Just when you thought it was safe...

Well hey there everyone – how have you all been?

I have to admit that right off the bat – this blog post has been sitting on my desktop for about three months. See, I’ve been waiting for a spare evening or two to put some thoughts together and try and write something meaningful to accompany these images (which incidentally I posted on our Facebook page over a month ago) but alas time has well and truly gotten away from us. 

As some of you may know, we recently ran a promotion on Scoopon.com that ended up just going crazy and I have been shooting literally every day, 7 days a week for... um, about the last four months. That, in addition to our already scheduled wedding and commercial shoots has really taken it's toll on my spare time lately. So sorry about that. But what I’ll do now is a quick sum up of the images in this blog post – for those that might be interested.

Ok, the first image. This was taken for a local fashion importer. We took a bunch of shots for their web and advertising needs but they were ultimately looking for an image to go into an upcoming edition of Australian Vogue magazine, and this was one of my favourite images from the shoot. The first half of the shoot took place in our studio, with the client having us photograph a couple of dozen outfits just against a plain grey backdrop with the model being lit with an 8ft parabolic umbrella as the key light, and a small 40cm beauty dish with a grid and sock directly above the model just to accent her facial features a little bit.

We then headed just down the road here in Kelmscott to a vacant lot adjacent to a new housing estate. The sun was getting quite low, which is just where we wanted it in order to backlight our model. Lighting for this shot was provided by a Bowens GM500 monoblock flash, which in turn was being powered by the Bowens TravelPak battery pack, and from memory it was pretty much on full power as we had to place the light a little bit from the model so it wouldn't be seen in the final image. I had placed a big 3ft x 4ft softbox on the front of the flash to make sure that we would get a nicely diffused and soft light on the model. That’s it. Taken with my Nikon D3s, 1/250^th second, f/16, ISO200 with the Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VRII lens at about 190mm to compress perspective and draw the background closer in on the model.


This next image is one of Serena again. This shot was taken for another fashion importer for their new upcoming website. As for the lighting – it was actually pretty simple and very similar to that described in the last image. That being; I put up the parabolic umbrella to camera left as the key light, powered by a Bowens GM200. The parabolic umbrella is so efficient that it really doesn’t require much power to produce a nice big and soft spread of light. The second and last light source for this image was my larger 70cm beauty dish, this time without a grid or a sock. But it was powered however simply by a Nikon SB-900 speedlight. The beauty dish is just above the models head and just outside of the frame in this image. Point being, it really didn’t need much power at all because it was only about 2ft from Serena’s head. I did end up putting the diffusion dome on the SB-900 however and I wanted to get a little bit more of a spread of light than I was otherwise getting without it.

The beauty dish also caused a happy little accident in this image. Let me explain! Because of where the beauty dish was placed, in combination with it being lit but the SB-900 (which sits differently within the dish than a normal monoblock flash would) and I wasn’t using a grid or a sock, the arc shaped shadow you see going across the top of the background is actually the shadow produced by the rim of the dish. After the first couple of test shots I took I pointed it out to the client and was set to put on the sock to get rid of the shadow, but the client liked the look of the shadow so we left it right where it was. Taken with a Nikon D3x, 1/160^th second, f/9, ISO100 with my Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VRII lens at about 70mm.

The final image I’ll talk about for today was taken at the 2011 ISDE Conference which was held at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. By the way, ISDE stands for International Symposium for the Digital Earth. Sounds really nerdy but it is actually really interesting. I have been fortunate enough to have won the tender to photograph this event for the last few years and it is always a challenge and also really hard work. It also presents some pretty difficult photographic conditions. The bulk of the shooting I was required to do was going to take place in the big 6000 seat auditorium with only the bare minimum of stage lighting and only one (stationary) spotlight on the speakers as they were delivering their presentations. What does this mean? Well basically it means that I would be standing a long way away in near darkness without a tripod (they are deemed a health risk in the event of a building evacuation). Fun huh. So for this I enlisted my Nikon D3s, a camera known for being a fantastic performer in said dark lighting conditions, coupled to a Nikon AF-S 300mm f/2.8G ED VRII lens. This lens is enormous and really heavy, so hand-holding for long periods of time was really out of the question. Fortunately using a monopod was allowed and that ended up being my saviour. Taken with my Nikon D3s, 1/80^th second, f/2.8, ISO3200, and obviously the Nikon AF-S 300mm f/2.8G ED VRII was at 300mm, because it’s a prime lens. :) FYI - this is a testament to how well the Vibration Reduction mechanism works in the new line of Nikon Pro lenses. Try getting a sharp image with a non-VR lens at 300mm with a shutter speed about three stops lower than you should be using to handhold the shot. I think thats pretty cool. Just sayin... 

Well, that’s as much spare time as I can wrangle at the moment, so take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you all... soon!