The Grass Is 17% Greener Over The Fence

OK, please don't panic if you see blank pictures on some pages.  Some of my links accidentally got broken while I was adjusting my Lightroom Flickr export settings.  It's going to take me a little while to fix them all again, so thanks for your patience while I get that sorted.

Meanwhile, as well as working on mastering that new Macro lens, I've been doing more commercial work thanks to some referrals by my good friend and bandmate Lindsay Somerville of The Big Picture.  Last week involved a fun and cowpat-filled day at Inchclutha near Balclutha.



I'd got a call from Janet Wright at Ravensdown about popping down there to get some shots of Paul and Joanne Barton in a paddock they'd been testing a new fertiliser in. The forecast was for grey skies, so I thought I might be doing some cross lighting from the rear for the group shots of them and Ravensdown rep Mark Crawford, just to give things a little lighting effect to match the scientific element of the subject. As it was, the sun was shining, so I used that and my Canon 580EXII on half power to cross light.



Morning milking done, we had a little time to relax and try a few different angles. Paul, Joanne and Mark were very good sports, and I think we all had some fun.



Posing in the grass done, the rest of the brief called for some general farm shots - with a welcome 'feel free to get creative' into the bargain, so I began with the farm labourers and their office.  I made sure to get down nice and low to get plenty of grass in and make the most of that blue sky.







The DoF my new 24-70mm 2.8 L delivered was really cool. I had my circular polariser and UV filters stacked on it at times to give me the natural vignette effect.



I used the 70-200mm 2.8 L for the longer shots. The two lenses make a great working combo for most commercial jobs and having the 7D and 5DII means I don't even need to stop and swap lenses.



Sometimes it's hard to believe, but once you get as far south as Balclutha and into Southland, the grass really does become this intense green. It's got to be a combination of the climate, the soil and the light down there.





As usual, there were many lessons learned that I can share. The cross lighting worked on the whole, but composing the trio the way I wanted gave me some shadow issues I'd resolve next time with some on-axis flash. The time of day and position of the livestock meant I couldn't quite get the rim-looking cross light I wanted, but that would have been doable on a duller day.  Tempting to add a contrasting gel to one strobe to see how that works.  I didn't want to scare the cows with my flash, but next time I'd try adding a little fill once I got some good unlit shots.

All in all, not a bad day at the office. Best of all, Janet's happy with the pictures she got.  Young Miss C is now begging me to take her back and show her some of Paul and Joanne's calves.  I might just have to arrange that.

Viva Viv

With Spring upon us and the tourist season warming up here in the south, I've been working just a little on the Southern Photo Guides website.  There's a lot more to do, but for now I've included a little gallery where I'll post (with permission) images made by my clients.

I really enjoy being able to share what I love about this special part of the world - it's natural heritage, amazing scenery and beautiful light, and to help people make their own wonderful images of it all.  Not that the creator of my first client gallery needed much help.  Please enjoy the vision and style of Viv Adamson.

Too Much Gear at Once

OK, for the gear heads out there, here's what I've collected in the last couple of years:

1 Canon 450D + EF-S 18-55 and 55-250mm IS lenses. My original kit, and the gear I've made most of my favourite shots with.

1 Canon 7D. Got that a few months ago. 6 more megapixels than the 450D, 8.5 frames a second for action and wildlife shooting, better low light performance and Hi Def video.

1 Canon 5DII The new baby. Full frame 21 Megapix with Hi Def video.

Lenses: A Canon 10-22 EF-S for really wide angle shooting.
A Canon 70-200mm L series 2.8 IS tele zoom
A Canon 2x extender

And bought with the 5DII, 100mm f/2.8 L series IS macro and another L series f/2.8 24-70mm wide zoom.

Great gear. Problem is, it takes a while to get used to. When I first took out the 10-22 ultra wide lens, I really struggled to use it - but then it became part of me. So when I took the new 5DII and lenses out the other day, I expected a workout. I got one.



I headed for Sullivan's Dam, 10 minutes from the city at the head of Leith valley. It's a drinking water reservoir surrounded by native cloud forest, but no clouds on this day. As usual with new gear, I just wanted to play with the extremes it was capable of, so quickly shot some wides with the 24-70. It's a really sharp and versatile lens. Good in low light, it's going to be my new walkaround lens.



Then it was on quickly to the 100mm macro. Wow, what a beast. With a new toy like that, I'm just obsessed with what it can do before I actually start seeing good pictures. So I shot a whole bunch of close-up stuff, none of it noteworthy, just fun seeing mosses and ferns up way up close.



