A Late Lunch by the Canal

The Lock Keeper's Café in Stroud

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Photography information: Above: Canon 5D II, with a Canon 85mm 1.8 prime lens, hand held. 1/1600 of a second exposure at f/1.8. ISO 100. AV (Aperture Priority) mode. 

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Wow! What a week! I've had several jobs back to back and it's not over yet! I have another lovely job tomorrow and my eldest baby girl is coming for a visit! I feel a shopping and baking frenzy coming on! :-D 

This week I finished up a big family shoot and have been working all week on a commercial job in which I had to hire several models for. I've been working all day every day from early morning until the wee hours of the night. It's a good thing I love my job! 

As a reward to myself for all the hard work I've been doing this week, I walked down into town for lunch. It was a late lunch as I was working hard to get some images out for the commercial job mentioned above. Where did I go? The Lock Keeper's Café of course! I love this place, and it's right at the bottom of the hill from where we live. People are always asking me where it is so I'll tell you. From town it's the other side of the train station over by the Wallbridge Lock/canal. That's the Hill Paul building behind it in the photo above. Just in front of it is the Cotswold Canal Trust Visitor Centre in the old Bell Hotel. 

The Lock Keeper's Café at Wallbridge Lock

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Photography information: Above: Canon 5D II with a Canon 50mm 1.4 prime lens. 1/1600 of a second exposure at f/1.4. ISO 100. Hand held.  AV (Aperture Priority) mode.  

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There's no parking so you'll have to make the short walk from town to it. It's well worth the walk though! And soon the foot path along the canal will be open again. I'm so looking forward to that as I love walking along the canal. 

Usually on Fridays you'll find the Friday Forum crew here at the Lock Keeper's. This Friday everyone had something else to do, so it was just me, and I was late. But not too late! They did serve me some lunch. I usually have a ham, cheese and tomato panini with a cappuccino coffee. But today I thought I'd treat myself to something different, so I had one of their specials for the day which today was a Tuna Noodle Casserole. Yummy!

Tuna Noodle Casserole

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Photography information: Above: Canon 5D II with a Canon 50mm 1.4 prime lens. 1/125 of a second exposure at f/2. ISO 400. Hand held. AV (Aperture Priority) mode.

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Today I had lunch alone all by my lonesome. I don't usually like eating alone and avoid it at all cost. But today down at the Lock Keepers it was quite nice. I did't feel all alone. I'm in there so often that the owner and crew know me quite well now. Also several people I knew were in and out and they stopped to say hi which was quite nice. 

I give the Lock Keeper's Café 5 out of 5 Stars! I highly recommend them for lunch or for just a coffee break with a friend. The staff are always friendly, the place is super clean, the food and coffee are fantastic, an over all lovely atmosphere. Oh and there's free WiFi and papers on hand to read. What more could you ask for? 

While I was there this little girl came for a visit. I couldn't resist asking for permission to take her photograph as she was just too cute! I had a talk with her father the other day and he said he'd be booking a family photo shoot with me soon. I'm looking forward to it. :-)

The low afternoon sunshine coming in through the large window on the right made for some lovely lighting and I waited until she was in this light to take her portrait. The two catch lights in her eyes really bring her eyes to life. The main light source being the large window I just mentioned above and the second catch light being made by the window in the door behind me. 

It's a shame about the window directly behind her head as this bright area in the photo is quite distracting. I burned it down some so that it wasn't so bright. I did notice this while I was taking the photo but there wasn't an immediate solution to the problem, not without loosing the lovely light on her face. 

Two year old Blue Eyed Beauty

The above photograph has had some extra post processing done to it. I did not exactly invent this look all by myself but the technique I used I developed myself. What I do is after normal processing I create a black and white adjustment layer. I really push the contrast of the B/W image then I lower the opacity of the B/W layer by 50% letting some of the colour of the original image come though. You wind up with a lovely desaturated image. Well I think it's lovely, my husband prefers the original full colour image which is below. 

Two year old blue eyed beauty (original)

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Photography information: Above: Canon 5D II with a Canon 50mm 1.4 prime lens. 1/800th of a second exposure at f/1.4. ISO 400. Hand held. AV (Aperture Priority) mode.

