Images revisited... and forgetting stuff...

Well hello boys and girls and welcome to another quick little blog post. I have to be honest and say that this blog would have been up several hours ago if it weren’t for a little mishap on my behalf…

You see, I have been posting these blogs from my favourite café for a little while now. I usually prep all the image files on my workstation PC at home; upload all the images to Blogger and copy all of the HTML code to a notepad file for re-arranging later. I then dump the lot onto a thumb drive and head to aforementioned café to relax, drink some coffee and arrange all the stuff into a (hopefully) meaningful format for this blog.

So there I was, sitting in my comfy seat at the café, laptop booting up ready for action, I reached into my laptop bag to retrieve the thumb drive only to realise it was still in my PC at home. Bugger. Oh well, at least I got to sit in the cool air-conditioning and watch the world go by for half an hour or so and just chill. So, not a total waste of time after all.

Anyway, to the images accompanying this post. I have been meaning to get around to posting some of the images I took at the various shows for this year’s Perth Fashion Festival, but time and clients always managed to get in the way of my good intentions. Well, seeing as I have had literally a couple of days off I took the initiative and prepped some images from the Re-Style show. I thought a lot of them looked a little familiar so I had a look on my Facebook Page and I realised that I had actually posted a few already from this show over there.

Not to worry – the images on FB were quickly thrown on to the net not long after the show, so you can think of these as a bit of a remaster of sorts. I guess I just like the portraiture aspect of these images, rather than them being just the standard full length head-to-toe fashion cliché shot of a model on a runway. Oh, the reason the show was called "Re-Style" is because all of the clothing was purchased at recycled clothing stores; you know, Vinnes, the Salvo's and so on. That’s it.

I’ll be posting a few more shows online soon, as well as sharing a few images from some great weddings we have done recently, and finally I am being hounded to put some new videos onto our YouTube channel; so keep an eye out for them. Of course I’ll post the videos on here too.

Which brings up a good point actually. If you want to see anything, have a technique explained or you have any questions at all, please keep sending us email to timography@iinet.net.au. Until I see you next time, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon. Oh, and happy new year!

Oh, and just to check to see if you made it all the way to the end of this blog post... I tried something a little different with the color toning of these images. I'm interest to know what you think... or if you even noticed... Please let me know!

Merry Christmas... and a few bikini's to boot...

Well hey there everyone, and Merry Christmas!

There’s no surer way to know the festive season is upon us – the weather is steamy and hot, the shops are sold out and the roads are full of people trying to get somewhere in a hurry. I can honestly say that tonight I have never been more grateful for refrigerated air-conditioning. Its 9.30pm, outside its still 30.2 degrees and 65% humidity. Here in my office, it’s a super comfy 23.6 and 30% humidity. Oooh yeah.

Anyway, to tonight’s quick pre-Christmas blog. I thought I’d quickly share a few forgotten images from the STM Swimwear Parade from this year’s Perth Fashion Festival. I had been given media accreditation for a few events at this year’s Festival but this wasn’t one of them. So a good mate and I were forced to buy tickets to the show and we just turned up with our cameras.

Now I have to admit that I may have stuffed up the seating allocation when I bought the tickets, and instead of being right at the end of the runway, we were in fact right at the beginning of it. This means that we were looking down the runway toward the photographers pit, with all the spotlights aimed to light the models perfectly as they walked… away from where we were sitting. D’oh. So those of you with an agile mind will then summarise that as the models were walking back toward where we were sitting, they were backlit and didn’t have any real usable light on their faces. Well that sucked.

So, I went in thinking that although we weren’t in the photographer’s pit, at least I might get some decent shots like the previous year at the Morrision Show. But instead we were faced with what looked to be totally unusable.

So call me a slow learner, overzealous or just plain keen to get some shots but I got my camera out regardless and set up ready to shoot. The house lights dimmed, the music started to crank and the catwalk was lit up like runway 27 at Perth International Airport. I ended up with my Nikon D700 at ISO-3200, f/2.8 @ 1/100^th second shutter speed, using my Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM Macro II lens. As that lens doesn’t have any form of Image Stabilisation and I hadn’t yet purchased my Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II I was wary of dropping the shutter too much slower, for a couple of reasons.

Of course number one was that I was conscious of the focal length -v- shutter speed rule of thumb. That being, if you are using a 200mm lens, if you want to get sharp images, don’t let your shutter speed drop below the longest local length; which is 200mm which translates to 1/200^th of a second. The second reason is that the models were charging up and down the runway at a fairly decent rate of knots, so if I had gone any slower the images would be blurred regardless of how steady I was holding the camera. As you can see, a couple of the images are a little blurry around the models feet and hands anyway, any slower than 1/100^th on the shutter speed and this would have only gotten worse.

So there you go. The images, while not perfect, are still a fairly good representation of the outfits that the models were wearing. And while it is still really hot weather I thought these images seemed to fit rather well. That’s it.

I hope you all have a blessed and happy Christmas, get spoiled rotten and take some time to think of those around you that have made your year so special. Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.

Still hanging in there... and a bunch of paper...

