This shot of the Perth Skyline was taken at the end of our first day in Western Australia. The 30 hour journey to Australia via Singapore went fairly smoothly with the exception of Heathrow security who almost caused us to miss our first flight by holding us up when they discovered the metal in Karen’s leg and then swabbing my phone for explosives. It was raining when we arrived at 1am but it had all cleared by the following morning. At this point I would normally go into the all details of how this image was shot and processed however while we are travelling this Photoblog will be more of a Travel Journal like the Egypt Blog rather than A Photoshop tricks and tips study. If any regular readers wish to know how images were created please leave a comment and I will be more than happy to go into the details and the Photoshop layers used.

After removing all the logos and trademarks from the building this image was accepted for Stock Photography at Shutterstock and is available for high resolution download here.

This image shows what you can do by compositing images in photoshop. I started with a shot of me biting into a ball. This shot of the moon was added on a layer above and a mask was applied to reveal it where necessary. A quick google search for “star field” found the background. Another mask was applied and the composition was complete.

This was the venue of my cousin Nikki and Paul’s Wedding reception. This shot of the Carlton Mitre was taken from the bridge. I tried a few settings and found a 1/6sec produced the best results getting sharp reflections and enough light. A small tripod was also used to get this shot.

This is Tahrir Square in Egypt. This part of Cairo saw the start of the Pro Democracy marches which ended Hosni Mubarak’s reign and started a chain reaction which is now sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. When I took this image in 2007 I was spotted by someone in the government building on the right. A short while later I was politely asked to stop taking pictures. Hopefully the new regime will allow greater freedom for the Egyptian people.

This is the Nile skyline in Egypt. To create some extra sparkle you can use a high pass layer set to hard light blend mode. Sharpening also works well to make the lights stand out. It works best if you sharpen at the very end of the process, after you have resized. If you sharpen an images at full resolution the effect will be reduced once you resize to a low resolution needed for web output.

The High Resolution version of this image was accepted at Shutterstock in a surprisingly fast 7hrs.

These are my brothers wedding rings. As they are both fans of middle earth I decided to give the rings a little magic. I started by making a mask of the rings then used it to De Saturate and Blur background. Then I inverted the mask and used it to add some subtle fractalius to rings.

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. Lightening is hard to shot during the day. You need a very long shutter speed to stand a chance of catching a strike. But when you point at the sky it does not take long to overexpose even with the smallest aperture. This shot was taken through the window of a moving bus so I relied on this technique to get my lightening.

Since posting this image has been accepted for stock.

All stock agencies offer some form of enhanced or extended license, in which buyers are given unlimited rights to reproduce photographs, typically over 250,000 times. In the case of Shutterstock the contributing photographer receives $28 instead of 0.25c/0.33c. Its always a nice surprise when you sell one. This is only the sixth enhanced licenses image I have sold compared with over 3000 regular sales.

Download high resolution image.

See other five Enhanced sales

This was taken from our hotel in Jordan. I used a Nodal Ninja to get the shots needed to make the panorama. I stitched them together using Panorama Studio. To process the image I used the Orton Effect to give the light a hazy glow. I also had to add a layer to darken the sky.

This was our hotel pool in Dahab, Egypt. I used a tripod and a 30 second exposure to get the lights to sparkle. To process this image used a colour balance layer to make the pool a nicer shade of blue. I used a tone curve to boost the mid tones. Finally I moved the black point in on a levels layer to make the sky jet black.