B352 – EDITING PHOTOS

As I’m writing a fair bit about my photography techniques, then I though one good thing to touch on for todays post is how I edit my photos. The main piece of software that I use is a program called Adobe Lightroom, I think its one of the best programs out there for editing loads of photos at once, in fact I cant really think of a different program out there that might be just as good, to me it seems like Adobe have this corner of the market locked down.

What I tend todo with my photos is import all the stills I took that day into Lightroom, literally its just a drag and drop thing and then start working my way through the photos. one thing that I have noticed with my editing is that I like to play around with the highlight tool a lot and play around with the exposure. i start by going from one extreme to the other, playing with the dials on the right hand side going up and down the dial till I get to a point where my happy with the photo. once Ive played around with the lighting, I then move onto the colour in the photo and because this is an iphone photo, the White balance is auto so I cant really play with that,  but the saturation, vibrance and clarity can all be messed about with. The clarity is something I don’t really like to change to much, I find that it makes a photo too grainy or too blurry and I normally use it a lot more if a photo is out of focus, kind of like a safety net. Saturation and vibrance are something I normally like to bring down, i love taking colour of the photos and give them that faded look and if you have read some of my previous blog posts you will have read the reason why I like faded photos so I wont go into those details now, just read some of my previous post and im sure you will see why.

I hope thats helped you to quickly understand what I do to my photos and maybe if you guys want to know more I can do a more in detailed post about this.

heres my examples and also some print screens of the editing process.

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– a less saturated photo, really wanted the smoke to blend in to the sky –
SATURATED_V2
– have a look at the setting to the right, look at where the saturation and vibrance dials are –
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– this is just a black and white photo –
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– not a big fan of high contrast street photos but thought I would show you want it looks like –
HIGH_CONTRAST -
– I tried to keep the tone settings basically the same as the saturated photo and then just change the presences settings –

B274 – BACK IN LONDON AND COOKING UP A TREAT!

Before I get back into the main part of this post I’m going to give a bit of an overview on how today has gone. At 10am this morning Amy and myself woke up in our Amazing hotel room and instantly realised that we were both destroyed, I was ill and for some reason Amy’s legs wouldn’t work. Turns are both sick, me a bit more ill than her, but ill non the less. I think its just a case of us crashing, Christmas is normally a time of resting up but if anything its been the complete opposite, im not moaning about it, I’ve had the best two weeks.

The plan was originally to checkout of our hotel and going and have a look around Bristol and take in all the signs, well our plan quickly became to get on the first train we could and get back to the flat.  Once we made it onto the train the next mission was to start editing the Go Pro video I made the other day, there’s no better way to make a train ride go quicker than to start editing a video, but well rendering took a bit longer than expect. The whole train ride really so I did manage to get a little sleep.

That leads me to the next part of my blog, what we did for dinner. We needed spice and a lot of it, when you’re ill nothing is better than spice, it cleans your nose and almost gives your body a kick start which is just what we need. Amy came up with the good idea of having a curry, making it from scratch and also learning a new recipe. If any of you are in need of a new dish and what to add a bit of spice in your life, then please feel free to give this recipe a go.

Ingredients

4 tablespoons oil

4 cloves garlic (crushed)

1 onion (Large, chopped)

3 red chili peppers (‘s, chopped)

4 teaspoons Madras Spice paste

1 tablespoon turmeric

2 tablespoons mango chutney

1 can coconut cream

1 tablespoon sweet chili sauce

1 tomato passata (large carton around 600ml)

1 bunch coriander (chopped)

4 tablespoons greek yogurt

2 chicken breasts (chopped)

 

Instructions

Step 1: In a large pan, heat the oil then fry the garlic, onions and chilli for about 5 minutes stirring regularly.

Step 2: Add the curry paste and turmeric and stir in.

Step 3: Add the mango chutney, coconut cream, sweet chilli sauce, passata, coriander, fenugreek and Greek yogurt and leave in a low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Step 4: While your curry simmers on a low heat, cook the chicken and once its white the whole way through dump it all into the pan with the rest of the curry

Step 5: let that all simmer till your 30-minute timer goes off, I decided to add an extra chill 10 minutes before the end of the timer just to add a little extra spice.

I managed to get two good sized meals out of it and some left overs. Thank you too the App Yummly and also http://www.jamandclottedcream.co.uk/ for the recipe, I’ve tweaked it a bit but I cant take full responsibly for this dish.

One last thing, my goal for this blog is to reach 500 subscribers, so if you are reading this and haven’t yet subscribed. Please can you subscribe and ill be sure to follow your post.

Heres my photos from today, I hope you like them! and im sorry if I keep moaning about being ill!

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– trying to get the timeline rendered by the time the train pulled into paddington didnt happen, I literally had my laptop open on the tube –
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– arriving back in Bethnal Green –
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– the Curry apperently smelt amazing ( my nose is blocked so I didnt know)