The Old Windmill

I recently took a stroll around Staunton Harold reservoir near Melbourne in Derbyshire. Just off the main car park there is an old windmill that no longer has any sails. It stands proudly looking over the reservoir. It probably gets photographed by virtually everyone that visits the area and I was no exception.

I was a glorious sunny day and I took the image below.

When I got it home and on to the computer I really liked the look of it but for some reason it seemed to lack a bit of punch so I started to mess around with it in Photoshop. Eventually I realised that it really lent itself to a black and white conversion. I exported it into Silver EFEX Pro and started to go through the various filters, I settled on the basic setting with an orange filter. I went back into Photoshop and remove the foliage on the left and the result  is the image below which I hope you'll agree is an altogether more pleasing image.

See you next time .......

A Walk in Derbyshire

Hi All,

Last Wednesday I took the day off work to go walking in the Peak District in Derbyshire. I initially wanted to go to the Nine Ladies Stone Circle in Stanton in the Peak but when I arrived there I found the batteries in the camera were flat. Very disappointing !!

I went back home put the D300s batteries on charge and grabbed my Nikon S3100 compact camera and headed out again. I was too late to go back to Stanton so I decided to try out a walk I'd seen in a book called 'Walks around Shirland and Higham. I decided to do walk number 3 in the book. This would take from Higham through Brackenfield, up towards Wessington and the finally back down into the Amber Valley and into Higham again. It was a great day out although it was a little too hot for my liking. 

Anyway, below are a few shots take along the way. The full compliment of shots can be found on my website at www.carrington-imagery.co.uk

Creating a Retro-Film-strip effect

Hi All,

I recently had the good fortune to photograph local band Whitemoor at a place called The Venue in Abbey Street, Derby. 

After I'd posted the pictures on Facebook and my website  www.carrington-imagery.co.uk  I was trying to decide what else I could do with the pictures. 

I decided to attempt to create a retro style film-strip featuring each member of the band in a different aperture. 

The first thing I needed was a 35mm style film strip template. I looked around on Google images, found one that was suitable and opened it in Photoshop CS5.

The next job was to select five images of the band. Bring them into CS5 and then using the free transform tool Ctrl + T reduce them in size until they fitted into the appropriate aperture. I also move each image in the layer stack until it was under the film strip template. Using the eraser tool I removed any overlapping pieces of each image as below.

After placing a white block over the parts of the images that protruded below the template I added a text layer with the name of the band in their particular font.

I decided I wanted a more grungy look to the film-strip so I added a checker plate texture to the image and used a hard light blend mode plus a reduction of opacity to 30% to get the look I wanted. 

I converted the resulting image to black and white using Nik's Silver Efex Pro

Then finally I brought the converted image into Nik's Color Efex Pro to give it a vintage tint.

The final image is below and was well received by the members of the band.