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(Please note: I know who the little girl is in this photo, I just didn't want to say who she was to the world wide web.)


On my walk home I noticed this sign by the canal. It tickled my funny bone so I photographed it.

CAUTION DEEP MUD

It's not every day you see this sign. Actually it's the first time I've ever seen it. If we'd seen a sign like this when we were kids you'd been hard pressed to keep us out of it. :-D In the background you can see the road construction continues up Bath Road in Stroud.

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Photography information: Above: Canon 5D II with a Canon 85mm 1.8 prime lens. 1/640th of a second exposure at f/1.8. ISO 100. Hand held. AV (Aperture Priority) mode.

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I leave you with a few photographs of flowers that I took on the way home today. All taken with the 85mm prime lens. Well and a camera too of course. ;-)

Street Portrait

Will

Canon 5D II, 85mm 1.8 Lens. Camera settings: f1.8, ISO 200, 1/800th second, AV mode. RAW image processed in Photoshop. 

Rarely do I go out without my camera and today was no different. We had some errands to run down in town so I grabbed my camera bags and rummaged through my lenses to decide which one to take. Wasn't a difficult decision, had already decided on one of two lenses before opened up the first bag. I'm in love with prime lenses and I've only got two of them. The Canon 50mm 1.4 and the Canon 85mm 1.8. The 50mm is my favourite, it practically lives on my camera. I love my zooms too, but they are big and heavy and for walking around the 50 is just perfect, small and light weight. Easily fits into a smallish bag. 

As you already know from above I decided to take the 85mm for a walk today. I took a few photos on our walk to town and back, but the above photo was by far my favourite. The shot wasn't planned, was just chance that we ran into Will. 

Usually I tell people to pay attention to their background when taking portraits. I tell them to steer clear of busy and bold background which mostly over power your subject. But I really loved these red phone boxes and I thought they'd make a great background for Will. While I was taking the photo my husband commented on the red phone boxes and thought they might not make a good background. With a different lens and broader crop I'd probably agree, but I really thought this would work. I was pleasantly surprised when I got home and found that it worked wonderfully. Thanks for posing for me Will! 

TammyLynn Photography - A surprise for Mum

Recently I had the honour of shooting two brothers and a little sister as a surprise Christmas present for their Mum. I love these sorts of shoots where the end portrait is to be a surprise gift for Mum. Here are a few of my favourite photos from this shoot:

This photo shoot was a gift from Dad, but I've also had the kids contact me directly to do a surprise portrait for their Mum! How thoughtful is that? What great kids! Here are a few of my favourite shots from that shoot from last year:

What lucky Mums!

I can honestly say that I truly love my job. :-)

TammyLynn Photography
Email TammyLynn

Beyond the Lens- Super Mom!

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

Featured on I am Gloucestershire 365's website under FYI Daily Blog on Thursday, 16 December 2010

This is one of my favourite photographs that I’ve taken this year, a portrait of my friend Lorca Simons. She’s an actress from Texas who grew up in theatre and, who like me, now calls Gloucestershire home.

My first title for this image was ‘Come Fly with Me’, but I later thought ‘Super Mom’ a better fit, as she is between 7 and 8 months pregnant in the photo.

Technically I’m breaking a composition rule with this image, but I like it anyway. The rule I’m breaking is the  left to right rule. As we read from left to right then images flow better left to right. She’s ‘flying’ from right to left. I could flip the image, and a lot of people do in situations like this, but I don’t like doing that. I think it makes the image look odd. That could be just because I know what it’s supposed to look like though.

I did not have this composition in my head when I took this photo. I saw this image later when the original photograph was coming out of the printer, and I saw it sideways. I thought, wow, it looks like she’s flying! So I did a quick edit to remove the floor, which was mostly black anyway, and rotated the image. I also added a bit more black space on the left and just below to help with the illusion that she was flying and to give her some space to fly into.

Let’s talk about space for a moment. Composition and how much space you have around your subject can greatly effect how the image looks and feels. Sometimes leaving a bit of space can add drama or tension to an image. Sometimes it’s just wasted space and needs to be cropped away. Sometimes cropping in really close and even cropping away some of your subject can add that extra bit of drama to your image. The general rule of thumb is when photographing wildlife or moving objects is to leave a bit of room for them to move into.