This is a shot through the viewfinder of my good friend Khaled Termanini's Mamiya. It was taken down at the Dubai creek, and while it's not quite the shot I was aiming for I did think it was worth posting. That said, when I'm over there again in March I think I'll borrow his camera and try it again.

In other news ...

I'm running another Creating Dramatic Images workshop in Blackpool in August (11th and 12th). Take a look at the link if you think you might be interested in coming along. If not, click the link anyway and take a look at some of the shots we produced during the last workshop (the gallery's about half way down the page). There's some great images.

http://www.chromasia.com/training/events/blackpool_cdi_8_12.php

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11.30am on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 43mm f/4.0 1/320 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none none

When I spotted this guy he was smiling, and when I asked him if it would be OK if I photographed him he nodded and continued to smile. As soon as I pointed my camera at him though he adopted this rather serious expression and, despite my best efforts, stared fixedly into the middle distance for the time it took me to take a few shots. When I showed him the images he smiled.

So, hardly the most natural of portraits. And, while it would have been nice if his expression had matched the figure in the background, I think the contrast works OK too. Let me know what you think.

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10.51am on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 64mm f/5.6 1/50 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none no

This was taken from the roof bar of the Four Points Sheraton hotel on Sheik Zayed Road in Dubai, the location from which I shot one of my favourite night shots in Dubai. Unlike that shot though, which was all about capturing as much detail as possible, this one was an attempt to create a slightly different impression: shallow depth of field, the reflections in the glass, and so on. I don't think it's anywhere near as successful as the previous image but, as an alternative way of capturing the location, I am pleased with how it turned out.

Let me know what you think.

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7.47pm on 15/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/2.8 1s aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 1x1

This was taken down at the souqs in Dubai, and while I have no idea what the guy on the left was thinking, I do like his expression.

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10.20am on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 35mm f/4.0 1/80 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor

This is a shot of the Jumeirah Beach Residences taken from the lowest frond of the Palm in Dubai while I was running my Shoot The City, Day & Night workshop that I ran at the GPP Fotoweekend training event in November. It's also the image that GPP are using to advertise the next occurrence of this workshop at GPP 2012. If you think you might be interested in attending, take a look at all the workshops that will be running this year. It's always a great event, but this year's line-up is truly fantastic.

In other news, if you haven't had a chance yet, head on over and take a look at my new photography and post-production blog. There's only one post so far, detailing what I'm going to be including, but I've also asked for some feedback from you, particularly in terms of what you'd like me to include. So have a look at my first post and let me know what you think.

And finally, I have a few one-to-one training dates coming up – February 24th, May 17th and May 21st–24th. If you're interested, take a look at our events page and one-to-one training page for further details.

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6.00pm on 15/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 35mm f/9.0 30s manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

This was taken from the roof of the Executive Tower B in the Business Bay area of Dubai when I was shooting with Catalin Marin back in November. It's not as striking as the other two shots I posted from this location (see here and here), but I am pleased with it, not least because it's a different take on a familiar location.

Let me know if you think it works.

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5.15pm on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/8.0 1/60 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz Detail minor rotation

While I don't think this is quite as strong as yesterday's image I was drawn to take this follow-up shot for two reasons. First, I was intrigued by the fact that the guy on the left seemed to be sending messages (or similar) on two phones at the same time, entering data on both phones at much the same time. Second, and less obviously: for the few minutes we were photographing the four men (see yesterday's image for the whole group) this guy concentrated on his phones, resolutely ignoring me, Bobbi, Khaled and Syl ... well, right up until this point, when he glanced up and smiled at Bobbi before getting back to his phones.

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10.16am on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 70mm f/5.0 1/40 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none none

New Year's resolution #2: shoot more people!

One of the things that Bobbi and I invariably do when we're in Dubai for a GPP event is head down to the souqs for some shopping, food and photography. Bobbi normally buys enough pashminas to clothe the entire eastern seaboard of the US, a pile of safron and spices the size of a small shipping container, while simultaneously managing to charm photographs from even the most recalcitrant of the people we come across.

While she's doing all this I tend to wander around shooting random bits and pieces, but I do make the effort to shoot people too. I don't find it as easy as Bobbi, and my hit-rate of people who are willing to be snapped is quite a bit lower, but I didn't have any trouble with this group of guys. Well, other than the guy on the right who was watching Bobbi :)

As always, let me know what you think.

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10.15am on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 38mm f/5.6 1/40 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none none

This was taken from the roof of the U-bora Towers building in the Business Bay area of Dubai, and while it's not the prettiest of the skylines you can find in Dubai, I did think it was worth sharing. As always, I'd be interested to hear what you think.

On a totally different matter, I'm really pleased to be able to say that we now have enough people signed up to run our Venice Carnival Photo Tour (14-19th February, 2012), so we're good to go. It's been quite a while since I visited Venice – I shot a wedding there in 2009 – so I'm really looking forward to getting back and having the time to shoot the city and Carnival. It's going to be a great trip :)

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1.21pm on 15/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/11.0 1/250 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

I was browsing through Catalin Marin's blog and came across this shot, taken while we were both waiting for the sun to set so we could shoot the Burj Khalifa at night (see this image). I then realised that I'd also taken a very similar shot but hadn't selected it for any subsequent work. Anyway, having seen how well Catalin's worked out I thought I'd give it a try, and am glad I did. I'm pleased with this one.

