A few days ago I went on a drive to see my parents and also visit one of my most favourite locations to hang out at which is only a short drive from them.
Toorongo Falls is in a town tiny country town called Noojee. The rivers here are beautiful and the walks through the hills to the waterfalls is always relaxing and never gets old.
While here I took some time to shoot some new textures to use for future editing and I thought I'd create a texture pack to share with you! The pack includes 9 high res JPEG images which can be used for texture overlays, a technique which I use in the majority of my images. You can find my tutorial on how to apply a texture to an image here.
Download the Toorongo Falls Texture Pack for FREE! Click here!
Great Ocean Road Trip
In celebration of getting my license and being together for two years I decided to take Luke on a camping trip along The Great Ocean.
After having my license for only one day it was a bit strange jumping in the car and driving for four hours plus straight. The drive along the bendy and hard roads helped improved my confidence!
We setup camp behind the sand dunes in Johanna where we stayed for two nights, making day trips from here we headed further out to visit Princetown, Port Campbell, The 12 Apostles and much more.
The trip has made me extremely excited about the ventures I can now go on and how many opportunities that open up with photography that I now can drive.
Once I get more comfortable driving by myself I am setting myself some type of photography challenge to push me further and help me begin creating a lot more. I've felt stuck creatively for a while now and I feel having the freedom of being able to get out of the city whenever I want to do photos is going help improve my creative drive :)
The Hour
Model - Kendel Griffin
Warburton Redwood Forest
Over the weekend my boyfriend and I spent the day in one of our favourite locations for hiking and taking photos, Warburton Victoria. Warburton is a small town about an hour and 20 minute drive out of the city of Melbourne and is located right on the Yarra River. It's surrounded by beautiful mountains, farm land and rainforests.
We had only explored a small area in the past so this time we decided to try and find new places we hadn't heard of or seen. The first place we checked out was La La falls, a cute little water fall where the hike along the way felt like you were walking through a fairy tale, with stone bridges and little creeks of water running from every direction.
The second place we went to was a Red Wood forest plantation, unfortunately we don't have these kind of trees grow naturally here in Australia but we are lucky enough to have a few plantations and national parks which do grow them. I was super excited to visit the forest because I had seen pictures and it looked so magical and creepy. We spent the rest of our afternoon exploring within the trees, filming and taking some photos which I'll be sharing both within the next couple of days. We came across a river that flowed just behind the forest which was hidden away in over grown rainforest. We wrapped up the day by having a picnic in a meadow and watching the clouds roll over the sky.
Questions and Answers
I'm finally writing this question and answer post! I know its been quite some time since I posted asking for you to give me any questions to answer but here it is!! Better late than never.
What inspires you?
There is no one answer for this question, I cant draw inspiration from most things depending on my mood and thought process. My two main sources of inspiration though would have to be past experiences and feelings which I've always found expressing my thoughts whether they are just simple ideas or more elaborate story telling series through image making to be my greatest escape.
I've always loved nature, the fact that everything is constantly changing but at the same time visiting the same location it's always familiar. I love to let my mind get lost in the beauty and texture of the forest and trees.
Who inspired you to start and who inspires you today?
There isn't really a person who inspired me to start photography. I've always loved art, painting and being creative. Photography was just another medium I tried throughout high school and ever since then I've been taking photos.
I've made plenty of friends within the photography community and they are the ones who definitely inspire me today with their amazing work.
Do you shoot in RAW and what is your post-processing routine to keep consistency among your images?
Yes, I do shoot RAW.
I have a few things I follow when I'm shooting my fine art pieces to keep everything fairly consistent. This doesn't always happen because it depends on the concept I'm shooting but 90% of the time I shoot out in nature, which I've found even in different locations gives a certain feel and mood to my images.
I always expand the frame when shooting my personal work, it allows me not to worry later on about resolution if I need to use an image for an exhibition and need to blow it up. I've also been fond of the way square images look.
How did you learn your skills? (both in photography and photoshop)
I learnt the basics of photography in high school while developing film and later on once I started shooting more and more in digital I started teaching myself what I needed to know so I was able to shoot a certain concept which allowed me to continually learn new techniques. I'm still constantly learning new ways to shoot thats one of the things I love about photography, you can never know too much!
Photoshop has majority been self taught. I've spent countless hours pulling all nighters figuring out what does what in photoshop. Trial and error was and still is my best way to learn what I need to do. I have started following certain websites which focus on teaching photoshop techniques and I have learnt a lot from the amazing people who spend their time teaching others.
I see you recently had an exhibition, how was that? Pro's and con's? How did it happen?
I did! This was earlier in the year but it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the night.
I was able to meet a lot of other creatives and help get my name out there a bit more.
It was through a company called RAW who hold a one night exhibition every few months in many different cities around the world to give emerging artists the chance to show their work and experience what it's like exhibiting their work.
Could you tell a bit about your colour correction / colour grading techniques?
I always edit my colours using curves whether I'm in Lightroom or Photoshop.
