Calendar Girls

This picture has been getting a lot of eyeballs around town lately. One of mine from late last year.

 

It's from the Fortune Theatre's 2012 catalog shoot, and was about as much fun to shoot as it looks. Calendar Girls is on now and I'm thrilled to say it's a sellout for the Fortune.  Interestingly, the models in one of the posters around town have been... supplemented by some articles of clothing...

 

As tweeted by @dearcolleen.

I think I'm kind of flattered.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible

Wow, its been a busy year and looks like the end is going to be even busier. That's the reason I've posted so little lately.

 

I've shot a lot of video, but have had a bit more still work lately, including some really fun stuff of the exhibits at Toitu Otago Settlers Museum. This one is Mrs Richard Hudson's dress. Hudson of Cadbury, Fry Hudson fame. Looking at the size of it, she sure didn't eat a lot of her husband's biscuits. Great fun trying to bring out the texture in these 19th century dresses and minimise the background distractions.  I'll be posting more from this shoot and others soon, I promise.

Just got off the phone booking a new gig that could see my year end with a real bang. Who knew "Red Bull" was also a type of explosive? Stay tuned.

Staying Open On The Road

The harder I work lately, the harder I have to work to maintain my creativity. One thing I find essential in creativity is remaining open to new possibilities, and believing that there's a great shot to be had everywhere, you just need to learn to see it... hence the name of this blog. Here's a handy example from my recent shoot in Adelaide, South Australia.

There I was, slightly sleep deprived, on a long bus ride, getting candid shots of a conference group (more from that shoot in future...). Nothing too taxing, just stills and video coverage of the event. After covering the winery visit, I was ready to snooze all the way back to town, but I was feeling I hadn't really stretched myself creatively lately, so looked for an opportunity to get some exercise. Waiting for the rest of the party to board the bus, I wandered across the car park to a patch of weeds, set my shutter to expose around a second or so, and played with shutter drag, panning and tilting to create some abstracts. Not that I was expecting any keepers, I just wanted to open myself up to possibilities again. Maybe I'd find a creative lead to chase later.

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Looking at these, there are some things I like and will maybe play with later - trying to refine the mix of camera movement and stillness to get an interesting mix of patterns and colour. But the real value of this exercise was just to remind me that opportunities are everywhere, even at the side of the road. You don't have to boss the camera hard to find them, you have to boss yourself.

So when our driver stopped the bus later to tell the party that there was a good chance we'd see Koalas in the trees, I decided not to snooze, got out with everybody else, and to my surprise, there was a mother and baby, in perfect pose for a cute shot.



My Aussie mates laughed at me for posting this, especially the ones from wildlife and film backgrounds who know this is about as interesting as Koalas get. They sleep 22 hours a day, have wicked claws so aren't as cuddly as they seem, and have a habit of crapping or peeing on you from above.  Sometimes though, cute is enough, and now I've got a great Aussie icon picture in my collection. A cliche for sure, but one that endures. And I wouldn't have got it if I'd stayed and snoozed on the bus.  Stay open!

Hector's Dolphin

It has come to this... my best pictures lately have been video frame grabs. I even had to turn down a gig shooting a ministerial (possibly prime ministerial) visit to a local factory today. Not worth bellyaching about though. Last week I was shooting and presenting video on the Otago Central Rail Trail and tonight I fly out tonight for Adelaide to shoot a travel conference for the next few days. There are worse salt mines to be stuck in, comrade.



Meanwhile, here's one of those frame grabs from my Canterbury shoot. A rare Hectors dolphin from the mouth of Akaroa Harbour. Beautiful little creatures, about the size of the 8 year-old I was using for bait. The visibility was pretty low, so a 21 Mp still shot wouldn't have turned out much better. Fingers crossed for some interesting stuff from Adelaide!

Canterbury tour

The last week has seen me driving a camper van around Canterbury, filming a little travel series with Miss C(8). It's been a lot of work, so not too much time for stills. That's been very frustrating, because there have been some magic moments, like filming my little presenter hand-feeding lemurs, or swimming with Hectors dolphins.

I did, however, have a second camera on when we were filming on board Kaikoura's Whale Watch boat, and got this shot ticked off my bucket list - a diving sperm whale.




Kinda proud of that.

The Corporate Portrait

There's something I really love about doing corporate portraits. I think it's the balancing act, the choices you have about lighting and background, and the need to create a picture that keeps a certain professional distance, but also has some humanity. Over the last several weeks I've had the gang from Destination Content into my little micro studio to get some headshots for the company website, a collection I finally finished this week with our design guru Nik Sweeney.



