lavalette - the weather that day rendered the skies a dull flat nothingness!

Dull skies do happen, so why not come on one of our photo holiday courses or workshops in France and I’ll show you how bring life back to a dead-sky photo. I'll also show you how to take and make stunning black and white images. Learn more about our photo holiday workshops and courses by following this link.

BTW - an A0 print of the Eifel Tower is hanging on the staircase wall of Studio Lavalette.

Studio Lighting & Model

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>During some of our photo holiday workshops I’ll be showing you various studio lighting set-ups, how to pose a model and get the best edits using Lightroom and Photoshop.

You can checkout our photography workshops availability by clicking here .

In this gallery I’ve included 12 photographs (4 sets of 3 photos per set). The model’s name is Amber Tutton - she’s a bright, energetic young lady and a joy to work with.

Here are some notes on each set:

Betsy Ross and Sunglasses – in this set I wanted funky colours, so I used the Betsy Ross flag, (a precursor to the Stars and Stripes), and my youngest son’s loud green and white sunglasses. Amber is lit with a large softbox to her right and beauty dish to her left – you can see the reflection of the dish in the first shot. In shots 2 and 3 I deployed a fan tilted up to her face to get her hair moving.

Square Format – this type of star-shaped pose is ideal for a square format crop. I lit Amber with a single beauty dish pointing directly at her, (about head-height), forcing a hard shadow behind her.

Black & White – I swung the beauty dish round to Amber’s left at about two o’clock as you look at her. I got her turn her torso to her right, but then twist her shoulders and head to her left. The light can then play on her back and neck muscles. The B&W conversion was done in Photoshop. You should never shoot B&W because you're then stuck with whatever Canon, Nikon, or whoever, has determined what B&W should look like!

Hand Placement – quite often if a photo looks odd it’s because the hands have not been placed properly…and badly placed hands can totally ruin a picture. Here I directed Amber to move her arms and hands into interesting positions. I think the first in the set works best as the left hand and arm lead the eye into the frame, then the right arm takes you up to the tilted head. I also deployed my secret light diffuser!

RPS "Associate" Panel

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Dating back to 17,000 B.C., the polychrome cave paintings in South West France are probably the world's oldest artwork. Their age is remarkable but, for me, it's the fact that prehistoric man selected particular surfaces of his cave walls to add a physical depth and a rich expression to his paintings. Previously benign bulges in the rock-face were totally transformed when he/she circumscribed them with the outlines of horses, mammoths or bison: they became the bellies, legs or heads of the animals.

I’ve borrowed from this prehistoric paradigm and for the central narratives used photographs of the, now tamed, landscapes, townscapes and fruits of the land, all shot in France’s Dordogne and Charente regions. These have then been suffused into photographs of walls from the same areas. The cracks, chips, discolouration and erratic rough surfaces add an unexpected visual dimension and like the Neanderthal paintings, result in enriched photographical images.

Reading from top to bottom, photographs 3, 5 and 8 are of Villebois Lavalette. More interestingly picture 5 shows La Maison du Couvent plumb in the centre with Studio Lavalette in front of it.

These 15 images are meant to be viewed as three rows of five photos - if your browser does not let you see them in this way, grab the bottom right hand corner of the browser and drag it to the left until the pictures display as I intended...!

The RPS awarded me the Associate Distinction, in the Visual Arts category, in June 2012 and
the entire panel is hanging on the wall of the studio in Studio Lavalette.

The Luminosity Blend Mode

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>As far as the photographer is concerned, most of the Blending Modes in Photoshop are of little use and the menu of options could be whittled down to just five or six. And one of the Modes I'd keep is the Luminosity Blend Mode (LBM).

The LBM ignores all the colour values and when a Layer is set to LBM it blends with the Layers underneath using just the the brightness values of the Layer so set. You can prove this yourself....open a colour picture in Photoshop, insert a new Layer underneath it and floodfill it wit white paint. Now go back to your colour photo and blend it to the white Layer using LBM - it goes monochrome. Indeed some people use this method for B&W conversions, but I do not recommend it!

Anyways, click through these five Steps and see how use the LBM to release the story of this old blue door and its rusty handle.

Black & White Conversion

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>This is a Step-by-Step Guide as to how I go about making/editing "my" particular style of soft, or even whimsical, black and white images.

The idea in a lot of them is to try and get the viewer to look longer and ask questions of the piece. In this one I wanted a profile portrait, with lots of room in front of the face/model, (called "negative space"), and unusually I wanted the mouth open: is if she's talking to someone outside the left edge of the photo. Who's she talking to, what's she saying? Well, that was the idea!

A Slice of Arizona

don@studiolavalette.com (Photography Holiday Courses and Workshops in France) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

]]>Antelope Canyon, Arizona
In July 2011 I was fortunate to steal time and visit the Arizona/Utah border. I had decided to eschew Grand Canyon et al as they have been photographed to death. My first destination was going to the lesser known, but just as magnificent, Antelope Slot Canyon.

You book and pay $60 up front and for that you get a Navajo Indian who drives you out to the canyon in a truck and acts as your guide. Well, you don’t really need a “guide” as the canyon is more or less in a straight line, but a) you do need a driver, b) someone to co-ordinate with the other tour parties and c) someone who can hide behind a rock and chuck the fine sand up into the shafts of sunlight! See photos 3 and 6 below.

The canyon has been formed by rainwater flowing through it. There’s something like a 20mile canal at one end of the canyon and when the rains do fall, (and it really really rains), water hurtles through it carving these wonderful shapes into the canyon walls.

Photographs 1, 2 and 4 are hanging on the wall of the landing at Studio Lavalatte.

Dust Storm at Horseshoe Bend
The other reason for going to the Arizona/Utah border was to photograph Horseshoe Bend; where the spectacular and thundering Colorado River makes a complete 180-degree turn.

In the parking lot there’s a sign that says, weather conditions can change very rapidly and if you see lighting or hear thunder get back to your car: and fast! It was a sunny afternoon, so I started the 1.5mile trek with camera and tripod. With about half a mile to go I heard thunder behind me. I looked back to see the sky darkening, but it was darkening very quickly. I made the correct decision to go back, other walkers continued towards the Bend!

Well…as I shut the car door the heavens erupted and dust flew all around me. The hire car literally shook and rocked from side to side. Never one to miss a photo opportunity, I positioned the car at various angles and jammed the camera in the bit between doorpost and the window and took over 70 pictures.

These six photographs below tell the story of the final build-up, the main part of the storm and the sky after it passed. In all it took about 90minutes from start to finish – quite an extraordinary event.

And I never got to shoot Horseshoe Bend….!