Thank God that's over... but I miss it already...

Hey – guess what? It’s another quick blog post! I think I have had sufficient time to catch my breath from this weekends activities. As some of you know, I ended up getting a slight reprieve in that two of this weekends six shoots got postponed due to models being ill or otherwise unavailable. That’s fine, the client has re-scheduled for a couple of weeks time, so that’s good.

The wedding shoot went well, even though I ended up getting soaked – twice – while shooting the bridal party in the middle of Kings Park. The chauffer came to the rescue of the bridal party with a swag of huge golf umbrellas under his arm, but nothing for the lowly photographer I’m afraid. Suffice to say that I can tell you all with full confidence that the Nikon D700 D-SLR camera body and SB-900 Speedlight are definitely 100% “weather-proof”!! As for the SB-800 speedlight being used as a remote off-camera light via Nikon i-TTL and my Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 lens – well so far so good but I am keeping an eye on them; especially the lens. I really hope no moisture managed to work it’s way inside the body of the lens. I took it, along with everything else out of my (damp) camera bag as soon as I got back, letting it just re-acclimatize to room temperature without excessively altering its temperature in the hope that any potential moisture issues will just go away. I used that lens for two studio shoots this morning and again this afternoon for the beach shoot and all was ok, I did not notice any unusual flare or distortions, so fingers crossed…

Oh yeah, the beach shoot. As those of you with a keen eye may have noticed, the image I have attached to this blog post was taken from the last shoot of this hectic weekend. Layla is a brand new model whom I was happy to provide a start to her portfolio. I tried to keep the lighting as subtle as possible for this shot and I think I did it pretty well. Layla is being lit on her left side by my Nikon SB-900 in wireless i-TLL mode. I wanted to keep the aperture fairly wide open for this shot, so I used the high speed flash sync (AutoFP is I think what it's called) feature Nikon are famous for. The camera was set to aperture priority mode, ISO 200, 1/1600^th second shutter speed @ f/4.0. I dialled in -1 stop exposure compensation for the flash. I like the way this image looks naturally lit, only the shadow thrown by Layla’s left arm against her torso gives it away. It was quite bright this afternoon so I wanted to use a really fast shutter speed to tone down the exposure instead of having to resort to shooting at f/22. I think I managed to achieve that!

I really had fun, amongst all of the stress this weekend. I really am disappointed that it’s back to the grind in a few short hours. Needless to say I am looking forward to doing it all again, very soon; this coming weekend is looking almost as busy at this stage! Bring it on I say… After all, one only becomes a better photographer by taking more images, and more… and more… you get the picture (pun intended).

Ok, I’m outta here again, catch you all later.

On the fly update...

Yet another quick blog post to let you all know how this weekend of shooting is going. The first of six shoots between now and Sunday evening took place this evening at our Perth based Photography Studio, a shoot with Amee. She is a new model who has just signed up with Perth’s own Xtreem modelling agency.

Amee has only done a couple of photo shoots before so she did very well considering. The pose you see in the image was one that she chose to do; and I think it works well with the lighting of the set.

No prizes for guessing the lighting scenario… it’s my favourite White seamless (yes, that’s right – it’s white!) backdrop with a single overhead light source with the beauty dish modifier with the grid spot attached. Simple yet effective… and it takes about 2 ½ minutes to set up…

I’m outta here. I’ll try to post more updates over the course of the weekend.

No rest for the... busy photographer!

Hey everybody. Well as usual it has been a busy week and a half, and I have to say – I love it. But, and mercifully for you all, it means that this will be a pretty short blog post!

The images I have included are a selection of shots taken from a fashion shoot I did last weekend. The vision (pun intended) was to use the long straight stretch of road as the runway, but the road edge also serves as a nice set of lead in lines drawing the eye to the model.

Lighting was a little tricky for this shoot. As Google limits the number of images I can put on the blog, I have placed a couple of images on my website here of the rig I used. The tricky thing about it is that I did not have an assistant for the shoot, so everything had to be pretty much “Set and Forget”.

