Goodbye and Good Luck Mike

Yesterday was something of the end of an era for me.  My mate and photo collaborator Mike Thorsen left Dunedin for a new life on the island of St Helena.  Mike and I have been bouncing ideas off each other fairly intensively all year; I had the honour of shooting his wedding and the pleasure of using him as my assistant on several of my commercial shoots.  On our last gig together for Tourism Waitaki, between me grunting at him to adjust or shift lights and reflectors, he actually found time to take some behind-the-scenes shots.

See how I seem so totally focussed on my subject that I don't even notice Mike in my shot shooting back at me?  And that I look as if I'm in total control and know what I'm doing all the time?  That's how good he is.

   

I'm going to miss our catchups over coffee to talk gear, his expertise in macro shooting and his advice on post production, but what I'll really miss is how good Mike makes me look. I'm expecting to see some great stuff come out of his time overseas.  

Good luck mate, I'm looking forward to working with you again some day.  I'll be your voice-activated lightstand any day.

On that note, it's time to put away the toys, tear myself away from the PC and wrap for the year.  Happy Christmas and a great 2011 everyone.  I hope you've been entertained, just a little informed, and come back for more adventures in photography next year.

Blow Wind, Blow

Yesterday was one of those spectacularly hot blue sky days that you just want to spend near some water.



Dunedin's beaches can be sublime on such days, so James down at St Clair Beach Resort asked me to pop down there and get some exteriors. It's a job that suits my natural inclination to portray things with strong saturated colours. What we weren't expecting were the Nor'west gales that blasted the south. Up in the hills, gusts were reaching over 150 kmh. It must have been about then that I was perched with James on top of St Clair Majestic Mansions, trying to get the shot below of the resort and saltwater pool in the background.



I wanted to bracket some exposures so I had the option of some HDR post production, so had the tripod set up with my 14kg camera bag hooked on to help keep it steady. We were like straws in the gale up there. You can see Majestic Mansions just behind and to the right of the resort in the shot below.  Funny how the wind doesn't really show but honestly? There were some scary moments.



It would have been nice to go for a little dip at the beach after the shoot, but I didn't fancy having my body sand-blasted. Driving home through wind-blown debris was just as scary. The temperature back home was around 30 C. One of our trees was down, the veggie patch had been hammered, and in the region, fires were burning, power lines were down and roofs were being lifted. In situations like this, there's nothing like the company of a 7 year old and a lawn sprinkler.

Happy Hour

One tiny snag about shooting pictures for a living is that I can't share everything I do straight away.  Often my clients want to release their promotional material or whatever it is first.  And fair enough too.  That's why I can't put up anything from my recent magazine or theatre shoots.  I can share a little of this though, some work I did in a local hostelry.

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It was one of those informal shoots where my client had a family coming in for drinks and dinner who were happy enough to be captured. Kind of a fishing trip for shots for general promotional material. Not a bad idea, we got some useful stuff, but you're always going to get better results from a comprehensive brief. It dawned on me that this shoot wasn't all about the family per se, but more about good looking GV's (general views) and detail shots to build up the venue's promotional catalogue. Before our time was up, my client and I talked and I quickly did a few experiments designed to show him what else we could do. The shiny, colourful stuff behind the bar is great material for detail shots, so I created some impromptu lighting schemes with my flashes (one or two of which needed to be cloned out later - this was just a quick experiment) and looked for some creative opportunities.



You can tell I also pushed the envelope a little in the post processing. I'm sharing these because I don't really expect them to be used. It might not be the sort of thing that fits in with the existing promotional material - the less processed stuff should, but I like to offer clients something extra they might not have thought about and it always pays to push myself in terms of new techniques.



We'll see what comes out of this shoot in terms of further business. I was up front and told my client I thought I could do more for him knowing his needs a little better now. I also feel I'm just getting comfortable with this hyper-real look and how to achieve it efficiently. It won't always be appropriate, but it's another tool for my photgraphic trick bag.

