Imonk

Flashy pad 5!

2010-07-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

Haven't updated the blog for a wee while so I thought I'd add a bit of info about a recent job for a regular client. As it was quite a nice day with some breaks in the cloud I broke out the flashes to keep the windows in check whenever there was blue sky showing. As I've said in previous 'Flashy pad' posts a cloudy day is usually better for interiors but when you get a nice blue sky with white clouds then you can't turn it down.

The shot above was taken using one (I think) flash bounced into the ceiling to light the interior so I could make the exposure for the outside (which was 250th/f9). Without the flash the interior would obviously have been pretty under-exposed. Here's a setup pic from a previous shot showing one flash bouncing off the ceiling and one lower down off the white door for even coverage...

Another space that needed some flash was the top floor which had a nice skyllight and was light and airy. The natural light shot was actually ok but I wanted to pull in the nice sky outside so I set up the flashes. Here's the natural light shot...

Which looks fine, but I really wanted to pull the window in so here's a rough setup shot

And here's the 'final' shot...

Which I do prefer. There's three flashes here by the way, one cam right into the ceiling corner, one cam left handled by me on the stairs (cam triggered with a cable release) and one in the bathroom at the end of the hall.)

I could have used HDR for these shots, as I did in my previous post, but the results, in my opinion, are rarely good enough quality and when the house has so much white to bounce light around I really think doing all this 'in camera' is the way to go whenever possible. I did take an HDR shot of a dining room to compare with doing it in-cam....

First is the natural light shot

Which, again, isn't bad, but I wanted the sky and a little bit more light as I felt this looked a tad dingy, which the room wasn't. So next is the HDR version (9 exposures)

Which loses some sharpness and the colours just don't look right. Then the shot with two flashes...

Which in my opinion looks much better. I was a bit sloppy and got a slight hit on the corner of the mirror but that's user error :)

All in all this was another nice house that I'd love to live in! Here's a few of the detail shots I liked:

And lastly, just to mention the two setup shots I posted (and some shots I stuck on twitter while I was shooting) were taken with the iPhone cam which is pretty good when you have some light. Here's a pic I took of a very brief break in the clouds out of the skylight :)

Which is now my iPhone background :)

Sorry for the longer post (and the dodgy design as my normal blog editor isn't working so using blogger), especially if it's bored you! Just thought I'd share.

Cheers all
Ian :)

Golf, HDR and food!

2010-06-05T15:10:00.001-07:00

Had a very nice shoot the other day up in St Andrews. It was a beautiful day and the drive up was really enjoyable. Especially after the stressful couple of weeks we've had (see previous post!). The commission was to shoot some food and a few internals for a bar & grill that overlooks the 18th hole of the old course, and since The Open is about to start all the stands were up and the town was packed.

The shot above is the first thing you see when you walk in and I instantly knew I'd have a problem reproducing the scene since it was such a bright day outside and quite dark (at least for a camera) inside. As I was shooting food also I only really had an hour to get the internals done. Normally I'd approach this by exposing for the windows and then lighting the interior, but this was a large area with a very high ceiling. I actually did use the flashes on a couple of other shots to light the corner I was shooting in, one of which is below...

But that wouldn't work for the main entrance shot as the space was just too large for me to light with three flashguns, plus I was up against the clock. So I decided to resort to something I hardly ever do....HDR. I don't like HDR. I know it's quite a fashionable thing just now but I'm just not a fan. The only HDR that looks ok are the ones that don't look like HDR. But, it was the only way I could get this shot at the time, so I took 9 exposures.

The darkest...

To the lightest...

and I blended them into the shot at the top of the post. I have to say it's pretty impressive. Given time and some studio lights I could do much better, but for a quick job I'd say I'm pretty happy with the results!

As you can see by this pic, when you don't have a window in the frame it's much simpler :)

Have to say this was a lovely place with a fantastic view of the 18th hole..

And some lovely food...

Loved this dish (Scallops above), I thought it looked so colourful and really well put together.

And finally...

I really liked the purple chair in the background which worked so well with the bokeh.

I shot all the food with natural light coming in from cam right. I didn't even use a reflector as the windows where quite large and the light wrapped around the food.

