My track record around buying successful Xmas and birthday presents for my wife is not exactly spectacular. So this year I gave it a lot of thought and decided to make her some nice portraits of our 3 boys. I had recently bought some off-camera flash gear (softbox, brolly etc.). I decided to give it a run out at Middle Head Fort.
Now my boys are not really the clean cut “perfect boys” that you often see when you walk into friends houses and you see the professional portraits on the wall with not a hair out of place. I was adamant that I wanted the portraits to really capture the essence of my boys. I think I have accomplished this even though these are not your traditional portrait shots…. dirty feet, disheveled hair etc.
My wife loved her present and the photos are now framed and hanging on the kitchen wall.
At least I got it right this year
Happy New Year to all my photo buddies and readers of my blog.
It’s been a while since I have posted a video, so I thought I would give you a double-header. This is the first of two videos that show how I made an image called Nightmare. This video is part 1 which takes you behind the scenes when we did the shoot. It was a lot of fun, there was a group of about 8 of us and I think everyone really enjoyed the location and the shoot. When you are shooting with a good group it really makes photography fun. We were also lucky enough to have a gorgeous and talented model (thank you Mandy) who modeled for us.
This shot is something different for me in a few different ways.
It combines off-camera flash with light painting. I don’t normally do much off-camera flash, but I’m keen to start doing more after Oat and Nelson’s wonderful off-camera flash workshop.
It is a shot of a person… I normally have a bit of a mantra of not shooting anything that talks or shits. Hence the fascination with seascapes, landscapes and urban shots. In this case I do feature the beautiful Mandy.
This shot was totally pre-visualised for about 3 months, and I have set out to create it. I planned everything about the shot from the pools of light to the type of clothes that Mandy had on. I wanted to see if I had the technique to accurately re-create my vision…. and I have to say I was very happy with the results.
What is this shot about?
Nightmare is about a chick who has been out for a wild night of partying finding herself in the wee hours of the morning in one god-awful freaky place. Her clothes are in disarray, her makup is smudged over face and I wanted to create a response in the viewer of “what the hell happened to her…. what is she doing in this freaky place”?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video…. I will try to post part II tomorrow which will show the post processing including some pretty cool techniques.
This video was produced in High Definition, so I’m not going to embed it inline with the blog but send you over to Vimeo where you can enjoy it in all it’s HD splendor.
On Saturday I spent the day with Oat and Nelson on their Off-Camera-Flash workshop. Now this was definitely something different for me… a devout landscaper. However it’s been something that I’ve been watching with interest for a while… in fact ever since Oat (aka HangingPixels) went to the “dark side” and crossed from being a landscaper into a photographer that photographs chicks in their underwear.
When I turned up clutching my tripod like a security blanket, it wasn’t long before these staunch Canon shooters started paying out on the “Nikon Guy”. However this didn’t phase me… those Canon guys can jibe me all they want…. water off a duck’s back!
Nelson strutting his stuff
Anyway, what can I say about the workshop… it was fantastic. Nelson (aka NellyPro) and Oat really know their stuff, and after browsing their portfolio’s, their experience in off-camera-flash was very apparent. I totally enjoyed the day. Not only did they de-mystify off-camera-flash, but the location shoots were a blast and made me really want to start experimenting a bit more with this type of shooting.
The ballet dancer (Emma) that I photographed a few weeks back has agreed to come out on location and do some modelling with me, so I have some pretty clear ideas of how I would like to incorporate off-camera-flash into my landscape and night photography work. Watch this space.
In the meantime, for any of you Aussie photographers, if you are at all considering a workshop to improve your skills, then I would highly recommend this workshop. If you want to reach these guys you can email Oat or email Nelson.
Check out this video that I made of the day. This should give you a feel for the fun we had on Saturday.
I just finished a project that I call “Body & Form”. It is a huge departure for me from my usual landscape and night photography, but it was a lot of fun. Here’s what the project was all about.
Aim of project: I wanted to push my photography into new areas. So far I have quite deliberately stayed away from shooting people or wildlife because quite frankly neither of them interest me from a photographic perspective. However I felt like I was ready for a new challenge, so I came up with the idea of doing a dramatic studio shoot of a ballet dancer’s body. My major objectives were:
1) Start getting an understanding of studio lighting
2) Learn how to work with a model
3) Get familiar with portrait and retouching workflow in Photoshop
Now I’m pretty lucky here, my Mother has a school for full-time dancers who are training to become professional, so I had my choice of dancer and also a great space to shoot in. My local camera club had the lighting gear that I could borrow.
I had done a fair bit of research, I approached the dancer (Emma) and she was keen to be part of the project. We planned two sessions:
Session 1: was to be totally experimental, I wanted to achieve the following:
• For me to get comfortable working with Emma
• For Emma to get comfortable working with me
• For me to experiment with different lighting setups to see what works
• For Emma to get comfortable with the lights and camera
• For me to work out the sort of poses I wanted to shoot.
Session 2: was “The shoot” and was taken about 4 days later. It gave me time to process the test shots from session 1 and make adjustments etc. Emma and I spent about an hour reviewing the session 1 photos and talking about what worked and what didn’t, so when we started the next session we were pretty focused on what we each needed to do.
This video is a little 2 min video that I made up for a presentation I was doing at my local camera club on the convergence of video and stills and how video can give your stills photos context rather than the traditional stills slide show. If you are interested in the lighting and the setup I used, this video will show you which lights I used and how I positioned them.
What’s Next?
Well the first thing that surprised me was I enjoyed this shoot very much and found every aspect of it a lot of fun (planning, execution, post production etc.). I’ve already talked to Emma about doing some more modelling with me out on landscape location and she has eagerly agreed. I am now about to do an Off Camera Flash course (strobist stuff) and get some portable gear that will allow me to take the studio with me on location. I have 3 very specific ideas in my mind that will introduce Emma to some of the more interesting landscape and urbanscape locations that I have photographed. I’m planning on shooting this project in May.
I find that picking some specific projects is a great way of pushing my photography further. I hope this inspires some of you to pick a project that pushes you further. It was a lot of fun for me.
Photography is my passion... I've been doing it since I was a kid and my old man taught me how to use a B&W darkroom.
I love learning new things and pushing the envelope.... and I'm happy to share what I learn with anybody else that shares the passion.
