Brighton Portraits

When we went to Brighton I decided to take some portraits. I was trying to take them slyly. My reason for this was to capture some natural images and when faced with a camera people put on an act. To capture close up images I used my 70-300mm sigma lens. Some people did look at me whilst taking their photograph however they are still natural expressions they haven't changed their expression to suit the way they would rather be shown.

Some of my images looked like they needed a bit of sharpening. In camera RAW I added a bit of clarity to the images. When I opened the image in photoshop the first thing I did was duplicate my image as not to ruin the original. I then went to filter, sharpen, unmask. I changed the amount setting to between 60-70% depending on each image, when I was happy I clicked ok. I then added a layer mask, making sure black was my foreground colour and white was the background colour (White= where the image has been sharpened and black= where has been unsharpened). Then using a soft brush i painted over the areas i wanted to un-sharpen, I didn't want the effect to be too dramatic so I had my opacity on around 80%. I then decided I wanted this series of images to be in black and white. To convert these images I simply went to image, adjustments, black & white, the reason I chose this method was because it gave me complete control over each individual colour within the image. To add a bit more depth and contrast to the images I then went to image, adjustments, gradient map and made are black and white was selected. I did this because when i adjusted each colour I felt the image still looked a bit grey. If I felt like they needed it I adjusted the levels to add a bit more depth, I did this until I was happy.

The next time I do a project like this I will make sure I have better control of my focussing/ camera as a lot of my images didn't look as sharp as I hoped for. It was quite windy when I took these images and I now realise that to get what I was trying to achieve I should have used a tripod. Apart from this I am happy with how my images turned out and I am looking forward to doing another project like this.