This blog is my old blog and is no longer updated

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Thursday, 31 January 2008

Client comment

I received a lovely comment today from a couple whose wedding I covered in November last year. It's always great to receive such nice feedback and know that your hard work was appreciated. So many thanks Emma & John for your lovely words:
"Hi Neil. Thank you for doing such a fantastic job with our wedding photographs, our album is fantastic and exactly what we were hoping for. You did a great job on the day and helped everything to stay relaxed and run smoothly. We also very much appreciate your attention to detail in the planning stages and the time you took to meet with us to make sure you knew exactly what we wanted!"

Tuesday, 29 January 2008

More HDR Photographs

Following on from my post earlier this week regarding HDR photography, below are a couple more examples (from the same assignment) of a normal single exposure versus a HDR version of the same image.

Again, you'll see how significant the difference can be, especially in the sky ares, which with the single exposure has been washed out. I could have improved this slightly in the single exposure by using a grad filter but it still wouldn't have been as striking an image as the HDR version!



Sunday, 27 January 2008

HDR – The future of photography!

Over the past few days I have started experimenting with a new photographic technique called HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range and have been extremely impressed with the results!

Although the actual concept of HDR is not new, it has, in the past few months it seems, started becoming much more widely talked about and implemented by photographers.

The idea behind HDR is that rather than taking one, correctly exposed photograph of a particular scene, you instead take multiple images at a variety of different exposures, typically three, with one image being underexposed, one overexposed and one correctly exposed. Using specialist software you then combine each of these images into one.

The advantage of this is that the resulting HDR image will contain much more information in relation to the light and dark areas of the image than one single file would. For example, when taking a photo of a typical outdoors landscape scene the camera can often struggle to correctly expose both the foreground and the sky areas – hence the reason grad filters are often used – but with a HDR image, information in both areas will be captured.

Here’s an example of a shot I took on an assignment yesterday. The first image is a single correctly exposed image, whereas the second is a HDR of the same image. As you’ll see the difference is huge and the second has far more impact!


To try HDR photography you will ideally need a camera that has a bracketing function and the use of a tripod as obviously the camera needs to stay perfectly still whilst you take the multiple exposures. On the software side I would highly recommend using a program called Photomatix Pro to combine your images together. A free trial version is available to download from http://www.hdrsoft.com/

I’m looking forward to experimenting with HDR more and perhaps try and incorporate it into my wedding shoots.

I'm sure HDR will become more and more popular over the next couple of years as more people see the difference it can make to images, and I'm sure it won't be long before cameras have an automatic inbuilt HDR button function.

I’ll post more HDR shots soon!

Tuesday, 22 January 2008

Favourite wedding photographs from 2007

I thought it would be fun to look back over the weddings I covered in 2007 and pick out a few of my favourite photographs.

2007 was a very busy year for me and I covered some great weddings. All the couples I worked with thoughout the year were kind, friendly and very welcoming - making my job far easier and very enjoyable! So here are my 3 favourites images from each section of the wedding day from the past 12 months.

The bride getting ready


Arrival at the ceremony venue

I love the expressions on the bride and her sister in the first of the photographs below. It was taken as they were walking towards the small chapel where the wedding was taking place. I was walking backwards in front of them and managed to step in a pile of stinging nettles - hence the laughter!


The Ceremony


The smallest details


Candid photographs


Bride & Groom portraits

The first of the three photographs below was taken at Salford Quays, just next to Old Trafford Football Ground. The sky were threatening to rain all day and I was worried that the weather was going to prevent us from getting any outsdoor shots of the bride and groom together. Luckily the rain held off just long enough for us to get some nice shots, this being my favourite.



Speeches

The next three photographs were taken during the wedding speeches. I really like the first two images, each of the bride looking her father with such love and emotion. The third was taken during the best man's speech. I was lucky enough to witness a number of great best man's speeches, this being one of the best.



The First Dance

The final three photographs were taken during first dances. I love taking photos of the first dance, the bride and groom really start to relax and it's hard not to take lovely photographs. It's also a chance for me to use a variety of different techniques and shutter speeds to get some contrasting effects.


Thank you for looking at my pick of my 2007 photographs, hope you liked them. Here's to the next 12 months!

Welcome to my blog

Hi All,

Welcome to my new blog!

I will try my best to post regular news items to this site, along with examples of my latest photographs.

In the meantime feel free to get in touch by emailing me at info@neilredfern.com, or visit my website www.neilredfern.com for more information regarding my photography.

See you soon!

Neil