And bugs.

With a macro zoom, the narrow depth of field is a great creative tool for focusing interest, but it's also a real challenge to work with. It's pretty hard to get more than one small plane of a bug in focus when you're zoomed in tight, but I know I'm going to have a lot of fun with it, and start making some great pictures one day soon.





Just as I was starting to get the hang of things, I had a call from a local tour operator about hosting some pho-tours. I'm slowly developing Southern Photo Guides product range, so this was a very welcome chat, and a long one. Stay tuned for news on that front.

Back down at the reservoir, I nosed around an old shed, shooting with the 24-70. Again, the depth of field was cool to play around with, and after a while I stopped seeing what the lens could do, and started seeing some pictures.



Yeah, right now all this new gear is a little overwhelming, but soon, it'll be part of me.

Post Haste

Quite a week last week.  It started on Sunday with The Chaps album cover shoot, and continued with a commercial shoot for New Zealand Post.  Most of that consisted of interviewing and shooting folks in the street, in locations from Mosgiel to Christchurch.  Kind of fun - I really enjoy interacting with people on this kind of job, but the brief called for natural lighting.  The weather (ie light) at the time was dismal, and the deadline tight.



The second part of the job was to illustrate the relationship between NZ Post and one of their clients, Glassons, by covering a pickup from Glassons' distribution centre. Now this part I really enjoyed. Deb the driver was more than a little reluctant to be the company poster girl but I promised her it'd all be over before she knew it (boy, I haven't said that to a woman since my teens). I threw myself into documentary storyteller mode, getting the players to run through the sequence with a little direction and plenty of wisecracks from me to keep the mood light. Good to find out my twenty years in television weren't wasted.



It seemed to work, as I got plenty of smiles out of everyone. The client only requested one shot to depict the relationship, but if I have time, I like to shoot a whole action sequence and look for the one shot that'll tell the whole story along the way. I like the first two here the most, definitely relationship shots - Deb through the forklift frame, the other driver reflected in the mirror - just the little touches I wanted. I felt I had my shot at this point, but like to see the sequence through, you never know what you'll discover when you keep shooting - so I got in the delivery truck to find another angle.



Then I capped it off with the hero-drives-into-the-sunset shot, and some signage in case the client wanted it. Of course I put some time into thinking all this through beforehand, but the actual shooting time took maybe 10 or 15 minutes.



Natural light? I cheated. Just to fill the shadows in the faces, I used a little on-camera flash, dialed way down so you wouldn't notice, but believe me you would have if I hadn't. Actually, I'd love to have gone all strobist, off camera light sculpting faces, gleaming off machines etc, but it wasn't that kind of job. You've got to adjust your technique to the job every time. A shoot like this, with a tight deadline?

Run and gun, lots of fun.

Bed Head

Dunedin shooter Mike McQueen raises an interesting question about the shot in my last post - why the bed?  Well, it was simply there in the room, and I really wanted the band to be sitting in that window light.  The casual, improvised feel also fits the band, but I also had a small technical motivation. 



See John Dodd and Mike Moroney in the rear?   Being back there and smaller in relation to Hyram and Marcus in front, they needed all the help I could give them to be present in shot.  John on the left is nearer the light, his jacket and face provide plenty of contrast that draws your eye.  Mike's further from the light source, so it's softer on him.  The lit side is fine, but the unlit portion of his head and the low textures in his dark clothing would have blended into the background of the wall without the bed head providing a contrasting background.

Not exactly pioneer furniture to match the room, but it did the trick.

The Band

Got a big week ahead.  Actually, it's already started.  Today I got to shoot for a CD inner with one of my favourite Dunedin bands, The Chaps.  They kind of defy description musically, but think four guys able to play just about any stringed instrument between them, and a few others that involve squeezing, slapping or blowing.  The instruments that is, I can't speak for what goes on backstage, but I know Hyram owns a goat. There's a smattering of material in the flavour of John Hiatt and Taj Mahal in their repertoire, as well as a whole buch of other stuff, music with a glint in its eye that you want listen to as well as get a little groove on.  They call it "Calypso Swing".  You might recognise Marcus Turner in the left foreground from the solo shoot with him I posted here.