The main need here was a relaxed, professional demeanor and a hint of the company's blue and yellow brand. So I used a blue gel on my white seamless background and colour temperature orange gels as rim lights. Wouldn't you know it though, by the time Nik got to town, the original blue gel I used had been shredded and the other I had, while looking similar, gave a distinctly different hue. Photoshop to the rescue.

Just for a change, I decided to do a little video clip to run you through just a few details of the shoot. I get a little tongue-tied here and there, and mix up the odd term in my effort to be truly spontaneous, but you get the picture. I'm not kidding when I say micro studio, so you'll understand when Joe occasionally bumps the mic against a lightstand or something, it's the first time at something like this for both of us. Enjoy.



We decided to use environmental shots on the website for our production team - more of a 'working' look. Those pictures are still a work in progress, but I did manage to whip something up of our editor Joe at his station. Red and blue gels on the background, a little bare bulb for hair light, and a white card on his screen bouncing light into his face. Much better than the bare fluoros of the office, believe me.

Working with Green Screen on a Budget

Last weekend I was supervising (in a kind of technical director/producer role) a little video shoot at Toitu, Otago Settlers Museum for Destination Content. It was a green screen job: shooting with an element of green in the background so we could create a composite shot later. It's a technique that can be handy for stills shooting too, so I thought I'd share a few of the details. Of course, I shot a few stills as we went, either with my 8mm Peleng fisheye lens or the Canon 10-22mm EF-S on the Canon 7D, to get  everything in in the tight space available.



We shot it on my recently purchased Canon XF305 HD video camera. Yeah, with the way business is going for Destination Content, I really am being pulled back to the dark side: Video. God forbid that I should end up back making television, but I've learned never to say never - especially to good opportunities. But anyway, our final goal with this project is to have a clip that can be projected inside the Museum's historic Tiger Tea Trolley Bus, recreating a 1970's era bus ride. We shot the action inside, with green screens in the windows that would be in vision, so we can pop footage shot from a filming vehicle into the green space.  Since the bus interior is so small, there was nowhere to hide lights, and there wasn't going to be much separation between our actors and the screen, so a simple, lit green background was out of the question.



However, since the green was to be in the windows, I was able to use a translucent green fabric and light from behind. The fabric had to give us a good bright green when lit so I finally settled on a few metres of Lime parka nylon from Spotlight, folded in a double layer so that the weave didn't create any odd interference pattern with the transmitted light. A few bits of gaffer tape to pull out the wrinkles, and we were in business.



For lights, we went ghetto-style, using a bunch of halogen work lights, the type you buy from Mitre 10, and white balanced accordingly.  You can see a couple of the standalone ones hanging from the hand rail of the bus in the shot above. We'll be giving the finished video an aged film colour treatment anyway, so colour balance wasn't crucial here. Shadows? Yeah, this isn't exactly the most realistic lighting scheme, the only way to get that would be with big soft light banks outside the bus recreating the outside daylight, but I still think we'd have contrast problems inside the bus, so would need on-axis fill anyway, so the two on-axis work lights were the simplest, cheapest option.



The few snags we did meet were reflections of the screen from the painted surfaces inside the bus, and one of our passengers blonde hair picking up the green from the window behind her. A little shift in camera position and a dark wig solved those problems swiftly. Not bad for an oily rag budget, and our scene director Evelyn, below, was pretty happy when she saw what we'd captured on the monitor.

  

Not exactly Lord of the Rings-scale effects, (did I mention we did a little video shoot at Weta workshop recently? That's another story) but not bad for some borrowed work lights and a few bucks worth of nylon!

Heroes

I've just been asked to shoot the pictures for Fortune Theatre's annual catalogue again, a job I always look forward to.  Meanwhile, I thought I'd share a couple from this year's shows. If you're from Dunedin you'll recognise the finished work from posters around town.



This set is from the shoot from "In The Next Room or The Vibrator Play".  We had in mind to photoshop the Victorian wallpaper background in later, so all I needed to deliver was a sexy looking bit of light on the lovely Elena and a shadow the graphic designer could work with. I decided to go with a very simple setup: using the Orbis ring flash for key and fill on Elena. It gives a beautiful sheen to bare skin as well as that distinctive halo-like shadow. Then to camera right I've got a bare 580 EXII flash providing the wall shadow and a bit of hair and rim lighting.



From the beauty we went to... well let's just say character.  This set was for the play "Heroes" and the posters are popping up around town now. Again, we were shooting for a photoshop background. The play is about three old war veterans. I wanted to be fairly sympathetic so kept my key light big and soft. It's a Linkstar 1000w studio head in a 120cm octagonal softbox. The Orbis comes into play again for on-axis fill, an I've got a bare 580 EXII on either side for rim lights.

Elena was thoroughly professional, but these old rogues... well, no matter what their age, get three blokes together, and after a while, naughty schoolboys come out. Exactly what I was waiting for.