Julie Watson Book Cover

One of my shots of Haweswater Reservoir's pump tower has been used as a component on the cover of Julie Watson's latest novel.

Kind of odd, seeing my work as a part of someone else's composite. And very cool.

The rights managed license was arranged by Tim Kahane at the endlessly inspiring Trigger Image.

Trigger Image are pretty unique for an image library in the fact that they have opted to develop a very definite house style and avoid the standard 'cover everything' approach of most stock libraries. It's dark, gothic, edgy, atmospheric and.. well, right up my street.

I was very flattered to be invited to join Trigger way back when they were just starting out. It's great to see them getting so many talented artists onto so many book covers these days.
Trigger represent the bulk of my fine art landscape work (yes, Tim, I will be sending you some new stuff very soon)...



My original shot looked a bit like this:

Scooter Shooter

The Final Composite Portrait

I like it when I find extra bonus shots in my library. This fantastically restored original Vespa scooter was wheeled into my studio for a green screen portrait session with actor/artist/filmmaker Andy Murray.

The purpose of the session was to make a retro-cool composite shot of Andy and scooter, relocated via the magic of Photoshop from a barn in Cumbria to Brighton seafront. The shot above was simply an exposure test I took while Andy was getting ready.

The backdrop was masked out in photoshop, the scooter's body panels were airbrushed a little to remove some of the unwanted reflections and the last stage was reducing the whole thing to black and white using an adjustment layer, set to reproduce the effect of a high contrast blue filter.

Original Shot

As a general rule, when shooting against a green screen, you want as much distance as physically possible between the subject and the screen. Get too close to the back drop and everything starts catching the awful reflected green light that spills off the backdrop. I've had problems with a horrible reflected green cast up-lighting subjects on previous green-screen shoots. Fine for a zombie shoot, but not much use for anything else, so I now tend to use white paper directly underneath the subject. It makes for a little more work making a mask for the lower part of the subject, but a whole lot easier than removing a green glow from under someone's chin.

New Things

So... we've just opened a new show at my gallery, next week I'll be launching a new website, in the next couple of weeks there will be a some new shoots happening in the studio... and today I'm starting a new blog. September is officially going to be The Month of New Things.