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We have been re-working our website for the last few weeks you can now check it out at www.serenityeye.com

Picture of the Day - London Skyline

Recently I was very fortunate to board the HMS Ocean as she sailed up the River Thames, the Royal Navy carrier which is being used as a support platform to house personnel who are being used during the London 2012 Olympic Games. It was an impressive feat to see the largest carrier Britain has manoeuvre up the river, but it did in turn offer a very interesting view point. Not often do you get to see the city from about 5 storeys up and from the middle of the river.

Using this vantage point I moved to the side of the carrier switching my Nikon D3s over to Aperture Priority (Av) setting f8 as my aperture to give me maximum sharpness (maximum sharpness of a lens is generally 2 stops from its widest aperture). Using the bracketing function, I set the camera to take 5 shots 1 stop apart. As I did not have a tripod with me at the time, I switch the D3s over to shoot in Continues High (CH) which allows the camera to shoot up to 11 frames per second (fps). By using this it gives you very little movement between pictures (you require a camera that shoots above 5 fps). 

Once I had the images on to my computer I used Photomatix to combine the 5 shots in a high dynamic range (HDR) I used the adjusters with the program to give the image a grungy and slightly surreal look. Once I was happy I saved it out as a tiff file which I then opened in photoshop, here I then boosted the contrast and added a crop to make it a little longer and thinner. I also used Topaz Detail 2 just to make the image pop that little bit more.

It just goes to show that sometimes it can be about being in the right place at the right time..

Please lets us know what you think by leaving a comment.

Thanks for reading.

Picture of the Day _ Caylee Fairy Shoot

This shoot was a themed shoot for Caylee, we combined two of her favourite things. Them being fairies and bubbles. 

The scene is lit using 2 Bowens lights and 2 Nikon SB-900's. The bowens were lighting Caylee herself and the flash unit were to light the back ground.

The bowens light were fitted with 60cm square softboxes and placed on lighting stand about 3 feet of the ground bringing them nearer to Caylee's height. They were also set to f5.6 to give an even f8 at the center of the set.

The SB-900 were set to 1/16th power each to give us a rough 1/8th power across the background. Both flashes were placed on the floor facing up towards the white background, the left hand unit had a green gel fitted and the right hand unit a red gel.

With a bubble machine on a small stall of to the left hand side, Caylee was dressed in her favourite Tinkerbell outfit and she was then told to run around and pop the bubbles. Emz had the camera set to f8 at ISO 100 and used a shutterspeed ranging from 1/125th - 1/250th.

At some points during the shoot you can see when Caylee had moved towards the back of the set and as she is now getting some green light from the flash on her side and face. Which added a nice effect to the image.

The images also made a nice black and white conversion in post production.

If your interested in doing a studio, location or themed shoot with us then please go to our contact page.

Also please let us know what you think.