If you could write up a list of the most influential figures in pop culture, celebrity portrait photographer ‘John Wright’ has most likely photographed them.

Michael Jackson,  Lady Gaga, Rhianna, Cheryl Cole, Muse, Ricky Gervais …I could go on.

His work has been published on the front of many, many magazine covers from around the world, and if you don’t think that you’ve seen his images… you’re probably wrong. You can see his iconic work at johnwrightphoto.com

I caught up with John at his studio in Hoxton and asked him a few questions about his work.

Special thanks to:

Annelise Sealy (interbang.co.uk)
Michael Stuart-Daley (michaelstuartdaley.com)

…and of course John Wright.

Cormac

I’ve just launched a new blog with Annelise Sealy, entitled ‘interbang?!’, combining my love for photography with her love for dressing up. We’ll be posting images from our own shoots, as well as reviews on designers/photographers, and other things that interest us… Just a bit of fun.

interbang.co.uk

Enjoy!

Cormac

London has lots to offer…

You can absorb art from all around the world by going to Tate modern, check out domestic imagery at Tate Britain or you can experience another pair of tates all together at a seedy bar in Soho.

Day trips are for tourists though, the night time belongs to the students, who, for some reason, prefer lasers to sunlight. Here are some photographs I took between 2006 – 2010 (when I was a student). Enjoy.

Cormac

Following an excited journey from Brazil to Europe, Gleison Paulino, 24, is inspiring everyone with his expressive and moving photographic account of his personal experiences that incorporate the vivacity of youth and excitement of discovery.

His work offers an alternative perspective of aspects of city life; exploring the individual within greater society.

There are many photographers out there who break the rules to great effect… there are few, however, who go as far as breaking Newton’s law of universal gravitation. The fantastical nature of his shots is certainly what draws you in, but it’s the sublime obscurity that he creates in them that keeps you engaged, and wanting more.

I’ll be collaborating with Gleison this year on a few projects so keep it locked on SICKMANSICK.

All photographs © Gleison Paulino – Reproduced with permission.

Cormac

Your hard portfolio looks fantastic! Great.
What about your online one?

It doesn’t matter how good your physical prints look, the only people who will be able to appreciate them are the ones you show them to. Luckily, a guy named ‘Tim Berners-Lee’ invented something called the ‘World Wide Web’ ;) , saving you from (literally) chasing after potential employers.

However, the world of web imagery and the world of tangible prints is quite different. Why?

Resolution:
At the moment the most common computer screen resolution is 1280px x 800px. It’s no good uploading your 5,616px × 3,744px RAW image, you’ll need to resample it to a suitable size for the web. I don’t tend to go above 800px for the longest side of the image, this will generally mean that the viewer can see the whole image without having to scroll around.

Colour Profiles:
This is where it can get a bit geeky and confusing, but I’ll keep it as simple as possible and link you to the geeky stuff at the end of the article. In layman’s terms, the image has to be represented on screen and in order for the web browser and operating system to do this it must interpret a ‘colour profile’ that has been embedded within the image.

You should always use RGB mode (as opposed to CMYK) for anything intended for screen.

One of the most common complaints I hear from photographers putting their shots online (especially from DSLRs) is that the colours look a lot muddier than when they viewed them locally. I pretty much guarantee this is due to the colour profile.

I recommend using the sRGB colour profile as all graphical browsers interpret the colours from this profile in pretty much the same way. Although modern browsers are getting much better at representing different profiles, you may still find that the colours aren’t turning out as you’d like.

Compression:
Images need to be compressed for the web. Compression means reducing the file size, the benefit being that the image will load much faster for the viewer and lessen the demand on, not only their bandwidth, but also that of the server hosting it. The most common compression format used for web photographs is the ‘JPEG’ file format. If you’re using Photoshop, I recommend selecting ’10′ from the quality settings; The reason I don’t choose ’12′ is because it offers negligible improvement in quality (at this resolution) yet a significant increase in file size.

More detailed information on Colour Spaces

Cormac

Sharing a special moment with others is one of the few truly magical things you can experience in life. We like to think that the memory of these moments will last forever, that their potency will never diminish. However, we are at the mercy of our bodies and our memories do in fact fade, whether through age, alcohol abuse or an unfortunate illness. For some people letting a memory go isn’t something to be taken lightly. One of these people is ‘Danielle Tice’:

She explains:

The reason I take photographs has always been to help myself remember, but it wasn’t until my mom died in 2007 and I moved to Portland in 2008 that I really began to take photographs to help other people remember as well.

For Danielle the best camera in the world is the one in her hands at that time. There is a purity to, not just her shots, but also her work/life philosophy. She couldn’t care less about having the latest gear, instead she concerns herself with pointing her camera at the action. She didn’t study photography, or indeed any art based course at university. She has, however, been documenting her life through various lenses for the past decade. Originally from Orange County, California you can sympathize with her appetite for capturing still moments when you consider how transitional her life has been.

I’ve lived in 12 houses over the past 3 years, usually with 4 – 8 other people. I’ve shared basements, I’ve used curtains for doors, I’ve slept on couches for weeks at a time. It was in those periods that I feel documenting what was going on became the most valuable; I wanted my friends to see how beautiful and magical our lives were, even as we struggled to afford food for ourselves or our cats.

Danielle Tice has the ability to make me feel like the people in her shots are my dearest friends.

To see her personal website please visit:
http://fordearlife.org/

For the benefit of absolutely everybody Danielle will be contributing to SICKMANSICK regularly.

