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Church of Our Saviour

The unusual title of this post (lit. stairs to heaven) is the name of a 1997 film by danish director Nils Vest about the architect Lauritz de Thurah who constructed in 1748 the magnificent spire and its spiral staircase for the Vor Frelsers Kirke (Church of Our Saviour) in Copenhagen.

Spiral staircase

I have yet to see the film, but reading about it made me think about the Vor Frelsers spire and other stairs. So I compiled 15 photos of steps and staircases from around the world.

See all photos in the Steps & Staircases album below:

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Portrait

While I normally like to tramp around the countryside or bimble along a coral reef to take pictures I also had a go at some studio work. The new album shows a selection of shots from a recent portrait session with a friend of mine.

The session involved very little equipment, so just a tripod and two flashes in front of a white wall. But it was all the more fun playing with various pieces of jewellery, a few of changes of clothes (she did that) and old fashioned skin-smoothing flattery in Photoshop (that was me).

Nude

Playing with black and white effects was the most fun and the photo “Nude” (right) is my favourite. Here’s a little Photoshop cook-book of what I did to the original image to achieve the brushed steel effect.

Post-processing

Although the most obvious effect is created by Photoshop actions (see below), the image needs to be cleaned before applying any actions:

• healing brush for skin spots
• mask out the background and brighten
• invert the mask and clone out the model
• Gaussian blur on the model layer with radius 15
• mask the blur layer, selectively paint on mask to soften only legs/arms

This is all standard stuff and results in a nice colour shot.
The black and white effect is mainly courtesy of two Photoshop action sets:

• monochrome channel mixer layer at 80% transparency
• Nill’s Fake HDR action
• cange gradient in top layer in HDR copy to black-to-transparent
• NiKant’s Realistic film grain action
• play with layer transparencies to achieve the final effect

Especially the Fake HDR action is very good for this kind of geometric pose, but only after rigorous skin softening using the Gaussian blur layer and spot healing brush click orgies. This action tends to accentuate even the smallest of skin blemishes.

The Realistic film grain action is always good as a final layer as it smooths over sloppy post processing and creates a lovely film-like b&w effect.

See the whole Studio Portraits 2 album below:

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A selection of my best underwater photos is now online in a separate gallery:

Underwater photo portfolio

The gallery contains some of my best images from Indonesia (mostly Lembeh Straits) and the Red Sea.

Enjoy!