After an excited trip to Jessop’s, New Oxford Street yesterday morning to pick up my final set of prints for the year, I’m delighted to be able to offer an e-Card system featuring my latest wintry photographs, to send friendly Christmas messages to your contacts.
Free e-Cards: www.matsmithphotography.com/cards
e-Greetings Card Features:
Enjoy!
I have never met a single person who, when asked to ‘relax and look natural’ in front of a huge lens pointing in their face, takes a photograph that actually represents their character in some way.
Nor have I ever met a child who will sit still for a photograph.
At least, perhaps they will do for a school photograph. But that’s a school photo for you: well-lit mugshot at best.
But as for any other portraiture of children, they won’t sit still.
I therefore find it takes the stress out of photographing boys when you work with them rather than against them…
Claire and Derrick at Petersham Hotel, London
I’ve just finished editing the photographs of the beautiful wedding of Claire and Derrick in Richmond, London.
The Petersham Hotel has glorious views overlooking the River Thames providing the perfect backdrop for some photographs at early dusk.
Claire and Derrick overlooking Richmond
And here are the happy couple in the hallway inside the Petersham Hotel.
Just Married
As any any Asian-cuisine-attuned Londoner will tell you, there’s a dearth of good sushi places in town.
Cue you me sushi in Marylebone.
What's for dinner tonight?
The term HDRI (or HDR for short) often educes strong reactions from photographers; it’s one of those photographic techniques that has been bastardised by amateurs to the extent some professional photographers shun it as new-fangled and gimmicky, or else argue that it portrays an unnatural photographic result.
It’s no surprise. A quick Google search for HDR images or a gander through photo sharing sites such as Flickr reveals the majority of photos tagged with HDR are hyper-real and over saturated at best, and vulgar, tasteless renditions of a scene at worst.
The real reason HDR is hated by some is because you can spot a bad HDR from a mile off, but it’s harder to spot a good one. This leads most people to assume HDRI generally makes for horrid images. Of course, many enthusiasts can’t spot even a bad HDR – but that’s another matter.
But isn’t the same true of any post-processing? Professional photographers tinker with saturation, contrast, crop, and toning all the time. When it’s done badly, you think “that has been tampered with”; when it’s done well, you concentrate on the actual image giving no thought to its production.
Like any photographic tool in the toolkit, it’s how you use it that matters. And as for the argument that it produces ‘unnatural’ images, this argument could be extended to any photographic technique; artificial lighting, post production, filters, cross processing, etc. In fact, a true art philosopher would argue that all photography is an unnatural rendition of reality, but maybe I’ll save this discussion for another day.
There’s no use arguing for or against HDR. It’s an image processing technique. If you believe in image processing, (and neither film nor digital photography would exist without), then you see HDRI as another tool in the toolkit. And it’s a tool that is here to stay.
These principles can be applied in hundreds of different ways.
In my next HDR article to follow, I will give you a step-by-step guide to the way I make an HDR.
St Pancras Commercial Shot, HDR example
This week I had the pleasure of photographing a scriptwriter friend called Maja, who was looking to have portraits taken for her acting portfolio.
We hit the shops for some makeup, stopped off at M&S Simply Food, and came back for seared venison on creamy mash with green beans, and a great bottle of red.
And here are some of the photos from Monday:
Maja on black #1
Maja on black #2
Maja on black #3
Maja on white #1
Anyone who knows me will attest to the fact I adore cooking and eating good food. Whilst I’ve no plans to turn this blog into a recipe or home-life blog, I thought it would be nice to share some of my favourites from time to time.
I can’t cook an interesting meal without taking its photo, making all my guests wait until the meal is cold, and generally being a food photo pest.
Here are my favourite dishes of 2009, in no particular order.
Layla cooked us all a fantastic “Tray Baked Chicken Maryland” at her new pad in Westminster. I like to call it “Banana Chicken”, which is frankly more descriptive, and the recipe she followed can be found on Jamie Oliver’s site here.