Bad Press

There I was, hanging out in the local primary school playground, waiting for thunder to roll.  ND filter, remote timer release, wide angle lens, tripod, rain jacket... and I'm standing around in the big wooden playhouse they have, partly for the shelter, partly because I can climb the ladder to the upper deck to get a great shot of the sky and surrounding suburbs when the lightning comes.

The thing is, hanging around playgrounds with a camera while there's a class in after-school care just is not a good look.  Even though I'm known to everyone as Miss C(7)'s dad, I felt kinda pervy.  After half an hour or so, I skulked home.  The rain had passed without a storm anyway.  On the way past the classroom, I made sure to stop and make small talk with one of the teachers, chat about the weather, and my obsessive hobby.  I almost showed her my test frames of the sky.  A reputation as a kiddie stalker is something you just don't need.

So home I went to play around with some frames from my last shoot with Stuart Devinie at Fortune Theatre.   Pushed the fill light, contrast, clarity and blacks sliders to the max and got this.  The different looks that are quickly and easily possible when you shoot raw are just amazing.  I'm going to keep experimenting with portrait styles.  You never know, I might crack that Dave Hill look one day - although this is somewhere between him and Andrzej Dragan.

The Newspaper Man

I recently had the chance to shoot some pictures of actor Stuart Devinie for Dunedin's Fortune theatre. I could've done it with the theatre lights or my camera flashes, but wanted big, soft light, so rigged the softbox and umbrella onto my new 1000 WS studio strobes. Lotsa light. Bang, bang, bang. I was ready to get all creative on the job, but my client wanted straight stuff to cut out and composite with other material. Maybe next time. Just for this posting I decided to ramp up the clarity and contrast - a bit like a high pass filter to give Stuart some edge.

I'm dying to do some stuff in the style of the Brakhas. Check 'em out. I love where they're going with their Sketchy Mondays blog, as mentioned in David Hobby's Strobist blog. I think their Glee cast pictures are particularly inspiring. Reverse engineer the lighting on those shots and you'll see why I'm trying to make a bracket that will hold four or five of my flashes in a row together.

With the increasing load of commercial work I'm doing, I'm getting more commercial gear. There's been the aforementioned studio strobes, and a Pure Sine Wave inverter to power them in the field. I'm expecting some backdrop stuff to arrive any day. I may do some posts on that stuff soon. Right now there's thunder forecast, and I'm hoping to get some lightning shots later. Fingers crossed...

Clever Pixies

In this day of digitally scheduled broadcasts this may seem foreign to modern viewers, but back in the day, TV was live. Shows were started with the push of a button, determined by an analogue control room clock and stations frequently had to make up or fill a few minutes here and there to stick to the advertised programme. Long pauses while presenters stretched until the incoming feed came online, test cards put up during breakdowns and silent, stately black screens were commonplace. When I was a kid the old NZBC TV station DNTV2 used to run this filler piece - basically an early music video of the Pixie Town animatronic display set to "So What's New" by the Tijuana Brass. I loved it. The display used to be housed in the DIC department store until it went out of business in the 80's, but now it's kept at the Otago Settlers Museum, dusted off and switched on every Christmas.



Handmade, driven by gears, belts and levers; lit by Xmas lights, I wonder what today's kids make of it. I've taken Miss C(7) and although she didn't exactly linger for hours, it's become something she looks forward to, something of a Dunedin Xmas ritual, like the Santa parade. Well last week I got the job of shooting some new publicity pictures of it. Another little dream job.



To be truthful, it doesn't pay the kids to linger, as closer inspection reveals these Pixies are a slightly sinister lot: Hard drinking, donkey-kicking tricksters. But I was in Pixie heaven. I shot them with a 2 light setup - my Canon 430 EZ at low power and high for key to simulate the Pixieland sun, and my Yongnuo 460 into the Orbis ring flash adapter for fill. Nice and quick. Occasionally there'd be challenging shots, like the Carousel. It was lit with fairy lights inside that came on and off intermittently, and it also turned, so getting the exposure and frame I wanted took some patience. I could have spent more time on it, but am reasonably pleased with the frame of the Lovers Nest here.



