Monday 30 June 2014

Skateboarding with Phil

I met Phil in my second year of university, he had transferred to Photography and Video after previously studying graphics; I remember we were all astonished to see his work (it's amazing.) Nearing the end of term I was getting a bit bored of all the book work we had to do, Phil had said he would be out skating for the day, so I decided to join him. 

I wouldn't say I'm an expert at sports photography, I'm far from it, but I will try anything and Hd been inspired by his passion for skateboarding to try out some new things! I also wanted to try some off camera flash, I used a 1-2 flash set up for these pictures, 2 Canon 430ExII (off camera) and my Canon 70-200mm lens.





See More at My Facebook Page



Friday 27 June 2014

Perhaps the most useful thing I've learned

Before University I had no idea what RAW was, I shot everything in Jpeg, now I'm going through all my old pictures I shot during college and I'm wishing I had known about the advantages of RAW.

So for all of you beginners who are just getting into photography here's some advice,

SHOOT RAW!!

If that hasn't pushed you into shooting RAW then here are some of the advantages,

  1. The main reason most photographers shoot RAW is the files written to your memory card are uncompressed, which basically means using the right software, either Photoshop or Lightroom, you can access that uncompressed data and utilise the data and improve the tonal range of your images.
  2. You should try to get it right in camera but if it happens and you over expose your images, you can adjust your exposure in post production, if you over exposure by 1 or 2 stops you can bring details back in photoshop or lightroom, this comes in very handy when shooting weddings which are both indoors and outdoors
  3. Editing RAW in photoshop is a non destructive form of editing, when you edit a jpeg any editing you do to the jpeg file will induce digital noise, when editing a RAW file, you are not editing the original file, this way you can edit the original RAW file a million times and still produce a high quality image.

These are some of the pros to shooting RAW. here are some of the cons:

  1. The file has to be edited, you can't just print a RAW file, it has to be edited to get the best results
  2. As RAW is an uncompressed file format, the files written to the memory card are bigger than Jpeg, sometimes even 3 times bigger.
  3. When shooting in a burst mode you will have a slower frame rate when shooting RAW, this is becausee of the bigger file sizes.

I hope this has shed some light on the Subject of RAW for you and will help you move into shooting RAW more (If you haven't already started!)



JPEG vs RAW

As you can see from the pictures the JPEG straight out of the camera is quite dull,  however with RAW file because the data is uncompressed you can make it more appealing to the eye.



If there are any subjects you'd like to hear about tweet me @JamilTeja

Stay Tuned for more Photography tips!

Wednesday 25 June 2014

Portrait Session with Tammy

Portrait of Tammy

Tammy has been a friend of my sisters' for many years now, a few years ago she started to move into part time modelling so I decided to ask her if she wanted a portrait session, she said yes! 

We were both home from university over the Summer, if I remember correctly it was the Summer of 2012 and I had been inspired to test out some new poses and some off camera flash set ups.

We went out on a beautiful Summers day, the weather was perfect, we took a stroll through Bournemouth Gardens and found a few interesting spots. some brides and benches and some long reeds.

I used a 1 light set up for these images as it was a really sunny day and I just needed to throw a bit of light into her face.








I am really pleased with the images we captured on the day, Tammy was such a pleasure to work with, she was very friendly and took direction well which made my job so much easier!

if you would like to see more of my work check out My Facebook Page

Saturday 21 June 2014

Free Range: 1 Year On

A Year Since Free Range

I can't believe it's been A YEAR since I displayed my work at the Free Range exhibition in London, ONE WHOLE YEAR!! Where has the time gone? It feels like it was just last week I was in the basement in Portland Building deciding what size to print my final images. (I decided to go for A1 Prints.)


The 12 of us with Neil and Nick on the Opening Night of Free Range 2013.


I bet some of you are wondering, what is Free Range? 
Basically Free Range is an annual Exhibition held in London where Third Year University Students studying The Arts, they exhibit their third year work to the general public in the hope their work will catch the eye of prospective clients/companies interested in hiring them. 

