Southern Showdown

My latest little video project has been for my mate Doug Kamo of Main Event Ltd. Main Event is running the Southern Showdown, a fantastic boxing match that raises money for some great local charities. Doug engaged me to shoot the contender profiles and training sessions this year and I was pretty excited about it. It would give me a chance to apply the kind of lighting I've been applying to some stills projects. When Rea (below) started working the bag and breaking sweat, I knew things were going to go well.



This dramatic double rim light is just made for athletes. Of course these guys don't exactly need my hero lighting to look tough. If you ever told someone "You fight like a girl", you haven't seen these girls.  Meet Lauren:



Profiles done, I turned things over to my assistant Joe to capture some of the gruelling training the contenders are going through.  I'd have done it myself, but the sessions coincided with some other commitments of mine, so I stuck around to make sure things were running according to plan and left Joe to it.



Of course before I left I couldn't resist the temptation to shoot some motion stills to try and capture the dynamism of the training sessions.



Just using ambient light here, which was nice and bright in the gyms.



The only trick was to shoot from a tripod to keep things nice and sharp while the longish exposures (around half a second) created the motion blur on the fighters.



It's a technique I like but haven't really had much opportunity to do, so had some fun and got some ideas for future projects.



Seeing the training sessions and listening to the contenders talk about their motivation for fighting is quite inspiring and I know they'll all be very entertaining bouts.



Think seriously about attending, and giving a little to one or more of the charities concerned.  I know you'll have a good time and do some good as well.



In fact, I'll guarantee you a good time.  Doug (that's him standing behind Joe above) not only engaged me to shoot for him, my blues band will be playing before and after the fights.  We're a pretty gritty combo, so we'll be a good match for some great boxing.

See you there!

The Tilt Shift Lens

Plenty on the go lately. Some local event coverage, a museum shoot, another for a national hotel chain, and in the video arena, contender profiles for an upcoming charity fight night. I love the variety. So to keep expanding my style and skill base I decided to invest a little of my earnings in a new bit of kit, the Samyang 24mm tilt-shift lens.



Tilt-shift lenses are mostly used for architecture. Having the ability to shift the lens in relation to the sensor lets you change the perspective of a shot to straighten verticals that tend to lean backward when you tilt your camera up at a building. It'll expand my range of technique nicely.

The tilt functionality lets you change the plane of focus from being parallel to your sensor to something approaching perpendicular, creating zones of focus in a shot that people aren't normally accustomed to seeing, so the pictures can be really striking. The lensbaby accessories made this effect really popular and helped give birth to the whole toy photo craze where you can make an ordinary scene look like a miniature because of the novel depth of field effect. More recently it's been done to death in Photoshop or Instagram. It could have its uses for me in product photography where I'd want to get a whole table of objects in focus at a wide aperture, but for now, it's not something I've bothered playing with.

I've been more interested in using the shift ability to take 3 adjoining frames for large panoramic shots in the style of Joel Grimes. It gives a very different look to just panning the camera. To my eye it seems to deliver a very distinctive distortion effect which I rather like, so it's been assimilated into my style bag. So here are some scenes to enjoy from my favourite museum and photography haunt, Dunedin Gasworks Museum and various Urbex (urban exploration) locations.







I'm also planning to use it for backgrounds for some composite work (thank you again Mr Grimes). Here's an example.



Shame about the model, but you get the picture. Here's one of my latest favourites, from my LE G2 phone, another bit of Urbex photography. I shot it on a recce and wouldn't mind going back with my DSLR, but I'm not convinced I'll make a better picture with one.



For me, it just goes to reinforce the important lesson that you don't need fancy lenses to make pictures you like.