Archive for May, 2008
Tain Vintage Car Rally
Wed May 28th - 10:20am
One of the highlights of the year is photographing the Tain Gala, and this year the gala committee is also organising a vintage car rally. So it was a very nice surprise to be asked to do a photograph for the cover of the car rally brochure.
The gala committee arranged for three vintage vehicles to be brought in to Tain high street one evening and we tried a few different ideas there, but eventually we went down to the links (park) and produced something a lot better:
Left to right in that photo are: Willie Ross with a Nuffield 10/60 tractor, Donnie Mackay with a BSA 650cc Thunderbold motorcycle, and George Sutherland with a 1921 Ford Model T Doctors Coupe that he rebuilt, starting with only the chassis.
French Horn workshop
Wed May 28th - 10:06am
I think this is one of the best photos I've ever done! It was very simple, just one light off to the right and under-exposing the ambient, but I think it worked a treat. The subject is musician Anthony Halstead who conducted a French Horn workshop in Edderton last week. The photo ran quite large in the Press & Journal.
The workshop also gave me an opportunity to try a lighting technique that I first read about two years ago. Way back in April 2006, David Hobby (Strobist) wrote about using small strobes to light a basketball game. The key point, for me, was that he positioned the strobes to shoot over the top of the game, zoomed to 50mm. Taking fall-off in to account this created a fairly consistent covering of light.
I've photographed quite a few music workshops and I usually use ambient only. But for this one I set-up a single flash on a light stand, a few feet above the heads of the musicians, and off to one side. The ambient light was tungsten so I coloured the flash with a CTO (orange) gel.
This wide view shows the overall effect. The flash is positioned just out of view to the left of the frame.
But the magic starts happening when you zoom in. These examples show how you get different effects depending on where the light is positioned. In the first picture the light was off to the left at about 90 degrees. For the second picture it was off to the right, but beyond 90 degrees to keep this side of the people's faces in shadow. And in the other two photos it was much further around and the ambient was under-exposed by several stops to create that dramatic outline effect.
Another idea that I tried was using the flash zoomed to 105mm, close to one of the musicians and aimed directly at her. By under-exposing the ambient I was able to isolate that one person in the frame. At the time I didn't think this idea was working very well so I didn't persist with it, but it's actually quite nice so I'm going to use it in future. This was just a test shot:
JK Rowling wins child photography appeal
Wed May 7th - 10:40am
Last August I mentioned (here) that Harry Potter author JK Rowling had lost a High Court case in which she tried to ban the publication of a paparazzo's photo of her son, taken covertly, without her permission, on an Edinburgh street.
Well good news! Rowling and her husband Dr Neil Murray took the case to the Court of Appeal and won. The BBC reports:
Judge Sir Anthony Clarke said: "If a child of parents who are not in the public eye could reasonably expect not to have photographs of him published in the media, so too should the child of a famous parent.
"In our opinion, it is at least arguable that a child of 'ordinary' parents could reasonably expect that the press would not target him and publish photographs of him."
Another nail in the coffin of the paparazzi parasites. Lovely!
