A week ago I had the pleasure of shooting with Naomi. It was her first time in front of the camera and she did brilliantly

Happy New Year!!

Yesterday I did a shoot with my friend testing new lighting set ups. I have posted the new images in my portfolio.

I was having a look at the Poladroid website only to find out that there’s been a new version released It has several bug fixes and it now offers photos at 400 dpi which is perfect for printing. It still has all of it s old features of the different photographic effects and it still has the same sounds and the ability to “shake” the polaroid while its “developing”. So much fun for free – its great

If you want the software, then go here: Poladroid.

Have fun

Just the other day I found a website that lets you upload your own photos and create creepy button eyed portraits. They’re actually pretty cool if not a little bit macabre.

When you go to this site: Creepy Button Eyed Portraits,  you can upload your own photos or you can use your webcam to take a photo. From here  you can add the buttons, then download to your computer,  email it to someone, print, send to facebook or myspace.  One word of advice when you use this, make sure that the photos are relatively small in kb otherwise you will be waiting for a while for it to upload.

Here’s a few examples that I prepared earlier :

On the same site, there is a cute mouse circus where they do this:

How cute is this?

Have fun playing with the different sections of the site

Ahh the joys of having the day off and surfing the net! Feels great after having some many none stop go go go days.

During my surfing of various photography websites, I found this little gem hiding away. The website is Poladroid and you can download this nifty little program where it will turn any jpeg image to a polaroid photo. All you do is drag the image to the front of the camera icon, where it loads up and then makes a clicking noise and process the image. The image pops up on your desktop as a polaroid and then slowly develops! I have officially become addicted. While writing this I had already processed 30 images, with plans of processing a whole heap more. The best thing about this program is that it generates the effects of a polaroid randomly, so you always get a different effect which you are unable to predict.

To show you what I mean, here’s the same image done 4 times with the program.

The only downfall of this program is that after you have done 10 images, you need to shut it down and restart, but apart from that, it great!

What you can also do as the photo is processing is take snapshots like this:

This way you can get different effects of the same photo.

I have included a few of my favorite photos  for you to enjoy!

If you want the typewriter font that I have used to label the photos, you can download it here.

Have fun with the software ^_^

Phew has it been a busy start to the year!!!

A few restorations, a wedding, retouching jobs and websites to do and I don’t know where the time has gone!

I have finally added a restoration section to my portfolio which will be updated again shortly. You can check it out here.

There is a new site added to AllyKatDesign portfolio – superhealth-fitness.com.

This has been designed for personal trainer Matt D’Angelo, so that existing and new clients can benefit from his expertise. You can visit his site here.

Ausbeauties is getting a complete overhaul, with all the images being retouched by yours truly with a fresh new look that will showcase the girls and photography beautifully.

Peninsula Hapkido maybe getting a new look shortly as well, moving over to a Joomla cms, making it easier for the owners to update their site.

So all in all its been a busy start to the year, but I think it will just keep getting busier and busier as it gets along, but one of my new years resolutions is to update my website much more often!

I just recently ordered some new business cards and thought that I would go for something a little different.

I went to www.moo.com and ordered their mini cards.

I uploaded the above 7 different designs and put my details on the back of the card. Also couldn’t resist the little moo business card holder so I added that to my cart too.

Expecting to wait up to two weeks for the cards that were coming from the UK I was pleasantly surprised when they arrived in just over a week! I am extremely impressed with the quality of this company’s customer service! Its just the little things that make them fantastic, like little stickers on the packaging that say Yay! and Oooh Hello, we hope you like your new moo mini card holder. It does all feel very personalised.

It might also be the fact that I have had problems ordering from os companies (that shall remain nameless!) and have been disappointed with their printing quality, customer service and how long it takes for delivery.

I have already recommended moo to clients and I definitely have no qualms recommending it again!

Yay! I love moo!

I have finally upgraded to Photoshop CS3 after hearing so many good things and having another photographer friend telling me over and over again that it is sooo much better than CS2 which is what I have been using.

And it is so much better! With CS3 I found that I really didn’t have to think too much when it came to editing my photos as it pretty much did all the calculations for me. For example, when applying the channel mixer adjustment layer, photoshop already had done the calculations for me! Granted I must admit that the default was a little on the flat side, but all it took was a small tweak and it was all good!

What really amazed me, was how much better camera raw has become! As you can see in the example, I took a pretty average shot at the following settings:

Shutter speed: 1 sec

F-Stop: 5.6

ISO:200

Focal Length: 4.5

White balance: Auto

I opened the image in camera raw and began to play with it. As in the previous version, I was able to tweak the temperature, tint, exposure, brightness and contrast, but now I could also adjust the fill light, recovery, the blacks, clarity and vibrancy of the image. So my so so image of the wonderful Miss Eva, became a gorgeous image of her.

It did make me think that really, you don’t need to know how to take a good photo any more. Bad exposure? Doesn’t matter – photoshop can fix it!

It does make me a little sad as the art of good photography is just going down the toilet. Why do you need to know about exposure, f stops and white balance when photoshop can do it all for you?

My parting words to all the budding photographers out there will be: Still learn the basics as there is only so much photoshop can do for you.

I thought it was high time to move with the times and give my visitors a little more when they visit my site, so I have integrated a blog that will be filled with random thoughts about software, coding, new work that’s coming and just stuff.

There will be different tutorials available as well in the future.

So enjoy the new look