So, I admit to not only using HDR but actually liking the results, hopefully though that's because it's not overdone like so many HDR images are these days IMO, and I also admit that for the first time ever I'll watch some of the golf just to see the 18th hole ;)

Cheers
Ian :)

Samuel the menace

2010-06-05T03:14:00.000-07:00

Well I've not posted anything for a few weeks and here's the reason. This is a picture of a wee menace! 2 days in intensive care, three in special care, then out and back in a couple of times. But now he should be home for good. So apologies for lack of posting but hopefully almost normal service will resume shortly and you prob wont even notice a difference from my normal ramblings and my sleep deprived ramblings!!

Cheers
Ian :)

Killer flick of light in killer kitchen!

2010-05-09T14:36:00.001-07:00

This house didn't really qualify as a 'Flashy Pad' post since I used natural light for almost all the shots. However, I did use a flash on the shot above to give a little highlight to the really cool kitchen at the far end of the room. This room was great and the kitchen was awesome, but it did present a slight problem in terms of exposure.

The main problem was that the kitchen units were pretty dark, while in front of them was a bright white table and chairs right beside the sliding glass doors. Luckily the sun wasn't streaming in the kitchen directly (if it had I'd have had to light the whole kitchen to close to the ambient level) so I could expose how I wanted and add just the one flash to light up the kitchen. The flash is placed on the floor behind the middle chair. I tried bouncing the light off the chair to get a bit more even coverage but it just gave me horrible shadows everywhere so I stuck with some direct flash :) The 'killer flick' line is of course taken from the great Joe McNally :)

Below is the same shot without the flash...

It's not a bad shot by any means, but I think the details are important with this sort of thing and I think the flash highlights the kitchen which is the main feature of this room really.

I love the shot actually, I like the balance of having the green of the grass there to lift the colours, it really does this great room justice.

Below are a few other shots I liked, some from this house and some from a different house on the same day. Both had these great kitchen rooms and basically, I WANT THESE KITCHENS!

And lastly, here's a couple of details shots I really like. These houses (like most showhomes I'm lucky enough to shoot) had some really nice interior design which makes it a real pleasure when looking for some details shots...

Thanks for reading/looking

Cheers
Ian :)

The Flashy Pad 4

2010-04-24T16:01:00.001-07:00

Just another wee example of using flashes for interiors. I was shooting for one of my clients last week and was lucky enough to have some nice weather for my exterior shots of the development, but I also had to take shots of the new showhome. For this, as I've said before, I would much prefer some cloud cover for a softer more even light. However, it wasn't too much of a problem with this house but I did have to break out the lights when shooting the living room. The shot above is the final and I'll show you how I got to it.

First off, here's the natural light shot...

Not a bad shot but because of the shape of the room I needed quite a long shutter speed to let the ambient soak in to where the dining table was, basically where I was taking the shot from. It was also taking a lot of the saturation out of the scene. Sometimes I like this look but here I wasn't happy with what I was getting so I knew I had to light the shot. So, first off I set the shutter speed to 1/250th (my sync speed) to see what the flashes on their own would do...

This was just a quick shot to see how things lay. There's two flashes, one behind me up on a stand right into the corner of the room and another in the far right corner. That far one was just pointing straight up and I could see that I needed to bounce it off into the corner too because of the harsh shadow on the ceiling light. So I turned that flash around to get more bounce and to get a softer light. This got me to here...

I knew now that I had to open up the shutter to let some ambient in to fill in those shadows. Now I did have an option here. I COULD have broken out a third flash (a trusty Vivitar 285) and placed it to my left to give me more light and an even coverage. Then I could have kept the shutter speed fairly high in order to keep the sky looking blue. Problem is I'd also have kept that BT van in the shot too :( I'd already asked them if they could move it (they were nice, but said no!!) so I had left this room as long as I could. So I decided to let the ambient soak in a touch more to nuke the windows. The view wasn't integral to this shot anyway so it wasn't a major problem. However, the flashes brought a much more even light and some colour and texture to the shot that was lacking in the ambient light only version.

I just want to add another shot here that was ambient only. I just loved the way the light from the window fell off the blue wall...

As you can see from the shot below, it's quite often advisable to keep the window or light source out of the shot, particularly if you're wanting to concentrate on a gorgeous light like this. I only add flash if I need it, it's a tool in the bag and not the first stop saloon (is that even a saying?)...

Actually, here's a couple of others from the shoot that I quite liked...

And this one which I actually really really like but I'm not sure anyone else will. Two versions...

And a black and white version...

I like the almost pastel colours of the colour but I also really like the grain and moodiness of the B&W. What do you think? Good, Indifferent, or crap? Would love to hear opinions!