Hey there everyone.

Wow, two months since my last blog post huh. Seems like that long too actually, been so much happening. So much so that I almost forget all that has been happening. The highlights?

Well, we now have hired two new assistants, so welcome to Beck and Alanna. It was a much bigger process than I imagined trying to hire an assistant. We were literally inundated with applicants to our little advertisement. I interviewed over 20 applicants in the end. There was such a wealth of talented photographers applying to work with us, it was all a little humbling. But the tough decision had to be made and these guys kinda shone over the rest. Awesome to have you guys!

We also have a brand new website - finally. Check it out at www.timography.com.au. My wife, Dee who runs the office and does all the accounting, liasing, back-office stuff that I really can't stand to do organised it through Oliver and the guys and gals at Perth Web Design, and I think they have done a great job. It took us a little longer than expected to get it online as we were so busy with clients that it sort of took a back seat for a while but we finally managed to get all of the content uploaded and ready to go. I hope you like it.

Um, what else? There’s been lots of new gear that I will probably get around to talking about at some point in the near future. There’s been a few mishaps mid-shoot that really put me on the spot, but we came out on top in the end. Speaking of new gear, the topic of tonight’s blog post has come about by some of that new gear, or moreso the need to get rid of some old gear...

Last week saw the arrival of the long awaited PocketWizard Flex and Mini TTL radio triggers for Nikon products. These puppies are amazing! I got the opportunity to use them on a wedding shoot just yesterday and oh my God – they are brilliant. It is so nice to be able to get consistent flash exposure, wireless, in TTL. Have I said how fantastic it is? Turn up on a location, turn on the flashes and triggers, take a bunch of shots and move on. No more having to set everything on manual anymore (although it still definitely has its merits, more on that later too!).

Anyways, the new triggers meant that it was time to finally offload my old Pixel TTL radio triggers. These things never really worked that well anyways so they have been collecting dust in my office. I needed to get some images in a hurry for eBay but I couldn’t be bothered setting up my light tent and portable tabletop lighting rig. It was late in the evening and the wedding shoot earlier that day really took it out of me!

So I thought... I have a bunch of flashes that will work on wireless CLS mode. I thought some more. I remember reading on the Strobist blog where David had found himself in a similar situation and managed to fashion himself a temporary light box out of a bunch of A4 sheets of plain old white office paper. So I gave it a go.

As you can tell from the image above, there isn’t a lot to it – other than a bunch of flashes sitting on the floor! They were all set to the same channel and group so they would all put out equal power and distribute their light fairly evenly. So that’s three Nikon SB-900’s and one SB-600, all in remote mode. The whole lot was being triggered by using a SB-800 in commander mode sitting on top of my D700. I ended up dialling in -0.7EV for group A (the flashes on the floor) and I had the SB-800 set so that it was turned on to TTL and contributing to the exposure. It took a little bit of playing around but I ended up setting the SB-800 so that the flash head itself was upside down but parallel to the floor, with the flash head turned around so that I could use the built-in bounce card to push the light up to the roof and bounce back down on the subject. Oh, and I dialled in the SB-800 to be +0.3EV.

So yeah, as you can see, the end result turned out pretty well. I was really happy with how the images of the Pixel triggers and the PocketWizard triggers turned out. Look for yourself. If I hadn’t spend the last 5 minutes explaining the whole process you would be hard pressed to tell that the images had been taken on the floor with a bunch of A4 paper and 5 flashes.

So why did I do it this way? Because I could. Do I need another reason? Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.

Honey, I shrunk the images...

Well hey there everyone. What I wanted to share today are just a few of my favourite images from the "A Touch of Wool III" catwalk show from this year’s Perth Fashion festival. Yeah I know I am a little late getting these online but I have managed to finally catch up with all my backlog of post-processing work and I found myself with a little, yes that’s right, just a little bit of time to spare before things start to get crazy again... man, I love my job. Really, I do!

Ok, so to the images. On this particular shoot, I learned a very important lesson. You see, nine times out of ten I will shoot full resolution, fine detail JPEG’s. On rare occasions when the client specifically requests or I am in the mood then I will shoot in RAW. Why? Because I can. Because I can get four times as many images on a memory card. Because I, and I am being truthful here, have never really found a need to rescue an image that was "that" bad out of camera that it needed to be a RAW file in order to fix it. But mostly, because it saves me a bit of time in post production as even though I now have a brand new super dooper kick-butt light speed PC, working with JPEG’s is just, well... quicker compared to RAW files. Ok enough of that.

Anyway, for this particular catwalk show I decided that I would turn the resolution of my Nikon D700 right down, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these shows are usually over before you know it and the action is non-stop so I didn’t want to be wasting time changing memory cards and potentially missing some of the show. But the main reason is that I knew I would not be printing any of these images larger than postcard size, and the majority would only be used for putting on the internet for promotional purposes. So I set my D700 to shoot 2120 x 3184px images, which is just over 6 megapixels, ISO2000, f/2.8 and a shutter speed that varied from 1/320th to 1/500th second depending on the amount of light falling on the catwalk at the time. But the kicker was that I turned the compression up so that the camera was spitting out "Basic" JPEG's. Oh dear.