The scenes captured, I did another quick pass with just the Orbis and my 100mm Macro lens, getting closeups of the wee faces. Not exactly Dora the explorer friendly or pretty for that matter, but these are from another time, handmade made by Kiwi grownups for Kiwi kids to enjoy - not some corporate drone designing a merchandising product. Last year I shot Humpty Dumpty - a companion piece to the little pixies - it had real human teeth, and was seriously Gothic/sinister. These little guys could just have real human hair, I wouldn't be surprised one skerrick, but it's those quirky little details and surprises that are part of Pixie Town's enduring charm. Go see it some time.

Another Day, Another Planet

Thought I'd just throw this one in the pot today. It's another from Moeraki Boulders. I could have bracketed the exposures and combined them in HDR, but sometimes, you want a shady boulder to look shady, and the sun to look like the large thermonuclear reaction it is. It's okay to have blown out highlights sometimes. A good example is the small specular highlights in peoples eyes. They need to sparkle.

This is one of the shots I put out to my "Shot of the Week" mailing list. Sometimes they feature here along with their stories, sometimes not. If you'd like to get them in your email every week, just drop; me a line via the contacts link, twitter etc. I'm always listening.

Moeraki Madness

It was a 4 am start for my voice-activated-lightstand Mike and me the other day.  I had a shoot for Tourism Waitaki that Mike was helping me with; We were due to kick off with some models at 0900, but we thought we might as well get there at dawn, to get some of our own pictures of the famous boulders. They're a bunch of beautiful spherical stones, said to be the remains of eel baskets, kumara and calabashes washed ashore from the wreck of the ancestral canoe Arai-te-uru. The less romantic explanation is that they're septarian concretions that have been freed from surrounding mudstone by coastal erosion. I know which I prefer.

The weather had been mixed all week and as we got there, we knew we weren't going to be in for a spectacular sunrise, as the coast had clagged in.  Never mind, we thought, moody and misty works just as well.

Our mood wasn't helped by another bunch of photogs though. Not long after we'd started, along the beach comes four guys with the same idea. Without a word of acknowledgement, they just muscled in and started shooting over our shoulders. It tended to make us a little bloody minded about letting them in. Mike merely played dog-in-the-manger with a guy toting a medium format camera, while I dropped the C-bomb at them. In hindsight I'm just a little disappointed at myself for not being more welcoming to obvious tourists. They were clearly semi-pro or pro going by their gear, but their attitude was seriously amateur.

I reminded myself that they're just rocks, and this was only ever going to be a recce for me anyway, so it didn't come to a fist-fight. Once they left, calm was restored, and it was beautiful down there on the beach, especially with some small Hectors dolphins surfacing just a few score metres offshore. I took some long exposures, trying to work with soft waves and hard rock, while Mike took a bunch of bracketed exposures to combine later. I'm looking forward to seeing what he gets, we've both got quite different styles.

Leisure out of the way, we grabbed a quick breakfast once the visitor centre opened and got on with the assignment once our models arrived from the local Polytechnic. The light came and went, and it was hardly tourist brochure weather, but we got some interesting stuff that my client was really happy with. My favourite is the one above, partly inspired by the movie Alien. It was a quickie we pulled off on the way to the next location. The girls were lit by Mike with a Canon flash on the left, while I had another low right, aimed at the boulder. With just a little more time, we'd have got some flashes inside the rock working to light the girls up, and a much softer key on them, but we were on a hectic schedule.

It turned into a long day, several different locations, run and gun, with Mike trying his best to give me good light in a few minutes.

So many different conditions and setups, we just about threw everything we could set up quickly at it - bare strobe, softbox, strobe through translucent reflector, silver reflector... nothing but fun.

