Archive for December, 2006
Bubbles or drips?
Sun Dec 31st - 4:06am
Give me an evening at home with nothing to do and chances are I'll end up trying to figure out some new lighting technique, so here's a little homework for anyone who wants to play along. This is a single exposure, full frame, not rotated or flipped or otherwise distorted in any way. So what is it, what direction is it travelling in, how many lights are there and where are they positioned? I'll tell you next year!
Missing comments?
Sat Dec 30th - 5:59pm
It appears that the site's anti-spam software may have deleted a legitimate comment today. Out of three spam comments it has caught to date, one was legitimate (which I spotted in time), one was spam, and one I have no idea about because it was deleted before I saw it, which should never happen. I've now removed the anti-spam software, but if you've posted a comment which didn't appear on the site then please post it again! Sorry for the hassle.
Inverness rescue owls
Fri Dec 29th - 2:19am
Here are some pictures of the owls from a bird sanctuary that a guy displays in Inverness to raise money. I'll need to do some proper shots of these fine feathered fellows sometime when I've got my 70-200 f/2.8 lens with me, but for now here's the best I could do with a 17-40 f/4. With the longer/faster lens I'll be able to blur those awful backgrounds and hopefully produce some nice bird portraits, so consider these a trial run. The ultimate goal will be to get an attractive shot of one of the owls with its wings outstretched, which they do briefly and rarely.
Tain Academy senior formals
Wed Dec 27th - 6:17am
In the week before Christmas I did three portrait sessions with full backdrop and studio lighting: One day it was an over-60s party, the next day it was a toddlers party, and then it was the most exhausting but also the most fun job I do all year, the Tain Academy end-of-year formals at the seniors dance.
I've learned so much since I did last year's formals, so of course this year's photos are that much better. The biggest technical difference is that I backed off from last year's novice "light everything" approach and used a single softbox, positioned about 30 degrees off camera axis to the left and about 10 feet high to produce the butterfly lighting used in fashion photography.
I've also learned how to pose people in more relaxed and flattering ways, including the major improvement of getting girls to pose with their hands on their hips. It's a matter of personal taste and I'm sure some people will think it's more feminine for girls to have their hands overlayed in front of them, but as always my priority is to get the most natural and genuine pictures, and consistently the hands on hips pose produces the best results. (Wouldn't work for older people but for teenagers it's fine. I've never tried it with kids but I suspect it would look too fake.)
Something I've learned from weddings is that when girls have put a lot of effort into their hair and outfits, they like to have pictures taken that show the back of them, so for this year's formals I did 3/4 side views of each girl. I wasn't expecting great results because it's a tough pose to teach someone quickly, but most of them nailed it first time, so that was a bonus.
Among the more unusual things we tried this year were having one of the lads cheering victoriously as he knelt on top of a heap of his friends who were playing dead, two girls pretending to attack each other with various tools, and another two girls who suffered the embarrassment of one being asked to kiss the other on the cheek. (Sorry girls, the shot I was really trying to get was one of you both laughing, the kiss was just to make it happen!)
Something I do need to improve next time isn't really anything to do with photography, but I'll have to request that the girls wear shoes and choose bras that are appropriate for their dresses. There were many girls this year who had the wrong posture because they had taken their shoes off, and there were a lot of potential shots that I couldn't take because girls had worn the wrong kind/colour of bra under strappy or backless dresses.
Anyway, here's a selection of shots. I did all the 'safe' shots of everyone so I haven't included many of those here, going instead for the more dramatic, interesting, or just plain bizarre shots that we came up with…
Shot specs:
Canon 1Ds • 70-200 f/2.8L IS • 1/125s • ISO 100
Focal range was around 85mm for full height shots, 135mm for 3/4 shots and 70mm for larger group shots. Aperture was f/8 for individuals and couples, down to f/16 for groups.
Lighting was a Bowens 1000DX with square softbox.
Motion in a still image
Tue Dec 12th - 10:29pm
Last weekend a local fundraising event presented a new challenge, that of capturing a sense of movement in a still image but without using motion blur. It's one of the fundamentals of photography, I suppose, but one that I've not run into before.
Normally with a violinist or drummer, for example, you convey motion by having their hands blurred. But this musician, Alistair Anderson, had a very distinctive style of performance that involved him moving his whole body quite dramatically, so blur wasn't going to work. I tried a few alternative ideas and the one that worked best was turning the camera slightly to throw the background out of line, and taking the shot when he made eye contact with the audience.
For another shot I wanted to focus much more on the connection between Alistair and the audience, so that meant getting right over to one side and down low, to completely remove "us" (the viewer) from his field of vision, so as to minimise any sense of him looking at us. Towards the end of one performance he held eye contact with the audience for several seconds and that produced a shot that worked to some extent, although not quite as well as I would have liked. There's a similar shot with more of a smile, which you can see in the gallery, and I expect many people would prefer that one, but it's obvious that it was taken when the performance had actually finished and that wasn't what I was looking for.
Click here to view a gallery of unprocessed shots
