A Little Night Shoot

Mike says he thinks this is "very Gotham city" and I have to agree. Feeling a little house-bound because of the weather, I decided to go out on a little night shoot with fellow Light Brigade photographer Mike Thorsen last night. It being summer, I kind of forgot it would be 10pm before things got dark, so we were in for a bit of a late night. I think we were both a little tired already, since we did about as much talking photographty as we did practicing it. There may even have been a couple of beers involved, but in our true intrepid style, we mooched around a couple of blocks near Princes Street and found some interesting stuff. I got to have a little more fun with my new 10-22mm lens. It's great for architecture, letting me get large buildings all in shot.



I actually wish we'd had a model with us. Someone in one of these phone booths would have made the shot. It was just that kind of night for me - I kept seeing great backdrops, like this Wharehouse car park:



Kind of modern-day noir. I converted the first and last shots here to grayscale before applying some split toning - trying to broaden my palette a little - the contrasty, saturated technicolor look is definitely my style, but I wouldn't like it to become a rut.

TV Star Portraits

Dear El Nino,

Bugger Off.

Love,

New Zealand.

I mean it. This has to be one of the dreariest summers in living memory here in Dunedin. It doesn't bode well for my upcoming camping holiday or the wedding I'll be shooting in a couple of weeks. Never mind. Life and work go on regardless.

With the launch of my business, I've had to think pretty hard about copyright of my images and what they're worth to me. I just turned down a lovely request from an American artist to use one of my portraits as the basis of one of her works. It was flattering, but since she sells her work, I had to decline unless she made me some kind of offer. From now on, I'll be slapping watermarks on some of my work here. Not just to protect my work from being used without permission, but also to protect the interests of my paying clients.



Speaking of which, my last assignment of 2009 was tres cool and as always, a learning experience: Portraits of international TV presenter Mike Leahy, for a local production outfit. I had some external locations in mind, and planned to do some cross-lit shots using the sun, but the overcast, drizzly conditions blew that idea out of the water. My alternate location was the Otago Museum, so off we went, with NHNZ's Giles Pike working as Voice Activated Lightstand. There are plenty of pictures of Mike in action hero mode, so I decided to try for something a little edgier, suitable for something like a pitch for a hard science series. After knocking off a couple of simple portraits with the shoot-thru umbrella, background and rim light, I decided to try for a cool wraparound look.





I like the 3-D look this wraparound light scheme gives. I basically used a bare flash behind each of Mike's shoulders, one on the background, and my Orbis ringflash adapter on the lens for fill. That done, we moved into the museum's tropical forest exhibit for some greenery. I was a little concerned that the temperature and humidity would be too much to cope with without a lenghty acclimatisation for my camera and lenses, and I was right. The lens was just too fogged and none of us wanted to hang around in there waiting for my gear to come right. I knocked off a quick few shots in there, though, figuring the fogging would lend a usable soft look, which it did, but nothing we wanted to stick around for.



Happily, by now the rain had stopped and we headed to a local park for some more outdoor work. I took a few shots of Mike under the trees, balanced for cloudy conditions, then some sitting on a bench while Giles held my gold reflector down low.





The reflector worked nicely to warm Mike up just a little. Pity it can't work for the rest of the city. Australia's going to be really mad when they figure out we've got all their rain!

Upskill yourself

Last year I enjoyed watching the free webinars on using Lightroom 2.0 run by Creativetechs training. This year they're offering another range of free courses live on the web. I'm enrolled for this one on portrait lighting. Check it out by clicking the link below.


Rosanne Olson's Lighting Course

Love and Newtonian Optics

It was great to catch up with the nephew in Auckland, but the real reason for my visit was to attend and shoot my sister-in-law's wedding.

Unfortunately Auckland turned on some really dreary conditions all week, and we had to do the whole thing indoors. I stuck to two set-ups: Shoot-through umbrella for key and orbis for fill during the ceremony and for some group shots, and then just went with on-camera flash and a longer lens for candids during the reception.

Just before we sat down to eat though, the downpour eased to a mere shower, and I dragged Jane and Joe out to get this shot, complete with rainbow.



No time to really worry about posing or composition, let alone lighting, other than on-camera flash set to E-TTL. In post, I lowered the exposure on the background just a little, and slightly upped the saturation on that rainbow, but apart from that, this shot was just about having faith and being ready for something good to happen.

Bit like marriage, really.

An Officer and a Gentleman and a Nephew

I was so looking forward to last week in Auckland. A wedding to shoot, a meeting with the writing team at Shortland Street, and a few hours shooting in the helicopter hangar at Whenuapai with my nephew the Naval Observer.



That's him in there, looking very much like The Stig. I should say I made him pose like this, he's not usually such glamourpuss.

