This blog post is a two in one of sorts. First off little Ainsley. I know you’ve heard me say many times that children were a delight to photograph but little Ainsley has raised the bar considerably on this front, she was brilliant. From the minute I arrived until I left she was full of fun, smiles, funny faces and laughter. Before I knew it three hours had flown in and Ainsley was still wanting more photographs taken. Many thanks to mum and dad who were great in helping, although Ainsley had that pretty much covered too

Onto the second part of this post which relates to post processing. Please feel free to turn off/fall asleep as it’s probably boring for 99.9% of you but it’s going to make a big difference to the way I work. What I’m referring to is a set of presets for Lightroom (the program I edit my pictures in) that pretty much mimics the look of traditional film. Now I can hear snores already but bear with me. Many years ago I shot film, primarily black and white as I had my own darkroom but I also dabbled in colour at times, although loved and still do the timeless look of B&W. The B&W film I used was either Ilford Delta or Ilford HP5 or Kodak T-Max. The only real colour film I played with was Kodak Porta which was given to me by another photographer to try out. I always like the kind of muted colours of the Porta and although I wasn’t a heavy colour film user it became the only one I used. The black and white films were all great films, my favourite being the Delta. Fast forward to the digital age and film is almost dead but still photographers the world over, me included, try to replicate the look of film in their digital images. I know that’s a bit ironic but there’s something about the look and feel of film that’s so attractive to me. It’s the imperfections that attracts me so much to the old developing process. The tiny hair that you don’t see in the enlarger or the heavy grain because you’ve underexposed by a stop and have pushed a bit too hard afterwards and also the dodging and burning of areas in the photograph that made developing your own photographs a difficult skill. The only way I can describe it is to compare it to vinyl and CD. When CD first arrived it was a wow moment because it was so clinically clear sounding without hiss or crackle. But, and it’s a big but for me, I loved hearing the hiss and crackle and warmth that vinyl gave. It gave the record a bit of character which is what I always felt digital images were missing just ever so slightly. Since starting out again in digital I’ve always tried to get that film look in my images but failed miserably. I’ve never been truly happy with either my colour or B&W post processed images. I’ve tried MANY presets and actions and they just never seem to really mimic film, until now. Last night I saw a tweet regarding a set of Lightroom presets that gave the film look. The photographer that sent the tweet is top notch so I digged a little deeper into these presets and read a few blogs and forums about them. All looked promising so I decided to take the plunge and I’m glad I did. I loaded up Ainsley’s images again, reset all the raw files and decided to really give them a test. Right away I could see they were very good indeed. With a couple of clicks I had an Ilford HP5 or a T-Max photograph up on the screen. You’re probably thinking so what, but now I can create my favourite look with 2 clicks rather than pfaffing about for ages in Lightroom and eventually giving up and this will give my images a consistent look that I feel I’ve been missing. The presets in question are from VSCO Film and are the only presets I’ve actually felt the need to buy. I don’t regret it for one second. So, here are a few of the images from Ainsley’s shoot processed using only the VSCO presets and at most have involved 3 clicks of a mouse in lightroom. You’ll probably think there’s not much difference from my usual but therein lies the rub, less is definitely more when post processing

For anybody remotely interested all of the images below were created with either the Ilford HP5 or Kodak Porta presets.