Back to Russia

I return to Russia in a few days for my fourth trip to the country, I am looking forward to capturing some of its Christmas traditions and perhaps extend my social study of the outskirts of Moscow.

Budapest

I just took a brief trip over to Budapest, the beautiful capital of Hungary, with a mixture of oddball weather and an unfortunate incident with a stolen wallet it was a weekend to remember. The county has some of the most fabulous food I have eaten abroad - stocky but tasty and considering the Christmas season - I consumed a fair bit of mulled wine!

- pictures follow:

USA

I will not be blogging for he rest of this month as I am currently in the states running a social media project, should you wish to see it pop along to:

www.facebook.com/Oakenfold

I have been shooting stills, video and audio - editing on the road - and delivering to social networks.

Butcher HDR from Barcelona

Another HDR image using the release candidate of Nik's new HDR Efex Pro, this shot was grabbed in a butcher shop in Barcelona as one single RAW, divided into 5 levels of exposure in Apple Aperture (-2,-1,0,+1,+2) and exported out as half size JPEG's (for speed as the output is web only), opened up in Adobe Photoshop before launching the Nik tool from the "Automate" menu.

Again, the objective is to create a subtle HDR look to an image where the dynamic range is flat and limited, original image included below for comparison:

Barcelona and Tarragona

I have travelled a lot this year, certainly more than I have in my life - In part this is down to my relationship which necessitates a degree of comfort with being on the road, My work has also expanded internationally, getting me to even more exciting locations where I can take pictures in between other work engagements or take pictures for seminars and training courses in the UK.

August was a busy month, in addition to being in Russia for 2 weeks I also visited a client in Barcelona and travelled to Perpignan for the Visa Pour'l image festival.

When not networking I was grabbing images to use for later workshops on software retouch - in particular looking at HDR editing (more of that to come)

Quick revisit to Thailand

I loved Thailand, its a stunning place to unwind I grabbed this shot while driving around the island of Ko Lanta in February of this year shooting some video with the 5D Mk2 - The island has a ring road thats runs through the bigger towns in the east and along the beach resorts on the west of the island.

Another image to be processed in HDR Efx Pro from Nik software, I tried a bleach bypass look on this image and then pulled it back with some localised overlay of the original image. The overall result is a little less psychedelic than most HDR while retaining an interesting dynamic range.

Russia in Black and White

In the midst of virulent heat waves and toxic smoke clouds I travelled to Moscow to create a short project on life in the city and country in modern Russia. The work starts in Moscow in the dense south of the city and documents a journey north through the suburbs into a rural Russia not more than 300km away over a couple of weeks, the subjects and settings are personal but the insight universal.

These images were captured entirely on an iPhone 3GS with no post production or editing, instead of the original camera app I used the "Classic Toy" app with an overexposed black and white film preset. As an SLR user it was challenging to use a mobile for this project, especially with an app that disables the autofocus properties of the iPhone camera but it was an exciting constriction and pushed me to think about composition and context more than I usually would with my Canon cameras.