But the day of my Shortland Street meeting, I had good reason to suspect I was coming down with a nasty case of shingles. I immediately found a doctor, convinced him my sister-in-law's wedding was important enough for me to need the anti viral meds justin case my fears were confirmed, and navigated via my google phone (I could do a whole blog entry about that wonderful little device) to the Shortland Street production offices. It was at this point that I noticed I had my basic camera kit with me, but not the stands and extra strobes I had planned to shoot Christiaan and his helo with. No time to dash back to the city, so it was onto the motorway and out to the airbase.



The Kaman SG 2H Sea Sprite is New Zealand's most sophisticated bit of flying hardware. Maverick Air to Surface missiles, homing torpedoes... it's got everything but a working cigarette lighter, and I'm sure the M60 machine gun could do a nice job of lighting up your stogie. My nephew, Sub Lt Christiaan Robertson is the airborne tactical officer. That means he's in charge of all this stuff, the rest of the Sea Sprite crew and their mission. You'd think he'd be all Joe Cool about this, and he'd have a right to be, but he really is the nicest - well it's still hard to think of him as anything but a big kid.

Anyhow, after bitching about leaving 3 flashes, my 2m stand, umbrella and tripod behind, I sucked it up and told myself that if the pros can make do with just 2 strobes, so could I. Hell, I hear some of them even get by with natural light. So we got to work.





It was a blast catching up with Christiaan, and we only just scratched the surface of what I'd like to do up there. But this was primarily a social visit, and the officers' mess called...





A couple of beers later, it was time to grab my Google phone and navigate my way back into the city. I'm indebted to my nephew and No. 6 Squadron, RNZAF Whenuapai for their time and access to their very cool hardware. Let's do it again Neph. I salute you!

Luck Has Nothing To Do With It

Following my recce shoot of the Smith Gallery, I went back to create the shot I had in mind, this time all in camera, no photoshop/HDR-buggery. Just so you have an idea of the challenge involved, here's a picture exposed just for the beautiful ceiling:



Lovely up there, but it's the only light source in the room, and the height means the light falloff makes for dingy walls and floor lower down. The job called for several lights, carefully placed to avoid hot spots, shadows and reflections. I wanted the dress in the foreground to be a focus for the shot, but bare flash just didn't do it any justice, so I warmed it up with CTO and Yellow gels, and a little fill from the floor. Strobist details are on the flickr page if you're interested. Anyway, five flash guns, two radio triggers, three optical triggers, three light stands, one tripod and a wireless camera remote in play, and this was the final result:



I'm happy with this. I could have done it faster. With a litte more faffing around and perhaps some more equipment, I might have been able to do something a little subtler with the walls, but once upon a time I wouldn't have had a clue how to do any of this. The only thing I miss is the lovely violet colour of the base the mannequin was on, but that was a bit of a photoshop artefact anyway. I'm glad I did the recce shoot to create what I wanted with Photoshop and come up with a plan on how to achieve it, but I'm fairly confident that I could probably have pulled this off straight away anyway. That's growth, and I must give due thanks to David Hobby and his Strobist blog for all the great lessons.

Wide Open Spaces (and wide closed ones)

There's nothing like a paying gig to justify some expensive gear. I've been wanting the Canon 10-22mm EF-S 3.5-4.5 lens for some time now, and finally stumped up the cash for one last week.

I've been pretty pleased with my EF-S 18-55mm lens, but this baby just gets more in the picture, which is particularly useful for the shots I'm doing for the Otago Settlers Museum. Some of the galleries are magnificent spaces, and it takes a really wide angle of view to portray that.



I love what it let me do with this recce shot of the Smith Gallery, showing pretty much of the room and that cool vaulted ceiling. To be honest, this shot wasn't totally achieved in camera. It is one single frame, but the wide exposure range meant I had to combine separate exposures for the ceiling, walls and floor and create a High Dynamic Range picture with the Photomatix application. I also dodged the foreground dress in a little to brighten it up.

I plan to go back soon and achieve this look by lighting the place. A tricky job, but I love the challenges assignments like this present. The new lens also let me tackle some exterior shots of the museum. It's housed in two long historic buildings that come together in an angle. Close up, it's hard to fit it all into one shot and if you get back further, you have to contend with busy traffic and lots of difficult foreground clutter like large trees and lamp posts.



The lens is nice and sharp, and I really like the colour response. I was worried about shooting blue skies without a CPL filter to darken the blues, but I like what I got here - although to be honest, I like to saturate my colours a lot in post. Just a personal preference.



This final shot is pretty juiced. Fill light, saturation and clarity adjustments in Lightroom, followed by lens distortion adjustments in Photoshop. Again, the dynamic range of the natural light forced me to lighten the shadows in post. It's kinda cartoon-graphic like, but I sort of like it anyway. Like I said, I love what this new lens lets me do.



It's not about expensive gear but boy, does it help sometimes.