As always, let me know what you think.

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5.23pm on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 200mm f/8.0 1/50 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

When I first visited the desert I had a variety of expectations regarding what I would find: tranquility, untouched dunes running from horizon to horizon, the odd camel or two meandering around, crystal clear blue skies, and so on. It's not like that though, especially on the weekend, when the whole of Dubai and Abu Dhabi take to their quad-bikes, dune-buggies and 850bhp monster racing machines to bash their way around the largest dunes they can find.

We did try to avoid them – the big dune you can see in the shot below, which was about 500m away from where we based ourselves, was deserted when we arrived – but within half an hour or so several convoys of vehicles arrived and started racing up and down it.

Once they got bored with that they started circling around the dunes we were photographing, which was part irritating, part photo opportunity. I didn't get too many shots of them I was happy with, but did like this one: a shot of Robert (one of the students for my Lanscape Photography workshop at the recent Gulf Photo Plus FotoWeekend event) risking life and limb to get the shot :)

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3.00pm on 18/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/7.1 1/2500 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

I'm now back from my travels, having had a great time in Istanbul and Dubai. I'll write more about both trips over the next few days, but in the meanwhile I thought I'd post this one. It was taken last week, before the start of the GPP FotoWeekend, and was taken from the roof of the Executive Tower B in the Business Bay area of Dubai while I was out shooting with my good friend Catalin Marin. I should also add that my inspiration to take this one came from Catalin's shot of the same scene that he posted back in September. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to shoot from the same location too.

Anyway, more on both trips soon ...

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5.57pm on 14/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/16.0 30s manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

Officially the Gulf Photo Plus FotoWeekend event begins today, but I started yesterday with the first occurrence of my new Shoot the City workshop. This is a one day shooting workshop covering three locations: the Ubora building at Business Bay (where this shot was taken), Palm Jumeirah at sunset, then the Four Points by Sheraton hotel on Sheik Zayed road for some night shooting. This is the first time I've run a shooting only workshop - I normally end up teaching at least some post-production during my GPP workshops - so it was great to see that this one turned out to be popular enough to schedule an extra occurrence.

As for this image: it's a shot of my extremely capable and talented assistant, Khaled Termanini.

Let me know what you think.

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2.12pm on 15/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 35mm f/8.0 1/640 aperture priority -1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

This was taken during my landscape photography workshop at this year's Gulf Photo Plus training event back in March, as an aid to demonstrating how to pre-visualise an image based on its post-production. And if you take a look at the original you'll see why this is a good image to use: there's not much merit in the original, and very little apparent detail. With the addition of a couple of curves though, one of which is almost vertical, the latent detail in the scene becomes much more apparent. The end result isn't exactly a masterpiece, but it is a whole lot better, and does illustrate the importance of thinking through how to transform a scene, rather than simply accepting it at face value.

If you're interested in the specific steps I went through to post-process this one I've added it as this week's Mini-PSD.

On a related note ...

We're offering a 20% discount on our tutorials to celebrate the 4th of July: on our annual subscriptions, lifetime memberships, and lifetime membership upgrades. If you're not currently subscribed to our tutorials then this is definitely worth checking out as we'll be increasing the price of our annual subscription on August 1st – our first major price increase since 2007. If you already have an annual subscription, or take one out before now and then, don't worry, it will remain at £25.00 for the lifetime of your subscription.

We're also discontinuing our lifetime memberships. Again, if you already have one, or take one out before August 1st, it will remain valid, but we're not going to be selling these, or any lifetime membership upgrades, beyond the end of this month.

In short then, it's a great time to sign up as our tutorials will never be this price again!

For further details, take a look at our main tutorials page:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

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2.36pm on 10/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 50mm f/5.6 1/40 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 1x1

This is Josen, one of the students who took my Landscape Photography workshop at the recent Gulf Photo Plus training event. He was a joy to photograph as it was almost impossible to take a bad shot of him :) It's also the image I've used for this week's Mini-PSD.

In other news ...

You may have noticed that I haven't posted much over the last week, but I have been busy: working on coding some new pages and templates for our training site. It's not finished yet, so I can't link to any of the new content, but we will be launching some of the new pages soon. Specifically, a set of pages describing our face-to-face workshops, one-to-one training, and our plans for the future. As soon as they're ready I'll let you all know :)

Alternatively, if you want some more immediate updates, keep an eye out for my posts on Facebook and Twitter.

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4.11pm on 10/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 68mm f/8.0 1/160 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none no

As I've mentioned before, I have a folder of images on my laptop called 'possibles'. It contains images that I've processed but, for one reason or another, haven't blogged: normally because I'm not entirely happy with the way they turned out. This one is no exception.