I remember we had to raise around £6000 to rent the space, (the smallest space, the bigger spaces were more expensive,) and an additional £2000 for producing our advertising material. 

In Hindsight I would say if I were asked to do it again, I would not due to the energy that goes into fundraising the £6000 - (We held many bake sales, an auction, a couple of movie nights and a 10K Run, to raise they money,) although these were all fun to partake in they distracted me from my work. Instead, I would have focused on my work and taken that £500 I had to raise and invest it in a new lens or camera.


Me with My Work



However I am grateful for having experienced the trials and struggles that we faced when Fundraising and also the satisfaction of seeing my work being exhibited in a big exhibition. 







Friday 20 June 2014

What's in My Bag?

I've been watching "Whats in My Bag" videos since Chase Jarvis posted his revolutionary version all those years ago back in 2007, it was a real inspiration to me to see what this amazing photographer was using to produce his images, okay he was shooting Nikon, but the equipment he was using wasn't any different to the equipment that you could buy in the shops; what he was doing with that equipment is whats important; I believe it doesn't matter what equipment you use, you can create great pictures with even the simplest of camera gear.





So please Like, Comment and Share, and if you guys have enjoyed this video
and want to see more please subscribe to my channel!

Thanks for watching :)










Thursday 19 June 2014

Brazilian Party Fashion Session

Since the football is in Brazil this year, My sister and her friends from university were producing a magazine article on Brazilian Fashion, they had everything sorted out but their photographer cancelled last minute. So Me being a great older brother hoped on a train and came down for the day.

The group decided to use a Brazilian themed restaurant just outside Waterloo Station, this was a great idea as it was covered in greens and yellows and blues and the clothes they had picked out worked well to stand out from the background. 

There was a big window where we were shooting, letting lots of light into the room and I used 2 flashguns to just add a bit of flash to make the subjects just pop.

We had the restaurant booked from 10-1pm and we shot a variety of pictures, here is a small selection.   








See More at www.JamilTeja.co.uk












Tuesday 17 June 2014

How to get High

I was recently watching a few photography videos looking at different ways of capturing exterior shots of the wedding venue and one technique stuck with me. I was inspired to take exterior shots from a high perspective, this can be useful as taking pictures from a 'normal' perspective can be slightly boring and you may not capture the true atmosphere of the event; by raising the camera up and gaining that high perspective you have a better chance at capturing the entire location and all the decorations with an interesting perspective.


For this shot I used my Canon 7D and my sigma 10-20mm f3.5 lens at 14mm.
1.500 at f11 at ISO 640.


For this shot I used my Canon 7D with my Sigma 10-20mm f3.5 lens at 12mm
1/500 at f13 at ISO 800.




How to get a HIgh Perspective?

Theres a lot of talk about utilising drones and other high tech equipment, and if you can afford that,
go for it! if you are looking for a cheap alternative, I have found using a monopod with a lever head to be just as good for getting a high up perspective (pending on how high up you want to get.)


Photography tip 1: when handholding the camera you will want to shoot with your shutter speed atleast double the number of your focal length, so at 50mm you wanna shoot at 1/125 or higher, but when using this technique you want to shoot at at least 1/500 to stop any camera shake.






Photography tip 2: How to trigger the shutter from down on the ground, you have a couple of options, you can buy an intervalometer and set it to take a burst of 10 pictures or so until you get it right, some newer cameras come with an intervalometer built in which is always handy! However, I have found it useful to set up my Auto Exposure Bracketing use this with a 10 second delay gives you enough time to prop the camera up as high as you want and then the camera will take 3 pictures, 1 correctly exposed, 1 underexposed and 1 overexposed, you can play around, see what works best for you.



Give it a go and let me know how it goes!




