Digital Diversity

Its been just over 3 weeks now since the best day of my life. The woman I love became my wife. The day went perfectly and it will always be remembered but that’s not what this article is about. Its about where we went afterwards – Kuredu Island in the Maldives for our honeymoon.

1 week after I became a married man, my wife and I set off to the airport for a trip to what can only be described as paradise.  It took a fairly uncomfortable 9 hour no thrills flight to get there that was made bearable by 3 things. The thought of where we were going to, the bottle of sparkling wine we purchased and a very friendly and chatty man named Jeff.

Once landed we headed to the plane exit and were greeted by a wall of heat. This was quite a shock to the system due to the cold weather of the UK and seeing as I was still wearing jeans and trainers I wasn’t helping the situation.

The last leg of the journey was to take a sea plane to the Island itself. This was delayed by an hour which was a bit irritating due to how long we had already been travelling but we weren’t going to let it dampen our spirits.

Finally our sea plane was ready and we got on board. The planes them selves are fairly small and hold about 15-20 people. The best part about them is that they give you some great views of the atolls from the sky while you fly to your island.

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Having recently entered the world of making stock photography as a little side venture, I looked at what I would need to create the type of images I wanted to take. Having graphic design experience I knew that a lot of images I purchased for jobs fell into a few areas. These tended to be business men or women doing various things such as meetings, Life style shots and still life shots of various objects. I don’t do portraiture shots so that sort of ruled out the first 2 so this meant I would be concentrating on the 3rd. For this sort of photography I would need a Tri-pod, a sharp lens and a light box. I already had my Tri-pod and recently purchased the Canon 50mm f1.8 mk2 lens that can be incredibly sharp at the right settings (mainly f2.8 and higher). The one thing I didn’t have was a light box.

So what is a light box?

A light box is simply a box with reflective surfaces so you can bounce light around giving an even spread over your subject. You can also get light tents that do a similar thing. Seeing as Christmas is almost upon us, I have a mortgage to pay and a wedding coming in the new year, I find myself finding it hard to justify buying such an item. Instead I decided to put my Macgyver hat on and build one.

To make your own light box you will need the following.

• Cardboard box (or any box really)
• Kitchen foil
• White paper
• Sticky tape
• 2 flexible desk lamps (I got 2 for £6 each from Argos)
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One of the most common tasks in photo retouching is sharpening up the image (or at least parts of an image). No matter what camera you have (or what lens if you have a DSLR) the image will almost always come out a little soft. This Varies from camera to camera and if you have a DSLR you can get sharper results by buying higher quality lenses. Even so, images still tend to need at least a small amount of sharpening no matter what.

This tutorial will go through 3 different methods of sharpening your images. You just need to  find which one suits your needs the most. They all work just fine but have different methods and adaptability.

For this tutorial you will need to have an understanding of the following Photoshop techniques:
Layers and Masks

These 3 methods are:
• The UnSharp mask
• High Pass sharpen
• UnSharp mask plus lighten and darken blend modes split over 2 layers.
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