At the risk of stating the obvious, for a fashion shoot the hero of the image is the outfit, the models are (sorry girls!) mere hangers for the outfits to hang on. Of course though I wanted to light the models face a little more than the outfit to create a more balanced image. I guess the point I am trying to make here is that for portraiture or modelling photography, the lighting is primarily (as a rule) only on the subjects face.

I wanted to try and position the models in the shade created by the trees and overpower the shadows using artificial and reflected light. For lighting the models outfit I used the reflector mounted on the boom stand. This had to be repositioned/double checked for every outfit as of course the sun was slowly setting in the late afternoon sky. I basically aimed the light from the reflector at the models hip, but in reality it was lighting from their ankle to their shoulder.

This left my beloved beauty dish to light the models face and shoulders. I took the grid spot that is almost permanently attached to the beauty dish off as I wanted a little more spread on the light to give a more natural feel, and if you look at the images you cannot see any shadow on the road from that light source which would otherwise confuse the shadows on the other side of the models being created by the gorgeous afternoon sunlight. I was pretty happy with that. Point to note: as you look at the image, the beauty dish and reflector were on the left (models right side). The flash head itself was a Bowens Gemini 500WS powered by a Bowens Travel Pack battery pack, and the whole thing was triggered by using Bowens Pulsar radio triggers. All of which leads me nicely into this week’s video…

We have mentioned a few times in previous videos about how I always trigger the studio lights by using the Bowens Pulsar radio triggers, so this video goes into a little detail as to how they work and are configurable for a variety of uses and multiple lighting set-ups at once.

Well, that’s it for this blog post. Take care everyone and I’ll catch you next time!

Are you Hungry?

Hmmm… what to write this week. One thing is for sure – it has been hard to try and do anything photography related in the last few days. My day job has been crazy busy and is taking up pretty much all of my time lately. I had even brought home stuff to do over the weekend while I would otherwise be perusing photography related activities… that’s gotta stop!

One good thing to come of all this though is that it has really fuelled my enthusiasm for photography. I’m hungry for more. Right now as I am typing this I am hatching a little plan in my head to do a location fashion shoot this coming weekend. I have had a spot picked out for some time now that has never really come to fruition but I think I have procrastinated long enough… so more on that soon.

Time to do a little preaching; to myself, just for a minute anyway. I hope I am not the only one out there that feels this way. If you are honest with yourself I hope you can relate to this for a moment too. But whenever I am away from photography, even if it is just for a short time, I tend to get in a bit of a hardcore rut. I start to take a look back through recent shoots, recent clients and recent personal projects. I start to get down. I think that I am the worst photographer in history. None of the images I take look any good in my opinion. I try different shoots – different ideas and with different models. Nothing seems to work. Can you imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a video by one of my peers Zack Arias. He had made a fantastically inspiring video called “Edit: Transform”. It appears that I am not the only one that feels like this from time to time after all. Have a look…

The strange thing is that Zack is a phenomenal photographer. Have a quick look at his blog. One word describes his work; awesome. Awesome in the biblical sense. Wow. How can this guy feel the same as me? I guess we are all human huh.

So, with Zack’s narrative soundtrack lingering in my mind, I plan to get out there as much as I can this next week. Like they say – when you feel like you’ve been bucked off the horse, the best thing to do is get back on. That’s me. Hi-ho Silver!!

I’m going to finish this weeks post with a quick little tutorial video. It describes how to do a quick 5 minute make-over on a portrait image using the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop CS4 and then the Soften Skin Adjustment brush tool in Lightroom 2. Why do I use both programs to edit one image? Well, Lightroom has a spot removal tool, but it’s more for removing sensor dust spots from a series of consecutive images. What I want to do is a unique in-depth edit on one image; that requires Photoshop. Anyway I hope the video tells a story for you. I know the sound is really awful... just turn your headphones up a little bit... sorry!

Ok everybody – have a great week ahead. I might see you out there. I’ll be the one with the camera around my neck…