Cheers
Ian :)

Flashy Pad

2010-04-20T13:53:00.001-07:00

I thought I would post up a few photos from a showhome I shot last week. The reason I'd like to post them is to show how I used a couple of flashes to even out the light in this livingroom. I always carry three flashes with me on every job but I don't always need them. If I'm shooting interiors I ideally like a nice cloudy day which will give me a softer light. If it's a sunny blue sky day it would give me shafts of light that are much much lighter than the rest of the interiors, basically far too much dynamic range for the camera.

I know a lot of people like to use HDR these days by bracketing between 3 and 9 shots and combining them in the computer, but that's not for me. I rarely see an HDR photo that I like and I'd MUCH rather know that I've got the shot before I leave the site rather than later on after half an hour on the computer looking at a picture that just doesn't look quite right!

There's a few things you can do to deal with these shafts of light such as pulling blinds down or even using a white sheet to cover the windows to soften the light a bit more, but if you have the windows in the shot then this isn't really going to work so well. Also, if the view is important for the shot then you really only have two options, light the room up to the same exposure value as the exterior ambient, or go the HDR route (you could take one exposure for the view and one for interior and mask in photoshop but to be honest, quite often just two frames like this don't sit well together.)

So anyway, on the shot above you can probably see a marked difference in the exposure of the upper and lower halves of the room. This was due to the angle of the sun coming in the window behind me. Also note that the lights are on. Some clients prefer to have internal lights on and some prefer them to be off. It's a matter of preference and it can even depend on the type of room you're shooting. If there are small spotlights then I'd usually prefer them to be on, especially if there's any reflective surfaces showing. I usually shoot between f11 and f16 which gives you a nice 'star/twinkle' effect from point light sources that add a little bit of extra interest in the frame. But for lights such as these I quite like them to be off so they don't burn in too much during the exposure. This also means the white balance is a lot more straight forward of course.

So I turned the lights off and took another shot to see how the shadows on the wall were affected...

I could see straight away that I would need to set up a couple of flashes to get a more even coverage. One option would of course to fix it in post production, but, as with the HDR, I'd much rather get the shot in the camera before I leave the site. Also, if I'm honest, it's also a bit of professional pride for me to get pictures as close to finished in camera as possible. I do of course post process all images but if you can do it in camera then I think you should.

Anyway, to even out the exposure I put two flashes fairly high up in the corners of the room behind me, both pointing into the corners with wide angle diffusers on. Pointing them into the corners gives a much more even coverage because it's making the light bounce off in all directions. This is really important to reduce shadows. One place I always look at when I'm looking at interior shots are the ceiling lights. You can usually tell where the dominant light is coming from by the shadow.

In the next shot you can see the coverage isn't quite even enough and so is giving me a bit too much of a harsh shadow on the ceiling light...

You can see two shadows from the flashes but you can also see that the shadow on the far wall has pretty much disappeared. This told me that the power of the lights was fine but that they needed to be backed off from the ceiling a bit. More distance means more coverage as they hit a wider area of the wall. This would fill in those shadows nicely. So I backed both off a bit (basically lowered the stands by about a foot) and shot again to get the final shot...

This might seem like a lot of effort to go to for a shot of a livingroom but it's details like this that make a difference. For the final delivered shot I also cloned the chair which has some of it's leather covering falling off (which I missed on the day!!) and tweaked the white balance a touch.

There is a nice even light in the room that I think makes it look clean, fresh and inviting and there's no harsh shadows to distract or draw the eye to. There's definitely a time and place for higher contrast looks but for most interior shots a nice bright, clean and fresh look is what is asked for.

Apologies for the longer post as it's probably a bit rambling but I get carried away easily :) Please leave a comment with any thoughts or hints for me or others, it's much appreciated.

Cheers
Ian :)

Nice house and Scooby Doo too!

2010-04-19T06:52:00.001-07:00

Just a few pictures from the weekend shoot. This was a lovely show house from David Wilson Homes in Dunfermline. The site is in the early stages so I had to do some extensive cloning on the picture above. In particular on the right side of the frame there was metal mesh fencing which was a challenge to remove :) And also the lower right window is basically a copy of the one above it since the fence went right in front of it. I've changed the reflection a bit so it's not that obvious but it was the best way to 'rebuild' the window.

I was a bit lucky with the weather too as it was a pretty cloudy morning but there was one patch of blue sky drifting slowly towards the right part of the sky for this shot. I had to wait about 10 minutes for this but it was worth it. Always better to get a nice sky in camera rather than having to replace it in post production in my opinion.