Saturday 14 June 2014

Portrait Session with Balquis

Portrait Session with Balquis

In my final year of university I started offering portrait sessions for my friends as a way of building up my portfolio; my girlfriend's friend had said she was interested in getting some pictures of her done professionally and when she heard I was offering portrait sessions she jumped at the opportunity. 

When we were putting the shoot together we decided to go for two juxtaposed looks, as you can see from the pictures Balquis in Muslim and she was at a stage in her life where she wanted to strengthen her Faith by wearing the headscarf; she also wanted to a few pictures which showed off her good fashion sense. 

It was Christmas time so I was wearing my Christmas Jumper!
BTS PIcture by Sonia Patel

Lighting: I gave Balquis the choice of shooting outside or in the studio, of course she said studio so I set up the studio with a 4 light set up. 2 softboxes from the front and 2 flash heads with grids attached to them in order to give a nice highlight and separation against the background.



Overall I'm very happy with how these pictures came out, and Balquis was extremely happy with them!

For More check out My Website

Wednesday 11 June 2014

My First Ever Make Up Session with Tanveer and Jakia

I think I've told you before, I met Tanveer through my friend and we collaborated on a portrait session and Tanveer asked Jakia to model for us.

Tanveer wanted to try a few different make up looks, we decided from the beginning of the session that we were just going to use a clean white background as she was interested in using the pictures in promotional material for future Make Up Artist jobs. 














Monday 9 June 2014

Portrait of Shanice

Portrait of Shanice

I surprised my girlfriend with a small portrait session, so I took her to my favourite location, laid down a blanket and set up a flash with a shoot through umbrella. We only captured a few pictures as she was feeling quite shy in front of the camera but from the pictures we took these are the best! 








I plan to do a follow up to this session over the Summer some time so stay tuned!





Portrait Session with Jakia

Portrait Session with Jakia


I met Jakia at the same time as I met Tanveer, she was the model we used for Tanveer's make up session. I found Jakia very easy to work with and we decided after out first session that we should follow up with a second. We experimented with different ideas and just had fun with the session.








See more at My Facebook Page




Saturday 7 June 2014

Portrait Session with Tanveer

I met Tanveer through my friend Amnah, Tanveer who just graduated the previous Summer and was interested in producing a Make Up portfolio. We collaborated on a few portait sessions together including the sessions with Jakia, Siobhan, Armina and Kiran. After a few portrait shoots with different subjects, she wanted a portrait session for herself.

Tanveer wanted the session to be outside, given it was Autumn she wanted to try some Autumn-y colours with her make up, so to compliment this I chose a nice location with lots of greenery and trees.

Camera Settings and Lighting: I utilised off camera flash and used a speedlite with a shoot through umbrella on a lighting stand to add some light to the subject to bring out her feature and used my 24-70mm f2.8 and f2.8 to get some nice separation between the model and the background, another technique I used was to shoot from above, asking my subject to sit for parts of the shoot to experiment with perspective to create some visually pleasing images.


















Wednesday 4 June 2014

What Inspires Me?

What Inspires me?

I was recently posed the question, what inspires me?

I guess the short answer is Emotion. Emotion is the driving force behind my work; I love capturing emotion and evoking emotion through my images.

When I started photography I didn't know what was what, I thought, oh you just point and click and that's the £1000 picture! It wasn't until I looked at my images and saw they were not even £1 images!

Then I started reading photography magazines, looking at the different images and the behind the scenes to see how the photographers made the images, this then inspired me to go out and try these different techniques; then I would come home look over my images and see what changes needed to be made and go out the next day and try to perfect them.

I started off with long exposures, capturing car lights and moved on to trickier techniques such as panning with a subject and moving onto off camera flash. Incorporating new techniques into my work kept my work visually interesting.

However, photography is more than just producing visually interesting images; Photography is a conversation, between you, your subject and your audience. Your intention is to evoke an emotion, irrelevant of the subject matter, you are conversing with the audience and evoking an emotion inside them.

and that is what inspires me.

what inspires you?