Jeremy Webb Photography

https://www.thehewettacademy.org/107/news/post/92/students-receive-inspiring-workshop-from-local-professional-photographer-jeremy-webb

Students Receive Inspiring Workshop from Local Professional Photographer, Jeremy Webb On Wednesday 4th October, Year 10 students at Hewett Academy had an incredibly inspiring workshop with local professional photographer, ...

Such great students these (permissions given)exploring Light at Hewett Academy

Building space: In the studio with Hiroshi Sugimoto Ahead of his major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery, Sugimoto discusses “the consciousness of space” with Marigold Warner, on a tour of his Tokyo complex

Working with Amy Lee and her Hewett Academy Yr 11 group, this was a beautifully-crafted set-up lit by 2 students using a bit of a ropey old light box, tbh :-D but I genuinely believe you can get great light from anywhere. It all depends how you use it, exploit it, manage it, change it, understand its characteristics and its transforming power.

Their shot (from the front) was way better than my grabbed shot here, as I passed by. BUT post-capture I played with a number of simple Photoshop hacks that student groups can easily employ, when "rushed" or poor technique means you end up with an image packed with possibility and potential, but needing a little extra and some kind of kick, to really bring that image into life. Permissions given, the edits below included:

Tighter vertical crop, to exclude the subject and reduce, reduce, reduce. Get to the heart of the image, for me the strong profile and the soft backlight.

Rotated the image slightly (anti-clockwise). This edit - along with the crop - made the expression seem much more dignified and peaceful and self-posessed somehow. ALL emphasis now on the profile while starting to think about the emotional warmth of the image without "crossing the line" of overblown and unnecessary edits.

Edit out (Clone Stamp tool) the hair strand under chin, (distracting) which is easy enough to do given the amount of light, even tone in the space surrounding it.

Big scratches (marked here in red) can be removed using the Spot Healing Brush tool, working at close magnification with a brush size just slightly larger than the width of the scratch lines being removed.

Around 85% of any image editing work I do is literally ONE simple task - exercise the mid-tone slider in the Levels dialogue box. Don't touch the shadow/black or highlight/white sliders - just the mid-tones. This allows you to effectively increase or decrease the light as if you were correcting the original exposure. I tried raising the exposure slightly, and decreasing it. Ended up deciding to lighten it revealing beautiful warm tones captured in the pixels but unseen in its original darker exposure.

(remember also that really quick, simple editing tools are built into camera phones, for try-outs, example here shows attempt to cool down the image with easy edit tools in iPhone)

Finally, using the Eyedropper tool, I selected the most saturated yellow I could land on from the exposure-lightened and cropped version, and using the Gradient Tool on an empty layer, dragged a horizontal line from L to R across the frame to make a warm yellow gradient above Background.

The Layer Style was foreground-to-transparent - which just means that it fades from (foreground box) colour to nothing at all, very gradually. I put this layer into Soft Light (blending modes in Layers palette) and it created the lovely rich creamy yellow background that also softens the light further AND conceals many of the remaining slight marks and scratches on the surface of the light box. Gives something of a glow too.

Final edit: cropped square (Crop tool, 1-1 square to lock width and height) and there's the album cover :-)

Thank you students, and Hewett Academy for your hard work and focus. Look forward to seeing more of your work again soon, inc any light painted portraits \O/ (that was SOME session!)

Incredible what you can do in a 2 hr workshop :-O Thanks for inviting me thehewettacademy.org These students created some stunning portrait work, using found light, available light, soft light, hard light, coloured light, top light, side light - using light boxes, soft boxes (continuous lighting), slide projectors, overhead projectors, and occasional props linked to their ongoing project work. Absolutely Brilliant 👊🤩(permissions approved)
https://www.instagram.com/hewettart/

Artists and image makers, want to find out if your work has been deeply-learnt and data scraped? I've been multi-plundered, there's pages and pages of it

Focussed fun is what I'd call it :-) working here with Yr 10 & 11 students at Marshland High and their dedicated art teachers last week - exploring practical lighting techniques, and pushing ideas hard. Also looked at colour, texture, composition, tone control, slow exposure, dramatic expression, abstraction, distortion and a whole lot more. There's SO much learning goes on, when you can set out a creative playground as their blank page. Interesting to see how many of the students explored so many of those things with so much curiosity. Exhausted trying to keep up with all their wonderful outcomes :-)

Norwich University of the Arts has achieved the highest recognition, a Gold rating, in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). It is the only specialist creative arts and design University to earn a triple Gold TEF rating 🏆

https://norwichuni.ac.uk/about-us/news/gold-for-norwich-in-the-teaching-excellence-framework/

Photography Workshops &
Artist Development Days

Norfolk & Norwich Artists / /Art Teachers / Fine Artists / \O/
Bring your photography ideas to a Photo-Synthesis Workshop
And make it happen, sign up for a practical, fun, skills-building Saturday:

7th October
4th November OR
25th November

https://www.artpocket.co.uk/jeremy-webb---photosynthesis-workshops.html