Author Archives: Brendan Maunder

Crossing The Line

Between the light and the dark, there is the middle ground where things can seem like they on a tipping point. 

The same is true with your photography where some days your confidence is smashed like a grape at the bottom of the barrel under someone’s foot as they stand on you to make wine.

The trick I have found over photographing for many years is to try and look at things differently.  Take this photo for example.  This was a photo I took some time ago and left it there until I thought of a concept to bring it to life, and with that open the old photograhy cabmnet, dragged it out while blowing the dust from it to give it a dual look and feel. 

I wanted it to have a dark feeling with the image giving the impression that no matter which way she went it wasn’t going to end well. 

From one side the blue represents the dark emotional state we all often find ourselves in, while the red in front of her was put there to give the impression that going forward was leading into the fire and so she sits.  Stale and stranded at the bottom of the stairs with no place to go. 

After Woman on stairs

The original photo was taken with an Elinchrom ranger pack placed at the top of the stairs to give her some shadows and to highlight her body while also hiding her face. 

You can move the slider to see the before and after. 🙂

You Don’t Know Jack

One thing I do know is that if you don’t continue to educate yourself and actively go out and learn things you will never grow.

You become stale and the passion moves away. 

For me, I am active in many areas of my life but I must admit that my photoshop in the creative sense has not been one of the things I have been pushing so given today was a cold day outside I got messing around some photos, this being one of them. 

Fire Lady

This was a photo I took of a model a bit ago and have had it sitting in the dusty draw to one day play around with it.  Well, I guess today was that day.

 

When I took this photo I wanted it to be something that I can use in many different photos as the pose the model was in as I think you can agree is very generic with lots of ideas..

Lady Sitting

I mashed the photo of her with some other images and with the help of Photoshop I came up with something very different.

As with other images of this type they really don’t start with an end and just form along the way.

I am sure I will do a few more of her in different areas and scenes but really wanted to play around with fire and smoke. 

This brings me to my first point of this blog….  We all keep learning and if you don’t keep looking for things to learn be it in photography, editing or just life…..  you become stale….

Don’t be stale. 🙂

This Is Crap I Give Up

COVID has changed the world forever and with more free time on my hands than normal for obvious reasons I figured it was a great time to give my website a long-overdue makeover.

So I whipped off the covers, pulled out the guts and threw them out.  Employed a graphic artist to come in and change my site so it matched my vision of being a place of education and commercial photography services.

Taking the clothes of my website

You would think that building a site from the ground up was be easy and straight forward right??

Well appreantly not…  Well not when you want the ability to sell your images on my site (I currently use an external provider/website for this), have the ability to created courses that I can sell or give away, be able to have a members-only section on my site on top of this and fit into my marketing and email providers to keep people up to date on my of my site updates of promotions. 

All that has taken many months of trial and error, building my site up on the side to test and trial to see what works and what doesn’t work but I think it was well worth it.

While my site is still bare-bones it now has the foundations of all the things I have been doing over the years in my place and on my main website.

I need your help

As I look at putting content back on my site, I have taken the view that I want to put up there what YOU want to see!!!

 

  • I want you to TELL ME what courses YOU want me to create
  • What pages YOU want to see
  • What categories of photography YOU want
  • What types of blogs YOU want.

 

For example –

 

  • Do YOU want to get free courses on using lightroom or understanding the basics of your camera? 
  • Or maybe you just want blogs about what it’s like to be a photographer?
  • Or even black belt courses that teach YOU everything you need to know to go from zero to hero in photography so YOU can run YOUR own photography business?

 

The website and book are open for you to tell me.

Drop Your Comments and Ideas and Lets See What Amazing Things We Can Create.

Touching Base With Nature

Like just about everyone in the world we are currently restricted to staying at home to “flatten the curve” and I must say it has been interesting from a professional and private perspective.

My days are spent working from home and only going out to get supplies. Given I live alone the first few weeks were hard as I normally am around lots of people and I don’t spend much time at home.

As the weeks have gone on I have come to get used to only having the odd contact with people and enjoying the company of Scarlet (my all faithful dog) and my free-range chickens.

I have spent many many hours in my garden to give it the much-loved care that it should have gotten over the years of me always being busy. I have a pumpkin patch the size of a small country and I am not the selfie appointed Pumpkin King as I have produced maybe around 200+kg of pumpkin not to mention the 40 or more cucumbers and I really don’t eat either, so my friends are currently being targeted to take my excess. Some are now telling me they have enough but I still have lots and lots.. So all the neighbours around me have also woken up to midnight pumpkin fairies doing deliveries. hahahaha

Anyways over the weeknd I spent a lot of time in my garden and as I was cleaning up with the whippersnapper I came across a treasure trove that only weeks ago every Australian have killed for. No it was not toilet paper but eggs.

I have been wondering where my chickens have been laying their eggs but now I am the master the king of eggs. lol

The Secret Stash
The Mother Load of Eggs

Leaking Roof

Had my aircon changed a few months ago and with the rain over the period since then I have noticed a leak so with self-isolation the new fad, it gave me a good excuse to get the roof sorted and take some photos, with a Jazzy edit to boot. 🙂

Fixing broken tiles while in ISO
Fixing broken tiles while in ISO

And for good measure I thought I would throw in a quick vid of the process.

If you want to play along at home you can download the files here. 🙂Download