La Vallée des Singes

A definite monkey theme to this blog post! These are some of my favourite pictures from a recent trip to France and La Vallée des Singes: the Valley of the Monkeys. An amazing place where the monkeys are allowed to roam freely with some wonderful photo opportunities.

I love these Silverback Gorillas. They are amazing creatures: huge yet graceful and they walk through the forest with a definite authority.

Les Giants de Ciel

A couple of the best pictures from a recent trip to Les Giants de Ciel (Giants of the Sky). Admittedly, these are just birds standing still so technique doesn't really come into play. Nonetheless, being able to get so close to the birds and have an uncluttered background leads to some really striking poses. Check out my earlier post on removing reflections from the eyes.

In the eye of the beholder

I recently went to Les Giants de Ciel in Chauvigny, France. It was by far the best ever 'falconry' display I've ever seen with a fantastic variety of birds amidst a spectacular setting.

As is often the case, there were several birds dotted around the grounds and you could wander around and see the birds up close. I was really pleased with a picture of an eagle owl, until on closer inspection I could see myself reflected in its eye.

Before:I tried cloning out the reflection of me using Photoshop and whilst it worked to a degree, there was still a lot of clutter in the background, detracting from the picture. I found the best solution was to burn the pupil area. This darkens the pupil, obscuring the unwanted detail, but doesn't make it an unnatural pure black.

You can do this in a non-destructive manner:

• Create a blank layer on top of your main picture
• Set the layer to be "color burn"
• Set your colour to be black
• Choose a brush with a low opacity to gradually paint over the pupil to achieve the desired effect

Make sure you keep the catch-light.

My burn layer looks like this:

Now, if you want to tidy up your burning, you can reduce the impact by changing the layer opacity, or refine it using the eraser or select a white brush to vary the effect.

The final result (which I think works really well, but I am biased!):

Free Stock Photos

If you are looking for some amazing high quality photographs (even if they are not mine!), try www.istockphoto.com. If you use the link below you will get a bunch of free credits.

Newborn baby lightbox

After having a some very popular photos in my first newborn baby lightbox I thought it was long overdue that I setup a new lightbox of the newest addition to my family on istockphoto.

I love this expression on her face at bath time:



...and this one makes me smile as she can be a drama queen at times!



One can never have enough of cute hand and feet shots as they grow up so quickly:



But right now, she's fast asleep and I've got a rare chance to update some photos!

Creating Contact Sheets in Lightroom to Email

I took a few hundred photos last weekend for some friends with their new addition to their family and wanted to send them via email a contact sheet of all the photos so they could take a look before I spent some time editing them.

Lightroom 3 offers a really effective solution for this although it wasn't obvious at first that I could create a soft copy of a contact sheet instead of printing it out that was small enough to email.

The easy way to do it is
1) Select the photos you want to include on your contact sheet
2) Select Print from the menu
3) In the template browser (left hand side), select the contact sheet you want. My preference in this case was the 4 x 5 contact sheet: a good compromise between size of each picture and number of shots per page
4) On the right hand side, scroll all the to the bottom to the Print Job section
5) Where it says "Print to: Printer", click and select "JPEG File"
6) Click Print!

It will create one file per page.

An alternative would be to follow the above steps but write to a PDF file and send it. The only problem I've found with this is the size of the PDF file which is often too large to email.

Diamond

Today, I clocked up 25,000 downloads on iStockphoto, putting me into the 'diamond' category. It's hard to track which exact photo gets the credit but I think it's this take on online gambling:

Royal Flush hanging on a clothes line.

The Needles

It has been a while since my last update but raising children is taking more time than expected and I've got a whole host of photos just sitting waiting to be edited but no time.

But, a recent trip to the Isle of Wight gave me a great opportunity to take a few good shots and I love this one of The Needles glistening in the sun.

The New Toy

First pictures with my lovely new Christmas present: a Canon 5D MK II. I can honestly say it blows me away. For a start, it just feels better than my old 30D. It's almost like going from a point-and-shoot to your first DSLR all over again.