It’s often hard to come up with new ideas for a blog post that is always about Landscape photography. I love the genre and the art, but I also love learning new things.

For those that know me well, know that I started off dabbling in Macro, expanding to a little bit of Urbex (for a little while, haha) dabbling in Landscape and then finding that it was the genre I wanted to specialise in. I’ve never understood the science of studio shoots and lighting setups. I only know that i want to create.

Sure, I’ve had ideas on what I’ve wanted to create, but the money was spent setting up my Landscape kit, and that’s where it’s stayed. I still shoot little bits from other genres, but rarely blog about them. This is mainly due to the fact that I know I gained many followers for my landscapes, and I often wonder..

“…How many people know about the other stuff that I shoot?”

“… would they even want to know?!”

I came to the conclusion that I will share my recent projects with you all. I do however, use the disclaimer that it’s not my niche, so please do not expect Gallery-quality results. I’ve always had a secret love of typefaces, advertising and graphic design. I rarely get a chance to shoot, design and print an advertisement, so this was a very rewarding experience that I’m glad to have tackled.

What started as a small request on behalf of my local gym to take photos of the Personal Trainers training clients, for gym advertisements etc, became a little more than that. My wonderful partner is a PT, so I had direct access to one, to use in a concept I had wanted to shoot for a while.

The Brief: What started out as “take photos of us training clients”, turned into me suggesting this different spin.

I hadn’t seen any gym posters like this one, so it sounded like a good idea. So far, he’s gotten some great feedback about them. Most however, have become a little blind to the advertising around the place. Still, feeling proud that I managed to get them looking as good as they did, considering the other trainers have cut-pastes and inkjet printouts in less-clever forms.

Clever = Yes. Targeted = Yes.

First Challenge: Visualization:  Imaging how it was going to look. Picking a piece of equipment and the number of shots/poses. Figuring out where each one stood, what they were doing, what equipment they were using. Pretending where the last one was shot, so as to position the next… so on and so forth. For this reason, often about 10 poses were shot per piece of equipment, and then the most suitable (usually about 4-6) were used in the final image.

Second Challenge : Lighting : Urgh. Definitely not my strong point. I had to dig into the depths of my memory to remember low-light settings I used when shooting nightclub photos years ago. What appears normal to the human eye is actually rather dark to the camera. High ISO was needed, plus strategically placed lights to better-expose areas that would have otherwise been heavy shadows. Sunlight became an issue on one my images, with the time of day changing around us, I had to use a base image where it wasn’t so intense and throwing large areas of bleached-white patches that were distracting in the final result.

Third Challenge: Photoshop. Not my strong point and I’m still very much a training-wheels beginner! I knew the basics of layer masking and blending. I gave it my best shot. Combined with Lightroom, I found a way to produce the image that I had in my head. I am now reading a book about 2 inches thick on mastering CS5, so that I can get into more editing for all types of Photography.

Now that I’ve exposed all my weaknesses… Here are the final images all layered up.

These were relatively easy to put together in Photoshop!

^ This one is my personal favourite thus far…

^ The mirror work in this one was difficult, but fun to do…

So, what do you think?

Will take any offers of studio lighting tuition… I’d love to get things a little better with the varying lights~