And now, batteries recharged, Miss C(7) handed off to a friend for the afternoon, I'm out the door for a magazine shoot. Yeah.
But this boulders thing. I've never encountered it in New Zealand before. I guess I should expect it at an iconic scene in the goldern hours, but don't some basic manners apply, like, say hello to other photogs at a scene? What's your take on photog etiquette?

Model Mayhem

As part of my support for Dunedin Gasworks Museum, I went this week to take some shots of children there.  We're trying to focus our marketing on kids and family, rather than the engineering and steam enthusiasts that the place traditionally attracts.

 



Miss C(7) was definitely up for the job, but I thought it would be good to have a young lad along for balance, so she suggested one of her classmates, Mr M(7).  Now it just happened that he had a very important play date scheduled with Mr C(7) (no relation).  And so it was that I set forth on Tuesday with 3 youngsters, my camera and lighting kit and just an hour to get some usable shots.  I also had a bag of sweet bribes and energy supplies.  Keeping kids well fueled is essential if you want them to work.  I just don't know how they got children to labour hard in Dickensian times on starvation diets.  Another useful secret lost to history there.



Now like Gremlins, there are risks to feeding children - it's easy to overfuel them, which is what I think I may have done.  Either that or the two lads were simply overwhelmed by the steampunk wonder that the DGM is.  Whatever the reason, my plan for a few well-lit scenes rapidly devolved to get-what-you-can.

The Engine House is a complex mix of window light and different overhead sources, which makes pictures taken with the ambient light pretty unattractive.  My first setup had me trying to highlight the machines with bare strobes and  the kids with a strobe and shoot-thru umbrella for some soft light.  Nice idea, and the test shot above of Mr M(7) is one of the results.  Unfortunately, test pops were about all I could get, as the minute I went to adjust my light, the youngsters raced off to explore some machinery (I can't blame them) or boiled over with giggling, jumping, song and dance (I still can't blame them).  As you can see, the umbrella gave me the nice soft light but spilt everywhere, including the shiny walls.  I decided the best course of action was just to light some machinery dramatically, hope it provided some highlights to the kids wherever I managed to get them to stand still, and use my ring flash adapter to fill the harsh shadows on their faces.



It was a step in the right direction.  Losing the shoot-thru lost the distracting and unattractive background and the tools and  machines look good in hard raking light.  That left me to try and get a performance out of the kids.  What I learned here is that you don't have to worry about them under-performing.  It's pulling them back from rolling their eyes, sticking out tongues and making faces down the barrel that is the hard part.



Oh what I wouldn't give for some professional models and the time to light them but considering we only had an hour or so between the end of school and the museum closing, I'm satisfied with what we got here. Thanks to our design wizard, our brochures are going to look great.

Model Mayhem is a web community where fashion-interested creatives like models, photogs and other artists can meet.  But this was real model mayhem.  Everything they say about working with kids is true, it's not easy but before I make this sound like anything less than fun, let me summarise: I spent the afternoon in a life-size 19th century Meccano set, with all my favourite electronic and digital toys, with three other people just as excited, bursting to laugh and play at the first opportunity.   And to cap it off, the kids may not be as professional as working models, but they work for pikelets.  Big tick.

Landscape, Lighting and Little Surprises

The art of making landscape images takes many forms. A while ago, in an effort to get MissC(6) out of my hair for an hour, I gave her a camera and told her not to bother me until she had shot a great landscape picture. She promptly turned around, took a shot of the New Zealand Pictorial Calendar behind her and handed me back the camera with a look of great satisfaction.

At the other end of the scale, there's my mate Dave. Dave has recently played a few gigs behind the drum kit in my band Bluestone - and very well too. He's played some serious gigs with some serious bands in the UK and is as Geordie a lad as you can expect to meet this far south of deepest darkest Newcastle.  Thankfully I was born in Hartlepool, about 30 miles down the road (with its own Yorkshire-influenced Geordie dialect).  I had the accent whipped out of me in primary school, but can translate for the rest of the band when needed.