If you're here regularly, you'll know I don't often go in for grainy black and white looks, but this picture just screamed out for it.  We'd found this nice little shed on Hyram Ballard's property (Hyram's the handsome devil on the right) and I thought the window light in there had this nice quality to it, not to mention the fixtures on the walls.  It was still pretty dark in there though, so I had my ISO cranked all the way up; some of the grain here is genuine sensor noise, but it was a little exercise in turning a constraint into a tool.  Of course I got my flashes out to light The Chaps as well, and we got a bunch of looks around the property but for now, this is one of my favourites.

Plenty more to look at and process, but like I said, I've got a busy week ahead and might not get around to a lot of post production:  I've a meeting about working on a calendar project, a meeting with a regular client about some promo shooting, a regional promo shoot and an annual report shoot which involves a road trip for a new corporate client.  Happy times.

On The Run With The Reads

A lot can happen in a quarter of a century.  Take the smiling young chap on the left for instance.  This was my Zoology classmate Andrew Read on the night of his farewell party from Otago University before starting his doctorate at Oxford.  Andrew went on to marry distinguished behavioural scientist Victoria Braithwaite, father the very lively James and Matthew, be made Professor and Chair of Natural History at Edinburgh University at 35, and has since progressed to a Professorship at Penn State.  Me... well, I've learned how to get a little more control over my flash.


Andrew and his family were back in Otago for a little skiing and sightseeing last week, and I had the chance to catch up with them, recall old times, and practice a little hit-and run family photography.



Taking a day off from skiing meant we could bring Andrew's parents Ron and Sophie up for a look at the ski field (Andrew assures me that Treble Cone has the best view of the many fields he has tried) and a family photo with a nice scenic background.  Lake Wanaka was bathed in sunlight, but the ski field deck was pretty shady, so I threw my flash onto a remote cord and took a shot with it camera left, just to get a little light on those faces and some extra sparkle in those eyes.  Not bad for a quickie, although next time, I'd turn Andrew's face in a little more to avoid the bounce off his glasses.  Now when did he start wearing those?


The day was about relaxing together, not posing, so I didn't want to spend a lot of time arranging groups and trying to get the lighting exactly right.  I wanted quick setups where the smiles were easy and natural.  This one's by far my favourite.  Down at the base of the ski field road the sky was brighter, giving us nice directional light from the right, so my flash was providing a nice fill in the shadow areas of everyone's faces.  Actually with this bunch, it wasn't hard getting natural smiles.  One tip I just got from a friend (thanks Reatha) is that it might have been better to put Victoria in the lower group.  Higher angles are more flattering on a woman, while lower angles make men look taller and hide any thinning hair that 25 years of blazing intellect might inflict.

Andrew's an evolutionary biologist, who despite what he may say, realised after attending Oxford that my own field of parasitology was where the real answers were to be found.  There just wasn't room for our two egos in one field of science, so I politely moved on to writing children's science comedy TV while Andrew has gone on to heading a high powered research group investigating the mysteries of why malaria is so hard to beat.  If you think that's not extremely cool, check out this video he told me about.  Remember all those pentagon billions that went into Ronald Regan's "Star Wars" Strategic Defence Initiative?  Here's what we got out of it:









Cooler than a can of raid, just not as easy to deploy in the 3rd world, or anywhere outside an extremely well funded lab, I'd say.  Unfortunately, this isn't one of Andrew's projects, otherwise I'd be using some of my old university pictures to blackmail him into hiring me. 




 After the skifield, we headed up the Matukituki valley road, and I stopped to get a few more family snaps before we lost the winter sun down on the valley floor.  This is a pose from Andrew much more reminiscent of our student days.  The quick snap here was to affirm that yes, I could again use a little flash fill to lighten the facial shadows.



Sun coming from camera left this time (see the shadow behind Sophie), I got to practice my left hand camera hold while aiming the flash with my right (see Matthew's shadow on half of Victoria's face).  As expected, the valley floor was pretty dark at Raspberry flat, but on the way back to Wanaka, we stopped by the lake near Glendhu Bay  to get a few dusk shots.



Here I took an exposure reading on the background, underexposed by a couple of stops, and then adjusted my flash so the family were nicely exposed. It meant a few test shots, but after just a few seconds I had it.  Again, the flash was in the default left hand.  By the time I'd readjusted for a closer shot, Matthew was up the tree, making for another nice relaxed family look.



Whenever I've got my camera with me now, I usually have a couple of flashes with me.  Even with limited setup time, a little off camera flash lets you cope with the changing light conditions.

Some things don't change though.  Andrew's smile.  If you knew him in real life, you'd know he's just not this pretty, yet the camera loves him.  In fact, you really have to try hard to make him look bad in a photo.  I should know.  I've been trying for 25 years.