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.