Layla's Banana Chicken
The recipe for the fabulous Carluccio’s dish “Penne Giardiniera” was released online this year. I haven’t pictured the finished product, but this recipe is superb.
Penne Giardiniera in the Making
On a trip to Budapest in summer, we were directed, courtesy of Yoon, to a fabulous restaurant called Babel, at which we ate their tasting menu with a perfect selection of wines to complement each course.
The award for the best chocolate this year goes to Babel, Budapest:
Tasting Menu at Babel
This year I have had good and bad experiences with pizza. I am a huge fan of pizza. Not the soggy, glutenous fayre served by the likes of Domino’s (or, for that matter, Pizza Express), but the freshly baked stuff, made to order.
I’m no stranger to baking my own; this was not something my mother taught me but rather I learnt at university whilst others were eating their pasta and pesto.
So this year, I decided to take my love for pizza a bit further, and spent hours perfecting the dish. I now use a stone base, which is really the only way to avoid slightly moist dough when you bring it out of the oven. It adds that stonebaked edge to the pizza, and almost negates the need for a huge stone pizza oven.
Here’s the Pizza Fiorentina, perfected back in July 09.
Pizza Fiorentina by Mat
Now for the best cakes of the year, at the Marie Curie Tea Party.
Tea Party
James does the best dinner parties. His apartment is kitted out with the nicest crockery.
In fact, the Villeroy and Boch large bowl shown below was the very item of homeware that persuaded me to invest heavily in good crockery myself. As payment for a job this year with a homeware store, I decided to receive stock, in the form of a coffee grinder and some of my own Villeroy and Boch.
Here’s an excerpt from James’s brilliant Mexican food evening:
Guacamole, Villeroy and Boch
This guacamole also inspired my own ventures into Mexican food on a number of occasions later in the year.
Being a wedding photographer, it would be rude not to feature wedding cake in my list.
Courtesy of Jane Asher Party Cakes, here’s a photo of the most glorious Malteser Cake. I couldn’t resist the chance to turn the sparkly floor reflections into a bokeh that mimicked the Maltesers. (Which photographer could…?)
Maltesers, sparkly bokeh
When I was asked last month to photograph around twenty female nude university students for charity, it got me thinking about that phrase that hardly needs any extra explaining or context: “… as long as it’s tasteful”.
This is the addendum that usually tells us more about the speaker than the preceding phrase “I don’t mind x/y/z…”, because it speaks volumes of our view of being naked.
At this point, it must be stated that I have no hang-ups about such a photography assignment, nor do I have any more excitement than I would have for any other type of assignment. Work – whether it features the naked or the clothed, the pretty or the less pretty, male or female, animal or vegetable or mineral – is work. In fact, work featuring twenty naked 19-20 year olds running around a field with horses for two solid days is hard work.
I imagine nudists will tell you that it’s our natural state – but for the rest of us, looking at naked people ‘in the flesh’ is something we do that involves only those who are very close to us. Of course, the internet generation – liberated as it is – finds it perfectly okay to look at photographs of naked people, moreover share with online contacts. A friend from school might have a ‘risque’ photo shoot and upload and tag photos on Facebook completely unabashed, caring little that their fathers or mothers will probably eventually see it – let alone friends of friends. But in the flesh – this is a little different.
When photographing naked people, one has to be aware of the typical British stance; we Brits are liberal enough to think it’s not immoral, but stiff enough to think it should nevertheless be done according to a generally accepted (and pretty abstract, if you think objectively) view of what is tasteful. In nude calendar terms, this means:
The above maxims provide a generic and acceptable creative brief on which to base a set of modern photographs for a nude calendar.
They don’t address my deeper concerns about depicting nude women in this way, such as
Now I have got that out of my system, here are some of the out-takes from the Nottingham University Nude Polo Club Calendar.
For more information about the Nottingham University Nude Polo Club Calendar, please visit their Facebook group.
Below is an out-take from the calendar that didn’t quite make the cut. More photos to follow once the calendar has been released.
Hannah and Mini
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