Cormac

Tips + Tricks introduction:
The internet is awash with tutorials on various subjects and software. However, I have found that as good as these step by step guides are, they are often very esoteric and therefore inapplicable to most people. Throughout the past 10 years I have been developing my skills in photography and various design software, the same goes for Rich and illustration; so we have decided to collate our favourite, and most used, tips and tricks. We’ll be posting them under the category ‘Tips + Tricks’ on a weekly basis.

In this post I will look at how you can achieve maximum sharpness in photographs and also show you a neat trick to sharpen an image in post production:

Let there be light:
As a photographer, your best friend isn’t your brand new 1DS MK III, or your 50 mm f1.2 lens; it isn’t even your 128 GB Compact Flash card ;) …it’s light.

The word ‘Photography’ should be the first clue,  it comes from ancient Greek – ‘photos’ (ϕοτοσ) meaning ‘light’ and ‘graphos’ (γραοσ) meaning ‘writing’. Without light you don’t have anything to capture; and yes, even your ultra cool ‘Leica M9′ is going to struggle.

A lot of the time an unsharp image is simply down to the fact that there wasn’t enough light to capture the shot with a high enough shutter speed or appropriate aperture. You don’t need expensive strobe lights for this, the best light you can get is from the biggest light in our solar system …and it’s free.

Whilst expensive equipment does improve the technical quality of the final photographs, you shouldn’t use this as an excuse not to attempt to achieve the best results with whatever gear you have.

Fix up, look sharp:
Or, more accurately – look sharp and you wont need to fix anything up.
Choose the correct settings on your camera for the given situation and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble later on. The correct settings will depend on various factors but here are a few rules of thumb:

1) Use a tripod
If you have one available to you and sharpness is paramount then this one is a no-brainer.

2) Shoot in RAW format if your camera allows you to. 
Raw format captures all of the information that the technology of the camera allows, without losing information through lossy image compression. Using the Adobe Camera Raw plugin through Photoshop you can adjust the ‘clarity’ of the image, perceptively increasing the image’s sharpness.

3) Don’t shoot at Maximum or Minimum apertures.
Maximum aperture means that the lens is at it’s widest, allowing more light to pour into the camera. The side-effect of this is that the depth of field is narrowed. As a matter of performance, lenses often do not perform optimally when fully opened. This means that although you can achieve faster shutter speeds, the overall softness of the image is increased.

You might, excusably, then conclude that the mimimum aperture will give you the sharpest result. In theory this works, but in practise whilst it gives you the greatest depth of field, diffraction causes a different kind of blur. (I know what you’re thinking “F*ck this, I’m sticking it in P mode” – but wait!).

The sweet spot is generally between f4 – f8

4) For long exposures use the self timer or a remote
Long exposures pick up the slightest vibrations, including the one from you pressing the shutter release. To get around this either: use a remote control, a cable release or set the self timer. (This is a good tip if you want to get into astro-photography.)

5) AF Point Display
Some cameras have a feature which, upon reviewing your images, displays which point of the shot (if any) is as sharp as your set up allows. In Canon SLRs this feature is called ‘AF Point display’, and you can enable it through the main camera menu.

Post production sharpening trick:
If you’re finding that despite all of this you’re still not happy with the image sharpness, here’s a very useful Photoshop trick that will help your images achieve that extra clarity: (I find that this method of sharpening images produces better results than the ‘Unsharp Mask’ filter in Photoshop.)

1) Open up your image in Photoshop

2) Duplicate the background layer by either clicking and dragging it onto the ‘new layer’ icon in the layers panel OR selecting Layer>Duplicate Layer.

3) With this new layer selected go to Filter>Other>High Pass

4) Select a Radius of between 1.0 and 3.0 (if you go above this then the image will look unnatural).

5) Select the ‘Soft Light’ Blending mode from the layers panel.

BOOM! Sharper image.

Zoom in to 100% and turn the visibility of the top layer on and off to see the difference this has made. You should notice the biggest difference in areas of details (hair and eyes on people).

That’s it for this week. Hopefully you’ve found some of this information useful. If not, then stay tuned for the next post.

Cormac.

P.s this post may be redundant in the not too distant future with the advent of ‘Light Field Photography’
Check it out – exciting, mind boggling stuff:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/

Dorrell Merritt is a London based photographer, focusing on fashion and portraiture. His work  takes a fine art approach and has strong elements of melancholy and sadness, he even chooses to drain away the colour from most of his shots to reflect this.

Commenting on his work, Dorrell says:

 I try to give an emotional insight into the characters in my work, and create narrative based on literature and art, mainly pre 20th century.

To see more of his work please visit:
www.dorrellmerritt.co.uk

Cormac

Condry Calvin Milo is a fashion and beauty photographer based in London.

Biography:
Condry grew up in Zimbabwe, but at the age of 14 moved to the United Kingdom to search a better future. Progressing through secondary education he developed a love for the visual arts.  He undertook an art and design course at college and then moved on to do fashion design, where he would learn how to design and make garments. Given this background, fashion photography was a natural progress for Condry.

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To see more of Condry’s work please visit:
www.ccmphotography.co.uk

Cormac

Actress Kacey Barnfield (Resident Evil: Afterlife, Neil’s sister in ‘The Inbetweeners’) asked me to design and build her a very simple but elegant website.

http://kacey-barnfield.com

It’s minimal design is governed by the fact that it’s purpose is to present information on Kacey, and her various projects, as efficiently as possible. As is often the case, the main headaches were technical ones (cross browser compatibility etc).

Enjoy,

Cormac.