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.

The Iceman Cometh

It's been a while since I got to indulge my creative side and just go out prospecting for pictures. So I was looking forward to getting some time to get out and shoot around Wanaka a couple of weeks ago on my family's annual ski vacation. The only thing missing was snow. Plenty of man-made stuff on the trails, but two days in, I was bored already. So I called a rest day and took a little drive to Hospital flat, looking for a photographic challenge. Here's what I found:

Some nice big icicles had been building up on the South-facing rocky bluffs.

Getting up to them was tricky, as the way up involved scrambling through thorny shrubs and ascending a treacherous ice stair, but I made it, body and gear intact. Once up there, the challenge became how to get around without becoming an ice-kebab. As the day warmed, the melt started and one or two large high skewers actually came crashing down nearby, but sliding back down the rocks with 18 kilos of photo gear was still my biggest worry.

There were some beautiful shapes and textures among the ice, but I found it hard to make something really good out of them with the limited positions and late morning natural light.  It was all just a bit messy. Time to break out a radio trigger and off-camera flash, and try to isolate the icicles from the background by lighting them from the rear or off to the side. 

The bare flash had potential, but my first attempts still didn't really grab me. What this ice really needed was some colour. Of course I'm never without a bunch of gels, so I went straight away to full red. The first shot showed some promise.



So I persisted.

Discovery: The natural blue of daylight contrasted really well with the rich red from my flash. It finally felt like I was learning something new and my creative itch was getting scratched.

For the next few days, zipping down the man-made trails at Treble Cone didn't seem so bad after all ... until the urge to see something new and make pictures from it came back again.

It always does.

Freemasons fellows

A few weeks ago I got a call as a result of a referral from my good mate Lindsay (Sid) Somerville, former Dunedin commercial photog and bass player with my band. Former because Sid's now enjoying life in Auckland. The client was Fran Cockerell from the Dunedin School of Medicine's Dept of Womens and Childrens Health, and the job was to shoot some environmental portraits of the newest crop of Freemasons fellows. Along with all the other good work it does, the Freemasons Charity awards fellowships in Paediatrics and Child Health. We were thinking of a quick standup of the group out in the children's pavillion garden if the weather allowed, and a few individual shots in the clinical setting. Sounded like fun. I just wasn't expecting to be shooting a medical version of Charlie's Angels. Doctors didn't look anything like this when I was a kid. In Southland in the 60's and 70's, you got treated by a cigarette-smoking frown, with tattooed forearms and dense ear hair - and that was just the nurses.

My supermodels subjects, Doctoral candidates Rebekah Luo, Katie Appleyard and Dr Mee-Yeuw Chen already looked fantastic. All I had to do was get the lighting right and not screw up the focus. I learned from reading Strobist David Hobby that open shade is your friend for outdoor portraits, giving you control over your light, so I found a nice autumn background, slightly underexposed for it, and popped the girls into frame with their backs to the low sunlight, filtering nicely through autumn leaves. They were beautifully back lit and separated from the background. The ambient light on their faces was a little flat, but fine for fill. All I had to do was put up a flash in a 40cm softbox to add a little key for some added definition and a little sparkle to their eyes and bingo. I also had a 1/4 CTO gel on the flash, just to warm things up a skerrick.



While we were there, I thought we might as well have a little fun and popped them up on some of the playground equipment. Now the girls were facing the sun but the clouds were playing ball, flattening out the light, so again, I used the softbox for a little eye twinkle and warmth.



Inside, things were a little more challenging, due to the tight spaces and clinical look to the place. For Mee-Yeuw, I decided to work with it, keep the setup simple, the light clean and bright and pop her against some props with the tools of her profession, stethoscope and chart. I bounced flash off the wall for fill and added the softbox for key and sparkle. The sheen on her hair is coming from window light.



Rebekah was assisted by a model I've worked with before, Miss P(8), classmate of my daughter Miss C(8).  The window was throwing a nice patch of light on the wall behind Miss P, so I bounced some flash off the ceiling and wall to push a little fill into their faces, and added a warm hair light (hand-held by Miss P's mum) for Rebekah that also added a little warmth to her pyjama-clad patient.



I might have guessed Katie had done some modelling. To say she already lit up the room is something of an understatement. (BTW, if you'd care to follow her delightful fashion and lifestyle blog it's here: Sweet Apple. If you're a budding fashion photog that would like to collaborate with her, I'm sure she'd love to hear from you, just join the rear of the queue) What I wasn't expecting was her co-model, young Mr J to steal the show. It's true that kids and animals can be hard to work with, but if you've the time and patience to let them give you what they have, you can come up with golden moments.



Mr J's props were definitely fun, so I decided to underexpose the ambient light to lose the clinical feel, pop the softbox and 1/4 CTO gel low and try some low side light from an unmodified flash with a full CTO gel. There were times when Mr J got in Katie's light, but I don't think she minded at all. It's one thing I love about photography and a hard one to teach my students. Obsessive as I can be about my light and composition, sometimes, the moment you capture is the most important thing.



To my male friends and followers out there, I know what you're thinking: "Worth getting sick for". Forget it. These doctors work strictly with kids, ensuring them a better future by looking at things like the effects of sleep and new vaccines. And thanks to the Freemasons Fellowships, I'd say our kids future looks better every day.