Christmas Video 2012

Here's my Christmas video, hope you like Christmas Pudding !

http://www.dj-photo.com/news/merry-christmas/

Is your monitor displaying images accurately?

How to see if your monitor is giving you all the information you need to judge images accurately.

Most monitors don't show colour or grayscale tones correctly. I use Eizo and NEC high end monitors which are hardware calibrated using Basiccolor software and an Eye One device which sits over the screen during the calibration process. This has to be done regularly to keep the displays calibrated to within the tight tolerances needed for my work.

You don't have to go to the length I have if your are not in the imaging business, one simple initial test to see if your monitor is displaying the greys correctly is to view a greyscale step wedge. If you can see a difference in tones between each step from black to white then your monitor has probably already been calibrated, if steps on the scale merge into the next then the monitor will need calibrating or just may not be able to display all the range due to it being a budget version, or just an old one!

Here's a step wedge below to test your monitor. Click on it to enlarge.

There are other factors associated with getting you monitor to display accurately, such as the colours that it is capable of displaying and the environment that your monitor is in. Having a monitor right next to a window or with normal room strip lights above it (or both) will easily fool your eyes when looking at the screen. It is best to have the monitor in a room without natural light, with neutral walls (preferably grey), and any lighting in the room to be as near as possible to daylight. It can help if you replace the warm (or cool) white office fluorescent tubes with ones that are closer to daylight such as Philips Graphica Pro.

The subject of colour calibration and workflow is vast but I hope you have had a little fun in testing to see if your monitor is anywhere near showing the correct greyscale.

Autumn is arriving, time for a Casserole

Warming Casserole

www.dj-photo.com

Season for Plums

Victoria Plums

Street Art in France

We visited some friends in Lyon at the week-end and these humorous paintings were on a wall near their house.

Street graffiti art in Lyon

Street graffiti art in Lyon

The Butcher

Recent photograph of a butcher carrying a whole Lamb.

Butcher

Tessa Sanderson CBE

I have updated my website's Home Page with a shot of Tessa that I took earlier in the year for an advertising campaign.

Peregrine Falcon

Beautiful bird.......

Peregrine Falcon

Experimental photograph

Here's an experimental photo of wine glasses and wine. Spot anything odd??
Answer's on a postcard please...... :-)

Another Ocado Van spotted with my photo of Raspberries

Last year I took a series of photographs for Ocado, they were close-ups of veg and fruit. My favorite is the Raspberry one, looks really sharp and luscious close up!

Nice shoot location

Photographing the President of the AA in a posh room with portrait paintings on the wall and a chandelier hanging down from the ceiling! The location was The Royal Society situated by The Mall, London. It was a two day shoot where we also photographed Lords and MP's. 'Non standard' expressions and actions were the brief. The resulting b/w photographs are to be published in an over sized coffee table book.

I'm on BBC TV (again)

I appeared on the BBC's One Show on Tuesday 16th. It was a four minute feature on food photography tricks. Last May they spent a day filming me and my home economist at my studio in Hertfordshire. After hours of "cut" "retake" "can you do that again" "what does that do?" we finally finished filming and the production team left to edit about eight hours of video into four minutes.

You can see the show for a while on the BBC iPlayer, wind forward to 10:44 mins:
click here to see it again

World's best behaved dog

Milly the Cocker Spaniel

This is Milly, a Cocker Spaniel, and by far the most well behaved dog I have ever photographed!

Beautiful Crocosmia leaves - studio shot

Studio photo of Crocosmia leaves

BBC film me at the studio

The BBC filmed me recently for a feature on Food Photography tricks to be aired in June on The One Show.
More details: http://www.dj-photo.com/news/bbc-vist-the-studio/

Last night I won 3rd Place in the Category "Food Portraiture" in the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the year competition.

My photograph of half a lemon meringue pie is on display at the Mall Galleries, London from the 25th-29th April 2012. The preview night on the 24th April was well organised and turned out to be a really good event with a very high attendance, Tattinger Champange flowed freely and the winners were announced. Although I missed the top prize, I was told by the organisers that my photograph had been the most talked about! There was constant group of people around my photo, having what seemed to be heated conversations, pointing here and there at the image!

Shame there wasn't an extra prize for the most discussed image!

Owls in the studio

Just before Christmas I photographed several Owls in the studio. Here's one of the photos of a Snowy Owl I took. More on my web-site here :
 http://www.dj-photo.com/gallery/personal/

Snowy Owl Photographed in the studio

Recent fashion shoot for a UK designer, two day shoot in February. make-up and hair by Lorraine Milligan, model Freya Berry.

Fashion photo

A photograph of mine has been shortlisted as one of seven finalists in the category 'Food Portraiture' for the title Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year. The image will be exhibited at The Mall Galleries, London in April!

Image Magazine Article

I have two photos published this month in the Association of Photographers' magazine 'Image'.
More about the mag here:
http://home.the-aop.org/IMAGE_Magazine

©Darrin Jenkins 2012

Olympians

I'm in the process of photographing three Olympians, will post images when the ads are out.

Toast

Conceptual Photograph of Toast