Here’s the kicker though. Compressing the image size compresses the dynamic range of the image too. You know, in all my time doing photography I had never known this because until now, every image I took was at full resolution and fine detail. The end result I found is that my exposure had to be spot on for the entire show (with its changing lighting scenarios and all) otherwise I was getting blown out highlights all over the place. It took me a few minutes to figure it out but I decided to stick with it for the remainder of the show; what better way to test ones skill while shooting a fast moving show, with the camera in manual mode and keeping the exposure within 1/3 of a stop the whole time. It was interesting.

That’s all for now. Take care and keep shooting what you love.

Taking some time out...

Hi guys. Just a really quick post tonight. I haven't really got any images to share, other than the iPhone snap that you see to the right. I haven't got any new gear to talk about (but give it a couple of days for that one lol). No lighting tips or words of pseudo wisdom for you all.

Nope, tonight's post is just a little something insignificant that I wanted to share. Something that has really been lacking for me lately is the luxury of taking a little time for... me.

Between photography, family, day jobs and everything else in between it has been hard to sit back, take an outside view and think about our next step. Reflect on where we are thus far. Plan where we are taking the business next. So, what the [bleep] am I doing sitting in a coffee shop in the departure lounge you ask? Good question actually.

You see I came here to the Perth International Terminal a month or so ago with a good mate to shoot some time-lapse movies of the planes loading and unloading on the tarmac. That’s nothing special I know but I have been back now several times on my own and I have to say that I am addicted to the vibe of this place. Everyone is so relaxed. They're all going on holidays or have just come back and are rested and refreshed and relaxed. If I had to sum up this place in a word, it would be relaxing. Weird I know huh, but that’s exactly how I feel after sitting here for an hour or so. It’s really addictive I gotta tell you. I really wish I could explain it, but this place just keeps drawing me back.

The next couple of weeks are going to be really busy for me and Timography. We have a bunch of shoots booked and we are launching something really special. A whole new look. I think it’s going to be pretty special. The new proverbial leaf.

So I’m enjoying the break for now. I’m going to revel in sitting back, sipping my coffee and just bathing in the atmosphere of this place. I love it.

Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.

An afternoon in the sun...

See, I am slowly trying to get back on track and post a new blog a little more regularly than I have been of late. Today I wanted to quickly share a couple of images from a shoot I did on the weekend for a young family.

The brief for the shoot was fairly straight forward. We would be shooting in the mid afternoon sun, about 3.30pm to be precise, and we would be on a privately owned fruit orchard. Cool! As it was private property I didn’t really get the opportunity to do any scouting ahead of time (as I often like to do) but none the matter; I’d have to put into practice all that “thinking on your toes” wedding stuff I have been raving about recently.

I did know two things that I wanted to do before I got to the shoot. Firstly, I wanted to use off camera lighting. Secondly, it was a gorgeous afternoon and the light falling through the valley that we were going to be shooting in was amazing so I knew that I wanted to use the daylight to backlight my subjects as much as practicable. I have been getting more and more frustrated with my Pixel i-TTL radio triggers to the point that I refuse to use them any longer, as the results I get from them vary so wildly that it makes them pretty much impractical to use. This meant that I would obviously have to use a different method to trigger my Nikon SB-900 which was firing through a 24” collapsible softbox. I could have utilized Nikon’s wonderful CLS to trigger the flash, but with the ambient light so strong it would have proven to be a little unreliable also unless I was within a few feet of the remote flash.

So, enter stage left a newly purchased but until now untried 10m flash extension cord. Yup that’s right, 10 meters. And I got say, right off the bat this thing saved my hide. It worked brilliantly. Yeah I know it’s not a fancy radio trigger “Radio Popper” but for now it suits me just fine. I know that Pocket Wizard are now in beta testing with their “Flex” and “Mini” TTL radio triggers for Nikon but there is still no firm release date for them. So 10m extension cord it is.

As for the camera settings for the images, it’s pretty simple. Manual mode. Matrix metering. ISO200. Use the camera meter to establish what correct exposure would be for the entire scene, no flash. Take a shot. Check your LCD to ensure that you are getting enough highlights around your subjects. If you aren’t, move your shutter speed back and forth until you do. Remember not to try using your exposure compensation dials here as we are in manual mode, and although the camera will let you make the adjustment to the dials it will have NO effect on your image. Only use exposure compensation when in Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority or Program mode.

For me, correct exposure ended up being 1/2000th second shutter speed @ f/2.8, ISO200. I then turned on the flash and left it in TTL mode and set the camera to high speed sync mode so I could still use the flash at this high shutter speed. Of course the trade off with high-speed sync is that you lose a little power. But this was ok as I had the flash positioned nice and close anyway, at only about 1 ½ meters away. That’s it. Take a shot. Wait a couple of seconds for the flash to recharge. Take another shot. Repeat this process. Job done!

We took a bunch of shots in some different locations around the orchard that afternoon, but these ones sitting in the grass were my favourites from the day.

Keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.