Urban Ex Photography

Urbex (or Urban Exploration) is the exploration of abandoned and derelict places. It is often seen as a risky affair, which on times involves trespassing, unsafe structures,broken glass and asbestos to mention a few. For many this is as far as it goes, but for a growing number it is also about photography. Many urbex photographers like to document the decay and dereliction that they find in various places, but for me it's about creating a dark image of a place that once was and that spooky atmosphere that can be achieved.

Talgarth  by Ross Summers

Due to this, my favourite locations tend to be asylums and hospitals (which becomes rather strange when you try to explain to people that you enjoy taking photos of abandoned mental asylums!). I personally shoot a lot of my urbex shots using a wide angle lens, tripod and HDR. The reasoning behind the HDR is that quite often, windows are boarded up or overgrown and natural light can pose a problem. HDR allows me to bring detail into what would otherwise be underexposed areas of my shots. 

 The Haunted hall by Graham Hazeldon

There are many websites out there offering forums and locations for urbex (28DaysLater, UrbexForums and SickBritain to name a few), but urbex locations can be found anywhere if you look hard enough. If you are thinking of trying urbex, I'd recommend that you take a friend with you or at the very least, let someone know exactly where you are going to be. Accidents do happen and safety should be your main concern, so I also dress for the occasion with
appropriate footwear and clothing.                                                       Talgarth Stairway, by Ross Summers

Talgarth Mental Asylum by Ross Summers

Also be aware that you may be breaking the law by visiting some urbex sites and with the rapid increase in interest in urbex, attention being paid to some of these sites has also risen. Many urbexers follow the ethos of "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints".

Ross Summers ( View Ross Summers' website )

Polaroid Montage using "Actions"

The idea of this technique, from "kennysarmy", is to create the effect of having an image made up of a monatge of separate polaroid photos. This is the image he created using the effect.

Polaroid Play by kennysarmy

This is an image of his daughter and she certainly did not stand that still while he took 30 or so polaroids and shhok his hand off in the process. No what he did was to use a photoshop action to create this illusion.

Here's how he did it. First of all he downloaded a photoshop action called polaroid from "addicted to design.com". This website has a number of actions for use with photoshop which can all be downloaded for free and is well worth a visit.

Actions are a kind of "macro" for photoshop. In other words they are a series of actions taken by a photographer which are recorded so that when you click play on that action photoshop will do everything that the person recording the action did, but on your photo. ( You can record your own actions to save time if there are any complicated sets of tasks that you repeatedly do). To install an action once you have downloaded it is not difficult and there is a simple step by step guide on addictedtodesign website.

Open one of your images ( just to be safe I would then save it immediately under a new name to avoid any chance of messing up your original and close it down again). In this example I have chosen a simple image to illustrate the ideas.

 

This one for example does not have a lot of detail to match up so it is an easy one to start with.

Then you should open the "actions" pallete from the "windows" tab. This will list all of the actions that you have available, including the polaroid one if you carried out the installation instructions properly.

You will see that the action "polaroid 600" is in the list. Make sure you have it highlighted and then click on the play traingle at the bottom of this window. This will prompt you to open the image. This time when the image opens it will have an area already highlighted. This is the part of the image that will be turned into a polaroid.

As soon as you click on this it will carry out the actions and create a polaroid based on this small selection. The polaroid in this example will look like this. 

What you need to do then is to save this as, say, "polaroid1". Then you just keep on repeating the whole thing, moving the selection to a new part of your original image before clicking on it. Then save each new polaroid. Keep this up until you have enough polaroids to cover the whole of the original image. Don't worry if they overlap - that's the beauty of this technique.

The next step is to open up a new, large blank image. This will be the canvass that you use to layer your polaroids onto.. From here on it is simply a matter of pasting each image onto this canvass as a new layer and positioning then so that they match up to the original ( or not if you are feeling a bit Picasso like ! ).

Finally - hey presto you have a polaroid monatge just like this one.

 

Thanks to Jeff  ("Kennysarmy" on flickr )

Presenting with a Border

One of the big things that makes a difference to the first impact of an image is the way it is presented. This is true whatever the image. This photo for example is presented as it is.