Anyway, the house was lovely and had a great kitchen...

Being an ex-chef I always like looking at new kitchens and this one was really spacious!

There was also a sales event on that day and we had the scooby doo van turn up for the kids for a while...

I took most pics of the house with natural light since it was quite cloudy so I had a soft enough light. I do have a 'Flashy pad' post to put up from a different job last week though so I'll be working on that over the next day or so.

Thanks for reading :)
Ian

Lancers

2010-04-16T11:35:00.001-07:00

I had the pleasure of taking some pictures for the newly refurbished Lancers restaurant in Edinburgh a few days ago. It's a very modern, stylish place with friendly staff and amazing food. As usual we were a bit time limited having to take interior, food and portrait shots, so we had to move to different lighting for each. I'm really happy with how they came out so I thought I'd share some here :)

The shot above was taken with a softbox cam left balanced with the ambient spotlights for the background.
The food shots below were mainly taken with natural light behind and a flash off to cam right.

And here's a nice wee outtake which I really like...

Hope you like these, if so leave a comment :)
I'll be updating more frequently from now on so check back here or my twitter for updates.

Cheers
Ian

2010-04-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes it's an update!

Well it's been far too long since I updated the blog. I've spent the last couple of months concentrating on the business side of things which is a necessary evil :) I've decided to post up a couple of tear sheets that relate back to recent posts just to tie these up really. Above is a Double Page Spread opener for a beautiful new build house feature that we shot at the end of last year. I love the picture and I think it worked really well as a DPS opener.

The next picture is from the last Braehead Food School shoot we did. It's the full page opener to a recipes section.

I'm currently planning some new blog posts so keep an eye out for updates :)
On a related note, does anyone have any recommendations for offline blog editors for the mac? Coming from windows live writer to the built in blogger editor is really rubbish :)

Cheers
Ian

Healthy food!

2010-02-06T11:50:00.001-08:00

Just a wee sneak peek at the latest shoot I did for the Home Plus Scotland magazine recipes. The magazine will be on the shelves in a couple of weeks time and the recipes will be up on the website then too!

Sometimes it can take ages playing around with the lighting and the angle/composition etc, then other times it just works pretty much straight away. Luckily, this was the latter. I put up a small softbox to camera left and feathered it off to the back of the bagel which gave me the shot below…

I was pretty happy with this shot but I wanted a bit more light in the right of the frame but I knew I didn’t need to actually set another light up. I always carry some white A4 paper in my kit to act as a quick reflector so that’s what I grabbed here. It really worked on the bagel (top shot) as it gave it a bit of a glossy highlight so I used it for the Endamame beans below as well.

There’s a wee setup shot below to show where the paper was placed…

You can also see how the softbox wasn’t pointing straight at beans, it was feathered off to the side to soften the light a bit.

Here’s one of the actual shot of the beans…

I also had to take a photo of a smoothie for the magazine. I had expected three but in the end was given one so the ideas I had for composition went out the window. I had noticed that they had a really nice bar with spotlights above it. I didn’t have too much time so I decided not to light this shot. I wanted to place the drink under the spotlights and expose for them letting the ambient go dark with an out of focus background. Problem was the ice on the top of the smoothie was blowing out so I had to move it behind the light slightly. That shot looked like…

I quite liked this shot but the napkin is still a bit too hot. I moved down the bar so I could get a better bokeh and exclude the bar pumps which might not have fitted into the tone of the recipes. The shot that’s been used in the magazine is this…

I’m quite happy with this shot, especially considering I didn’t have much time to set it up and my original plan went out the window.

Oh aye and here’s the picture of the chef, who was a thoroughly nice guy!

For this I had the softbox up high cam right (that’s not it in the frame btw, that’s a curtain) and a CTO gelled flash on the floor behind to give a nice warm light to the background.

Cheers
Ian :)

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year!!

2010-01-16T15:44:00.001-08:00

Really hope everyone had a great holiday and enjoyed the snow as much as possible :)

Been really busy over the last few weeks so I’ve neglected the blog a bit so I thought I’d drop in a few pics taken with my coolpix over the hols.

The plan is to update my website and start posting on the blog again shortly so check back soon :)

Cheers
Ian

A lil something to whet the appetite!