I was just a little surprised when this Blues/Rock Percussion God told me what he does in his spare time.  Knowing he puts me just a degree of separation or two away from AC/DC made me expect either power boating, Motor cross or the ancient English sport of shin-kicking.  But a couple of years ago, Dave started painting landscapes, and bloody good ones as it turns out.   I was already impressed at the images that he had to show me on his phone, but last week he asked me to come around and capture some digitally for him before he offers them for sale. Wow.



Dave takes months to make these pictures, spending weeks prepping the canvas before creating the image, then honing details like reflections and small pebbles, and applying glazes to apply colour effects to things like sky and clouds.

They're lovely, but Dave's canvas prep and glazes make his paintings quite glossy - always a challenge to shoot pictures of. You need to light the canvas evenly, avoiding hot spots and direct reflections. You also need to keep the canvas parallel to the plane of your sensor and get the camera well back to minimise image distortion - not always easy in small rooms or installations. Thankfully I had this all in mind and got the job done in short order.  As usual, most of the knowledge I applied came from what I learned over ad David Hobby's Strobist blog (link on the right) but the book I'm reading at the moment would have come in handy too.  It's  Light: Science and Magic by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua, pretty much required reading for photogs who want to master the technical side of lighting.  I'm eating it up, but that's the kind of geek I am.  Dave's an artist.

I'm sure Dave's stuff will sell well. Keep an eye out for his signature. Probably a good time to invest in his pictures.  I'd appreciate it if you did, cause I'm pretty sure that as well as more canvas and paint, he'll invest some of the money on this really nice set of cymbals he's got his eye on that will make him (and the rest of us in Bluestone) sound even better and let us earn some beer money.  Support the arts and you benefit the whole economy folks.

I shot the man himself with my Orbis ring flash adapter.  Still loving that smooth lighting effect on human skin.



All in all, it's been a fun week, shooting a story for Woman's Day and doing some event and group photography for the Partners in International Management conference at Otago University. I've got another tourism shoot coming up later this week - which has me looking at investing in some very cool lighting equipment.  Stay tuned for that story.

I really love this job's variety and the range of people I get to meet while doing it. They surprise you in wonderful and amusing ways.  Kind of like when a 6-year old takes a great landscape picture without even leaving your office.

DIY - A Dad Thing

I've had my Orbis ring flash adapter for a bit more than a year now and I love the soft, even light and trademark shadow it creates.  If you're shooting with it for an extended period of time however, it can be pretty fatiguing to hold your rig, and lots of zooming or manual focus can become a real hassle.

That's why buyers began screaming out for an adapter to hold the Orbis onto their cameras and being smart, that's why its manufacturers took their time to create one that would work and last long.  When they finally brought it out a few months back, I'll bet more than a few Orbis owners thought "well I could have made that".  I know I did.



So the other day, I decided to pop down to my local Mitre 10 Mega store for the hardware to build my own version.  There are similar hacks all over the net, like here  but here's my recipe:

Ingredients:

1x 1000mm x25mm x 3mm aluminium bar (approx. $NZ 9.00)

2x 25mm 1/4" threaded bolts - I recommend hex heads, but slots will do

2x 1/4" threaded bolts - about 1/2 inch if you can find them. 

2x 1/4" wing nuts

2 spring washers

1x fibre washer

1 strip of cork floor tile

2 blobs metal putty



You might have to run around for the bolts - the camera fittings that you need them for are in imperial measure, so not that common any more.  I ended up going to Steel & Tube to get mine.

Cut the bar into 2 lengths, drill holes for the camera mounting and adjustable section on the camera portion.  Drill slots for the flash mounting and the adjustable section on the flash portion.  Smooth rough edges, bend into right angles.

Glue the cork to where you're going to sit your camera.  Mould the blobs of putty around the bolt hex-heads to make knobs and let them cure overnight.

