Hey! My name is Luke Arms, and I'm the guy who takes the photos around here. Welcome!
I'm a documentary wedding and on-location portrait photographer based in Newcastle, Australia. Most of the weddings I cover are in the Hunter Valley, the Central Coast or Sydney, but I'm also available to photograph a handful of national and international destination weddings each year.
This blog is the story of my amazing family and my wonderful clients. If you like what you see, please leave a comment or two. Better yet, say hi and get some of your own photo lovin'!
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Enjoy!
Last year, I bought a film camera.
I can’t explain why. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself that I could take decent photos without needing to check my exposure after each shot. Or maybe I wanted to believe that film still has that somethin’ somethin’ that digital doesn’t have.
Eventually, I put a roll of film through my new (old) camera.
What do you think? Somethin’ somethin’?
Try to ignore the fact that I took all of these in a quick stroll around the Newcastle CBD 
He’s only anonymous because I don’t know what his name is.
He’s often sitting on this bench, a few metres away from my studio.
I’m glad I finally asked for his portrait. Next time I see him I’ll try to find out his name.
I want to take more photos like this.
Sorry I haven’t been blogging much lately. As per last week’s hint that things have been “pretty rough”, we’ve been facing some challenges that I can’t really tell you about 
This has further delayed delivery on some of the photos I had hoped to have out by the end of February, which has been difficult in its own right. I’m hopeful that we’re only a couple of weeks out from being all caught up, but until then the blog will continue to be quieter than normal. I have some great things to tell you about when normality returns, though 
Meanwhile, I leave you with a photo of Radar that shouldn’t need any explanation
I’m sorry for being such a bad blogger lately. The last couple of weeks have been pretty rough, and blogging slipped below more important things on the priority list
Anyway, it’s now two weeks late, but here’s my long-awaited intro to black and white post production. And there’s a whole hour of Wednesday left as I start writing this, so it TOTALLY counts as a workshop wednesday
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways to convert a colour image to black and white. Just ask Google. Seriously. There’s a whole world of possibilities out there!
My approach, as always, is simple, Lightroom-based and not particularly earth-shattering. I hope it helps you figure out an approach that works for you
Here’s a colour image, straight out of camera, from Ainslie and Rohan’s wedding:
It looks OK in colour, but to my mind, the long shadows are begging for black and white treatment. This is the end result I was going for:
And here’s how I got there (just using Lightroom’s Develop module):
), but occasionally I might darken the greens, lighten the reds or make other minor adjustments. In this case, I didn’t override Lightroom’s defaults.* Exposure: 0
* Recovery: 34
* Fill Light: 14
* Blacks: 10
* Brightness: +109
* Contrast: +100
Voila! A pretty dramatic-looking black and white I hope you found that useful … if so, please spread the word!
by luke
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