This one isn't too bad, but often if there are a lot of very light areas near to the border they will just get lost when presented on to a white background. The obvious thing to do is to get into a habit of adding a thin black border. Then it would look like this.

Clearly not a major difference but even here it will make the image stand out more on white. Obviously if you were putting the image into a gallery or a page with a black background them you would use a white border.

Both of these effects are easily done by selecting the whole image and then using the "stroke" option (in photoshop it is under the edit tab.) . Depending on the size of the image the storke can be various widths. A small image might only need 1 px while a very big one might be 4 px . Don't forget to choose the right colour and choose the "inside" option in the dialogue box.

You can ofcourse increase the size of the canvass and then use different sized rectangular selections to do this  and create a more complex border. This idea can be taken even further and you could produce a personalised style of border where the presentation really starts to make a statement. This is one that I use.

 

In this case I had a stock image that was the size that I wanted to save the finished image. This was filled with black and my name printed in white using a handwritten font. This was the signature element. I them copied the photograph I wanted to feature and pasted it onto a new layer in the black template image. A text layer was used to print the title of the image in white and the whole lot saved with a new title.

The same thing can be done with a white template just as easily. as this example shows. In this case becasue it may go onto a white page I added a thin 1 px stroke to the white template layer so that the whole thing is separated from the background white when put on a page.

An increasingly popular variant on this is to add a think black strip across the top and bottom of landscape images, such as in this case.

The idea of a white border does not have to be so formal. You could use a mask to give the border effect. In this one, for example I used a template where I had painted a black template onto a white background. This was then pasted into a new layer on the orinigal photo. Set the layer style to "lighten and this is the result.

 

The template used was this.

You can use all sorts of border templates to get the same result. Obviously this will be the opposite if you want a white border - i.e. you create a template with the black on the outside of the border layer. here are some more examples.

 Another thing that you can do to create different borders is to create the feeling that the image is on a raised canvass. This is achieve by using the layer style tab and selecting emboss. You can play around with the setting until you get th effect you are after. Here is an example of the effect, but there are lots more variations on this theme you can get by experimenting.

 

I will just give one final example of things you can try to give you images a different, but "finished" feel. This one was created by selecting a rectangular area of the image and then inversing the selection ( so that it had selected the area outside the rectangle. Then you remove the colour from the selection. Repeating this on another copied layer means you can create double borders.

The good thing about trying to devise a style for your images is that there are lots and lots of variations and yet no "right" one. You just get something that works for you.

Peter Leech

( You can get some examples of border templates to try these ideas out by going here )

Using Masks in Photoshop

06    Using masks in Photoshop - an introduction Author: Khurrum

This tutorial is for people who are just starting out Photoshop or for the people who have been using Photoshop but don’t know how to use Layer Masks.

The basics of Layer masks are incredibly simple but very powerful.

As always we’ll go over a simple tutorial that will quickly teach you how to use Layer Mask Basics. I think that actually doing something is the best way to learn. At least doing some thing is much, much better than just reading about it.

To view the rest of this tutorial please click here

Simple Introduction to HDR

HDR or High Dynamic Range Photography is getting quite common, but what exactly is it. This video explains the idea in a nutshell, using examples.

An HDR shot of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff

Now take a look at the workshop video

Taking Photos at Night

Night time can be a great time for taking shots in towns and cities. In fact even if it has been grey and rainy all day the reflections in the wet surfaces can make night time photography even more spectacular.

But there are problems. You need to do more than simply put your camera into auto mode and press the button. You will need to set manual features to get the best results. This video from DSLR Tips.com explains in simple terms exactly how to do it.

Composition Rules OK !

This video is by Jeff Dunas of Fontana Knowledge. He keeps things simple, but gives clear examples of how things work and why, evidenced by examples of his work.

The areas covered include

• The Rule of Thirds
• Use of Perspective
• Lines and Patterns
• Balance
• Simplicity, and
• The Divine Proportion

Take a look, even if you think you already know all of this. If you don't -then be prepared for a step change in your photographs.