I do sometimes use other ways to colour my images but I've found I'm always heading back into a curves layer to make adjustments. I love the matte film look in photos so one of the very first things I do is to change the shadows and highlights so there are no true blacks and whites in the image. I usually have a colour palette in mind when shooting so I have a rough idea of what I want to do when I come into Photoshop. I tend to play around a lot until I'm happy with what I'm getting. I've found selecting certain areas of the image to colour individually instead of overall helps make things look a lot more interesting. I wish I could answer this question a bit better but a lot of my editing is fiddling around from a basic idea and routine.
Thank you everyone who asked me questions! I'm sorry I was so delayed in writing this. I need to catch up on my blog posts in the coming weeks :)
The Grampians
Over the weekend Luke and I went on a trip out to The Grampains, a three hour drive from Melbourne. The place was absolutely beautiful, open fields, huge rock covered mountains and stunning waterfalls.
Just before arriving and going into the mountains to climb down the waterfalls and explore we stopped off in a place called Halls Gap to visit a zoo we found on the Internet, we weren't expecting much giving it was in the middle of no where but saying that it was super busy and was definitely one of the best zoos I've visited in terms of their animal habitats and enclosures. They had huge open paddocks which you were able to wander around and feed wallabies, kangaroos, goats and deer :) (most of these photos are of us feeding the deer because we were so excited when we found out we could)
Pine Plantation and Q&A
The other day we went down to one of my most favourite places to visit and also a location I shoot at frequently, about an hour away from where I live in a town called Macedon.
It's just a pine plantation but the things I like most about it is being able to explore and get lost in there without the worry of coming across other people, which comes in handy when you are shooting nudes.
We took the trip down there because it had been a fair while since we had visited and thought it would be a good place to spend the afternoon relaxing and practising learning how to film and playing around with some lenses I bought recently.
I'm excited yet nervous to start having my shoots filmed, I'm looking forward to the challenges of it though and new learning processes!
Also, thanks to my friend Macey Rayburn Photography for the idea of creating a Questions and Answers post. I'll be be writing a blog post that will answer any questions anyone has to ask me about my photography, editing, myself or anything you wish. So if theres something you want to know whether it be how I got into taking photos to how I edit them, ask away in the comment section below or over at my Facebook Page. I'll be collecting all the questions over the next week or so and publishing my answers here in a new blog post so keep an eye out! :)
RAW Artists Exhibition
On Saturday, 29th August I was lucky enough to be part of RAW Artists, an event which is for emerging artists to be able to showcase their work to the public in a fun and energetic setting.
This was my first ever exhibition so as you can imagine I was extremely nervous mainly by the face to face interaction with people who were viewing my work, it's an extremely different feel than sitting at a computer screen and reading comments about your work.
Nerves aside it was a great experience, being able to have such a better connection with people who are interested in your work and you to be able to explain in more of a personal manner why you created each image and your processes from concept building to post processing and seeing their interest was definitely the most enjoyable part of the night.
There was also another reason why I was so nervous for the night, stage fright. In an event meeting a couple of months before the night all the artists were told that the host of the event will be speaking to each of us on stage (in front of about 800 people) about ourselves and our work. This was a choice and if we didn't choose so we weren't obligated to speak. I had thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to, coming to the conclusion that no matter how terrified I was of somehow embarrassing myself, stuttering my words or any other reason it was something I actually wanted to be thrown into without too much thought. I had already made an extremely large jump by participating in an exhibition for the first time, I had to go all out and make the most of it and not stop half way because of some fears.
It was such a pleasure being able to meet the other artists properly who I was showcasing with, everyone was so talented and lovely!
I was overwhelmed by the amount of people who came along to support me, people who I hadn't even met it was great to finally meet everyone.
I can not thank every single person for being there enough and for making it such a brilliant and crazy fun night :)
You can check out RAW Artists website here and also their Facebook!
Photos by Janaka
First blog post!
Creating a blog has been on my mind a lot lately, I thought it would be a good way to be able to document my shoots for myself to look back on, whilst sharing with others. My goals for creating a blog are being able to share behind the scenes images/videos while talking about the process of how the final image was made. From the first location scout all the way through to post processing. I've been super nervous about doing this because I've never had a good way with words and making sense but I'm hoping writing these blogs will open a new door of photography to me that's more than just taking the photo and sharing it.
Along with the photography side of these blog posts I will be posting more personal ones along the way, I think it's always good to know a little bit about the artist and why they do what they do.
I started taking photos about six years ago just as a hobby, I was always creative and enjoyed arts more than anything else but when I first started photography something drew me into more than anything else, I'm not sure what.
After studying film and darkroom processing for two years in high school I ended up teaching myself how to use digital cameras when I left school.
I began experimenting with different styles and techniques, whilst I learned a lot from this I also lost track of what I enjoyed. I got caught up in constantly changing what I enjoyed to shoot, although I believe it's great to shoot many other things rather than be restricted I could never define my work and I felt I could never define myself.
After giving up on photography for several years I've been working my hardest to narrow down and pursue what I wish to do.
I'll be writing a separate post sometime soon on my current goals and the challenges I'm having to over come to reach them.
Since this is my first post I want to share some of my very first photos I ever took, I look back at my work a lot and reflect on what's changed and what hasn't and try to see what I like in old images which can help improve my current work.
Wish me luck on continuing these posts, thank you for reading and enjoy!