That's it.  To assemble, fit both sections together and fix with the bolts and wing nuts.

 

Use the knobs you made to fix the camera and flash.  If your bolts are a bit long, use fibre washers to make them a nice tight fit to stop things spinning in the mount.



Hey Presto.  The aluminium I used is a little thinner than the real version, but I think it's going to be fine. 



The job done, it was time for my assignment: a couple of shots of Miss C(7) as her school's indoor soccer player of the day.  You might think this would be easy, but she can be a hard model to direct and when she's also the demanding client, it becomes a hard job indeed.  Hardly worth my hourly rate, believe me.



In terms of material cost, I probably saved myself about a hundred dollars.  But if I was charging for my time and skinned knuckles, I'd probably be out of pocket.  DIY can be like that, but the feeling of satisfaction you get from it is priceless.  A bit like taking pictures of your player of the day.

Definitely a Dad thing.

Found Art

This week I was back at Dunedin Public Art Gallery for a promotional shoot. I'd already taken some venue pictures during a graduation party so this time the job was to create some shots that promote it as a wedding venue. That called for two delightful models, Victoria and Hamish who my wonderful client Tim Pollock convinced to work for me.  They were very convincing as newlyweds, especially considering they won't actually be getting married until next year.  I wonder if they've booked a shooter yet?

So to the shoot.  The post on these pictures isn't totally finished, but this blog is about the process, not the product.



The gallery atrium is a large and lovely space, but for intellectual property reasons, I needed to avoid featuring the large wall and installation art. That meant concentrating on features like the staircases and windows. It was quite an exercise in lighting and as with most gigs, time was a factor. The large windows meant I had to work with changing ambient light. I'm pleased with the shot above, which was achieved with a mix of daylight from the windows, the in-house lights and a couple of flashes - one on a stand for fill and my voice-activated-lightstand Mike T holding one for a hair light. If anything, this shoot really showed me the dramatic difference good hair light can make.



The shot above was lit with my Orbis ring flash adaptor. This is one that could have used a hair light just to add that touch of glamour, but they were standing against a tall window here and I was racing the outside light.



This is one of my favourites. It wasn't on the shot list and my wonderful client Tim may not use it, but I like it. Between setups I noticed Victoria arranging her hair in the window's reflection and I thought it would make for a nice intimate moment. This was actually a test pop, rather overexposed and brought down in post-processing, but it's got a kind of high fashion look that I really like and am adding to my trick bag. I'm a big believer in pursuing opportunities like this when you spot them. My old writing Guru John Vorhaus calls it 'found art'.



More found art. I noticed Victoria playing with the veil fabric and got her to have some fun with it. The spiral staircase was a feature Tim really wanted to capture but lighting it was quite a challenge. Big window daylight coming from camera right mixed with tungsten venue lights. I really needed to bring in some more light from camera left, but the only place to put one on was a mezzanine floor twenty metres away. I was worrying about this the night before and decided to go into a film and video light hire company to see what could give me a 3 metre spread of light at such a distance. I ended up loading my truck with an HMI, a big movie light. It just did the trick. The wall shadow is from one of the sculptures hanging from the ceiling. I figured a shadow wasn't really infringing the artist's IP.



Same setup, this time getting some shadow action from the staircase. Shame about the window in the background, but it is what it is. This and the other stair shot were on Tim's must have list, so I'm glad they turned out well.



Finally, the ambient light outside reached the point where I could get my window shots. I these had firmly in mind although I've never actually executed the technique before. I added a low flash in background to create the romantic back light and also give their faces a little fill. Most of the fill is actually coming from the flash reflecting from Victoria's dress - a handy trick for wedding photography, traditional brides make walking reflectors.

Tim wasn't quite expecting this, so it was nice to deliver it quickly on the night, and he was pleasantly surprised. I think it sells the venue nicely. I certainly hope so!

Have you ever had an experience with "Found Art" in your creative process? Feel free to share with me in the comments section.