Where I started and where I am

My older brother ‘Young Inventor of the Year’ is a teenager he takes everything apart even parents car engines! He puts everything back together again but with added extras!.. You can imagine he generously gives me ‘Scalextric’ for Christmas the cars from which by the afternoon had double engines and wider rear tires that now wielded so much power that they could no longer be contained to the guided metal track past the first bend. I had literally no interest in this all I wanted to do was draw (a love of which my now 5 year old son also has). The only thing that remotely interested me about his extreme engineering talents was when he would take apart his ‘386sx’ PC to add new parts to it so that it would run new software. To me adding parts to a computer was like Lego (there is a point to this story trust me). His computer was added upon to the point that it could run a very early version of ‘3d Studio’. Every time he was out I would sit for hours upon hours working out how to render shapes and textures and put them together, and then how to animate those pieces, this was pre-internet it took me along time. I even remember making a 5 second animation of a very very crude looking ‘tie fighter’ from star wars and trying to connect the VHS player from downstairs to the computer to record it before my brother got home to use the computer. It was from this that I thought ‘If I can create shapes and find a way to connect them there is almost nothing that I can’t create!’ Its a philosophy I still maintain today, I see something I like ‘I’m sure I can work that out’

Years went by and the internet became ‘a thing’. I was a teenager myself and I worked out there were a number of web building companies (homestead and geocities) that allowed you to make websites with no coding experience all you had to do was put take images and shapes and put them together. I found on my computer (at this point I had inherited enough parts from my brothers old computers to build my own) a program called ‘Microsoft photo draw’ this thing was incredible, I could render and animate shapes, 2 and 3D and manipulate photos to make websites for people.

I used photo draw into the mid 2000’s, in-fact I even used it during my photography degree projects. At this time photoshop was expensive there was no way I could afford it, photo draw was free, it could do everything I wanted it to. At university I couldn’t afford to continuously do traditional colour processing so found a way to scan negatives, I would then invert them in photo draw and make them look as close to traditional colour processing as possible (at this time digital images typically hammered the reds) and printed them out. I saw that digital was the way things were moving for me that was perfect. I finished my degree and met a retoucher who is now an incredibly talented graphic artist in my first job out of university in a portrait studio. He was using a ‘wacom graphics tablet’ He said something that has stuck with me ever since ‘Once you start using a graphics tablet going back to using a mouse is like trying to draw with a boxing glove on’. Truer words have never been spoken! It took me a few hours but unless my graphics tablet disconnects for some reason I don’t think I’ve used a mouse on my own computer since.

I started photographing houses just when Adobe brought out Lightroom, I invested in the software and at this point had a copy of Photoshop CS2.

I was photographing and floor planning houses 5 days a week. My day would start at 9-9:30am and I would finish my last job around or just after 3 pm (except in the summer when it was closer to 6pm) I would get home scan and upload the floor plan sketches to the chap who employed me, and would then retouch until 11-11:30 pm. At weekends I would shoot weddings so it was absolutely essentially that I worked out a way to retouch all these images in as efficient way as possible, I tried every add-on, every trick I could, to try to speed things up as much as possible, At this time online tutorials and Youtube were not a thing so I developed my own method and way to get through things, which later would turn into a style of sorts.

As time went on and I was working with more photographers so did the amount of retouching, At one point I was retouching up to 15 houses a night (shoots from other photographers as well) Thank goodness this was before I had children! The method I’d developed over the years worked ok for this but I felt I was standing still and quickly losing a life long love of retouching and image manipulation.

In 2017 I began working on my own again. I went back to the start and completely redesigned the way I retouch utilising some of the amazing tools and software we now have available to us.

Today because the type of interior & Exteriors I photograph has changed I tend to shoot directly to a surface pro mounted to my tripod running software called Capture One which enables me to shoot and retouch the RAW files at the same time.

Back at my office I continue retouching in Adobe Photoshop, before stepping away from the images before returning a few hours later to do a final check and export (I find it’s healthy when working on a piece for a while to step away and return to it with fresh eyes to make sure I’m completely happy with it).

It a long way from where I was just a few years ago but the demands on my clients are different, the level of work I’m able to produce has changed, I know I’m handing over something I’m proud of and that I’m constantly now evolving as a photographer and retoucher.

An example of the post production work on each image I produce.