A year of "Serious Boy"

Time flies when you're having fun is a sh*t rule! My little boy is now three years old (going on 50!) and it sometimes feels like yesterday when he first came home from the hospital.

I've got lots of nicknames for Cullan, most of which are endearing and the worst of which is my "little monster" (which I actually mean affectionately because he's bigger than most of the kids he meets), but the latest is "Serious Boy". Despite (or because) his Dad struggles to put the camera down, Cullan generally avoids posing for photographs. As a result, my photograph collection of him looks like a moody documentary project with very little eye contact.

It's funny because he's a criminal comedic genius; this week I posed the question "Shall we wake Mum up with a kiss and a hug?", and it was met with the instant response "No... I'm going to get my drum!". Yet in most of his portraits he looks incredibly sombre, the kind of black-and-white picture a children's charity would love to use for fundraising.

It's one of the things I love about his character. His focus is intense when he's doing something, but he always takes time to look for fun. Here's a bit of both sides in the last 12 months.

 

Happy Birthday Serious Boy!
Dad :-)

Visiting Home

So another long absence from the inter-verse and some more photographs to show for it. I'm slowly making progress through my images but it's been a hectic couple of months to say the least. In that time I did manage to spend some time back home in Ireland.

It seems a bit odd to be calling Ireland 'home' when it's been almost 10 years since I moved to England. At the time I'd planned to travel much further than Birmingham, but I won't complain when I can fly to Dublin in less than an hour :)

For our latest trip home we decided to go by train and boat. It seemed sensible at the time given Cullan's love for all that appears in Thomas the Tank Engine. But we'd underestimated the enjoyment level of an eight-hour journey with a little man with an even shorter attention span.

I think we all enjoyed this last trip the most. Cullan enjoying his daily ritual of a lollipop and playing on mommy's iphone while waiting for his uncles to wake up. A trip to the beach, zoo and as much fun as he could have with everyone. Plus a day dressed as Spider-man (I wore my hulk t-shirt!).

As always, too little time and too few people caught up with. Maybe the lottery will be kind and next time can be longer!

Tom :)

Best of 2011 Pt. 1 - Family Pics

I've started off this year being a 'busy bunny' behind-the-scenes working on the website and some projects. Thought the best way to start the year would be to have a look at my photographs from last year and post the highlights.

These are my favourite photographs of 2011 taken with my family. Weddings and Studio photographs to follow...

This final picture is not an advert for childline, Cullan was more than content watching TV at the time. It's all down to the lighting :-)

Saol-ing Away

So the last week or so has seen me spend more time behind a desk than a viewfinder unfortunately :-( On the plus side though, I have managed a few strides in my 'behind the scenes' work and am getting very close to launching my photgraphy website.

One of the things I've been working on is my processing workflow. This is mainly for two reasons (three if you count also being a bit of a geek!). Firstly, everybody wants nice pictures but nobody wants their photographer to take forever working on their photographs (and as they say time is money). Secondly I want to create a recognisable style for my pictures and some consistency in colour, so when I do a series of images they look like they belong together.

I'm a fan of yellow filtered images, they give a nice skin-tone and warmth to an image. I've tried a few plug-ins for photoshop like Alien Skin Exposure 3, and while they offer a lot of options I couldn't really get the effect I wanted.

So with some freely available actions and a lot of DIY I've finally managed to create a custom action I'm happy with. I won't bore you with the details of it, but at least show you what I'm talking about. The image below gives a side-by-side comparison of two pictures of my little monster. The image on the left is the original and the one on the right has my custom action applied.

As you can see the photograph is now warmer with whites appearing a cream colour. The change to the colours brings out a lot of definition (like the blades of grass) and while it loses some of the lighter blues it makes the darker more defined (so the jeans look a lot more detailed and textured).

Here's a short series of my favourite monster at our local park. After running around like a lunatic for several minutes he went from chewing/hiding my lens cap to picking flowers for his mum... and then forgetting what he was doing and crushing them in his huge baby hands :-)

The image at the start of this post is of my brother Paul back in Dublin, with the deceptively calm looking family dog Daggit. I've applied the same processing to his picture but have really put it in for a bit of home-sickness therapy :-) Hope the sunny weekend is treating you all well!