It was taken in February 2010 from the Palm Jumeirah (Dubai), while shooting with my good friends Catalin Marin and Robin Nichols, and when I first processed it I wanted to create an image with a lot more contrast. No matter what I tried though I kept coming back to a version that looked very similar to this one, simply because nothing else seemed to work.

Anyway, at the time I decided that I wasn't all that keen on the result, but didn't want to discard it, so confined it the 'possibles' folder. Today though, when I looked at it again, I decided I liked it a lot better. I have made a few minor changes, in terms of tidying up some masking errors and bringing out more of the fine scale detail using Topaz Detail, but in all other respects it's much as it was when I processed it last February.

Let me know what you think.

In other news, as I mentioned when I posted my last entry, we're currently offering 25% off our Photoshop tutorials, so if you've been thinking about updating or improving your post-production skills now would be a great time to sign up!

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3.05pm on 27/2/10 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 25mm f/14 1/20 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz Detail minor transformation

This is a follow-up to this image, a shot of this falconer and his falcon taken at the Bab Al Shams resort, near to Dubai.

I underexposed by two stops to create the silhouette and used an aperture of f/16 to create the star-burst effect.

The post-production was also relatively straightforward: I shifted the white balance in Camera Raw to cool down the image, added a few curves to increase the contrast, and then transformed the image to make a slight change to the composition.

In other news ...

Get a 25% discount on our Photoshop tutorials
From now until midnight (UTC-8) on the 26th of April you can get a 25% discount on the first year’s payment of an annual subscription, our lifetime membership, or our lifetime membership upgrade. All you need to do to take advantage of either offer – and gain access to all our existing tutorials, Mini-PSDs, Critique Slot Screencasts, members’ forum, and our current members’ offers – is enter the coupon code below in the box at the bottom of the sign up screen. Have a happy Easter :-)

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/online/

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5.44pm on 13/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 57mm f/16 1/2000 aperture priority -2 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

This is a shot from the roof bar of the Four Points Sheraton hotel in Dubai, taken a couple of days after this year's Gulf Photo Plus training event. It's also the image I've posted as this week's Mini-PSD as the processing was quite interesting, i.e. I used 15 separate Curves adjustments. The first of these provided a (mostly) global adjustment to the contrast, the 15th toned the image, while the other 13 altered specific areas of the image, particularly the various buildings. The reason for this, as you can see if you take a look at the original, is that there was quite a lot of atmospheric haze (in the form of low clouds), so the buildings all look soft. By selectively amending the contrast, particularly for the buildings or the left, I was able to make the scene as a whole look a lot clearer. This sounds like a complicated process, but it was just a case of working with each building in turn, then generating a mask to block the effect from the rest of the image.

On a related note, quite a few of you have requested yesterday's image as a Mini-PSD, but I'm going to use if for a Creative Workflow tutorial instead. I'll be working on this over the next couple of days so hope to publish it by Thursday at the latest.

Anyway, tutorial stuff aside, I am pleased with this one but would like to hear from you too.

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6.52pm on14/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/13.0 15s shutter priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

I'd like to dedicate this one to my good friend Bobbi Lane, a) because it was taken during our recent Faces and Places workshop in Oman, and b) because she's having a harder time than she deserves. Here's hoping for a brighter tomorrow.

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4.58pm on 17/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/5.6 1/250 aperture priority -1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor rotation

This is the third and final shot that I'll be posting of the interior of this Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane – a shot of the lower section at the front of the plane (visible in this shot of Jason's) – and in some ways it's my favourite of the three. As with my previous entry it's also an HDR, constructed from a bracketed sequence of 11 exposures with a 1 EV spacing using Photomatix Pro. And again, if you take a look at the original you can see the tone mapped image and small thumbnails of all 11 exposures.

Let me know which of the three you like best: this one, the shot of the cockpit, or the view from inside the tail section.

As I mentioned, while this is probably my favourite of the three it does pose a problem, as portrait format images are never easy to blog: either I post a version that's a lot smaller than my usual images (not a great solution for a detail-rich HDR image) or you need to scroll the page. Neither solution is ideal, but in this instance reducing the size didn't work well.

On a related note: as those of you who have followed me since the early days already know my switch from academia to professional photography and training was largely accidental: as my blog became popular I started getting work as a photographer, to the point whereby it became financially viable to swap careers. Along the way I've continued to treat my blog as a place to showcase my best work, experiment with different techniques, document the lives of my children, and so on. In short my blog is the primary way in which I output my images ... and it's a great venue with a wonderful audience :-)

The only negative consequence – because I take photographs with the blog in mind – is that I rarely shoot in portrait format, simply because I know that the images will be difficult to display. I guess this isn't a huge issue, but it does mean that I limit myself when I shoot, and while I don't think there's an easy solution to this I am conscious of the fact that I probably miss quite a few great shots, simply because I see and blog the world in landscape format. As I said, I don't think there's an easy solution, but if you do have any thoughts, let me know.

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3.25pm on 15/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye f/11.0 11 exposures (1/125 to 8s) manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Photomatix Pro Photoshop CS5 none minor warping