Fine Art photography and photography training

Welcome to Gale Photography

Hello, and welcome to my website! I'm Derek Gale, photography trainer and Fine Art photographer based in Worcester.

If you are looking to improve your photographic creativity, skills or knowledge, check out the Photography Training pages.

For beautiful Fine Art images that showcase my personal vision take a look at the Fine Art Photography pages.

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You can never stop learning!

Thursday, June 11, 2009

I spent last weekend on an advanced portrait photography course in Fairford. You may ask why I, as a person who offers photographic training, needed to go on a training course. Well, in a field as large and as varied as photography there’s always something new to learn, and with this course I had the chance to try out some lighting equipment that I don’t have. This included an Elinchrom Octa. The Octa is a huge softbox, and I mean HUGE, that gives an incredibly soft and flattering light similar to that coming from a large window. It’s so big it wouldn’t actually fit into our studio!

We were lucky enough to have great models to work with, ranging from Charlotte Thomson to Dave’s Kawasaki Vulcan Drifter 1500 motorbike. The image shows both and is lit with five lights including the Octa.

1505 bw small

I’m really looking forward to developing some of the ideas from the weekend into the photography we offer our clients.

by Derek Gale

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“Bokeh” and the RPS

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Every now and then I have a “creative photography” day, where I try and push my limits and keep myself fresh. This week, on a really hot, sunny day with very strongly directional light, I took time to shoot some “Bokeh” images in the garden. “Bokeh” is derived from a Japanese word meaning fuzzy, and refers to the out of focus areas of an image. I often shoot portraits with lenses at large apertures to give nicely out of focus backgrounds; this gives good separation from the sharp foreground subject. The images I shot this week don’t have a sharp foreground subject!

Shooting “Bokeh” is a very interesting thing to do, as you can’t really see through the camera’s viewfinder what you’re going to get by way of a final image. The structure of the viewfinder screen can split highlights into spectral colours which don’t get recorded.

I’ve developed a technique that gives beautiful, abstract images with swirling shapes and colours. They are clearly not sharp in the traditional sense, but also don’t just look out of focus. The only manipulation this image has had is a bit of Auto Contrast in Photoshop.

broad brush bokeh small for blog C symbol

This week also saw an excellent development regarding our photographic training courses. We are now running “The Creative Eye” as a workshop under the aegis (good word!) of the Royal Photographic Society on August 15^th. Take a look at the relevant page on the RPS’s website here http://www.rps.org/workshops/view/1509

by Derek Gale

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martinsolerJune 1, 2010 - 7:30 pm

Very nice abstract colors.
I just got a 50mm 1.8 lens and am having some fun with bokeh too. It’s great fun.
http://martinsoler.com/category/bokeh/

Derek GaleJune 2, 2010 - 2:06 pm

Martin,

Thanks for your comments.

I’ve got the Nikon 50m f1.8. It’s an interesting lens to play with for portraits.

Derek.

Another Award!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Welcome to the Gale Photography blog!!

On these pages we’ll be giving you our news and views, and thoughts about photography in general.

We’re having fun planning our 2009 Photographic Training and Photo Trek programme. We’ve just rescheduled our “Love your DSLR” course to June 13th, and there are still places left.

If “al fresco” photographic training is more to your taste, then what about coming to a Photo Trek? The first Photo Trek at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, is in place for August 8th. It’s a half-day afternoon trek and I’ll be taking a group of no more than 10 people around the fabulous gardens and parkland, and helping them improve their photography on the way. I’m really looking forward to it. We would like to thank Lord Faringdon for permission to run Photo Treks at this terrific venue.

On the subject of having fun, I had a very interesting evening last Monday. I popped along to the annual MPA regional Portrait competition down near Bristol. It was judged by Damien Lovegrove who did another great job of constructive commenting. He gave me a Merit Award in the Location Portrait section. He loved the use of a low camera angle, off-camera flash and frozen action; thanks Damien!

2009 MPA Portrait Merit

At our studio in Oxfordshire we always try to get a different style of portrait image, and this lifestyle portrait shot of a boy jumping his skateboard was great fun to do – although lying on the ground with a very wide angle lens while he was doing it felt a bit dangerous! Oh, how we suffer for our art…

by Derek Gale

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