2009-12-10T16:16:00.001-08:00

I recently shot the food for the Jan/Feb edition of Home Plus Scotland magazine. This is the second time Braehead Cook School have supplied the recipes for the mag and there’s another one coming up. The first shoot at the school gave me some lighting and styling probs but this time I had added to my props kit and I was already aware of the lighting so it went great. Also had Tom’s help this time round. It’s always great to have someone else to bounce ideas around with.

I’m working on a food styling post which will be up shortly-ish. Like any type of photography the styling can make or break a food shot. Styling is an art form in itself and I’m no food stylist but I wanted to put up a post just showing what I think about when I take food shots. However, as it’s late and that’s not ready for posting I thought I’d just share a few of the shots from the shoot.

So here you go…

The all new Home Plus Scotland website will be up early next week with loads of back-dated content so once it’s up I’ll link to it so you can hopefully get the recipes for a lot of the food shots I’ve posted before. Tom and I can confirm that the food is fantastic!

Cheers
Ian :)

House on the (windy) hill!

2009-11-26T17:18:00.001-08:00

Just wanted to post a couple of photographs from a very recent house shoot we did for Home Plus. Just finished processing the set and I really can’t decide which of these two I like the best!

The house was at the top of a hill and it was a very wild night up there, hence the title.

The top picture is obviously focused on the thistle motif with the distant lights slightly out of focus, while the picture below is the opposite.

I do like both and have applied more editing than I have in the files being submitted to the mag, but I still can’t decide which I like most, so if anyone has any opinions feel free to leave them in the comments :)

It’s really late though so perhaps I’ll see them differently in the morning! I’ll post a few more shots from the shoot soon.

Cheers
Ian

Strobist fun!

2009-11-18T14:30:00.001-08:00

The other day I shot the picture for Home Plus Scotland’s ‘Designer profile’ article again. I’ve shot the last few of these and it’s always an enjoyable challenge because we like to try for something a little bit ‘edgy’, especially for a homes and interiors type magazine. I also had the pleasure of Tom’s company along on this shoot. It’s great to have someone to bounce ideas off of and Tom’s knowledge of photography is awesome. If you haven’t read his blog then you really should.

Small flashes are just made for this kind of thing and thanks mostly to David Hobby of ‘Strobist’ fame I love using them! This job was to photograph Brian Hinnigan who is one side of the husband and wife team of Hinnigan Fabrics. They are based in the Scottish borders and produce all sorts of really contemporary fabrics and we had the opportunity to shoot this picture in the old mill where the fabrics are created.

It was fairly dark with lots of cool looking machinery (well, cool looking to a daft photographer like me who would probably lose a hand in ten seconds if he was left alone in there!). When you’re using small flashes like this then the low ambient is perfect. The shot above is the main shot that the editor has chosen for the full page image which is the usual format for this article.

The shot uses two flashes, one through a softbox fairly high to camera left, while the second is on the floor to camera right. The softbox is lighting Brian while the floor flash is lighting the threads. I kind of wish I’d added a third behind just for a blip of rim light but I do like the slightly ‘dark’ look of it.

I did use a third flash in the image below to light the background a bit. It was shot through a brolly for a bit of diffusion. I also moved Brian along a bit mainly to get more string but also to avoid the pole that was running right through the middle of the shot. In the end, I had to clone it out as we wanted to go with the picture above.

At the time I quite liked the string shadows across Brian’s face but after living with the images for a few days I definitely preferred the top one. Here’s another couple from the shoot.

You can see on the photograph above we moved the brolly to the right a touch to feather the light off because it looked a bit too strong.

This photo was shot with a softbox cam right quite high which gave enough light onto the background fabric as well. I was standing on a (rather rickety) step ladder.

And lastly this one which was actually the first composition we tried…

I loved the look of this machine and as soon as we went in I knew I had to try for this shot. It’s just a bit of a shame that all the spools of thread are on the other side. There’s a few red ones there too but the composition wouldn’t have worked from that side. We lit this one with the softbox cam right again, another flash camera left pointing through the machine to light up the spools and we did use a third to light the drum at the back but I can’t actually remember if we used it in this photo, doh!

I shot mainly portrait shape because the usual format is for a full page portrait and questions on the other page, like this. But I was also thinking of a double page spread (DPS) possibility so I always shoot a few of both, just in case. The shot above might work as a DPS but we’d have to add a faded black panel over the left page to fit the text on. I might try it and see how it looks. Worst thing about working with your own images in layouts is that you can endlessly tweak them to death.

Thanks for reading!
Cheers
Ian :)

A wee walk up the Pentlands and some snaps!

2009-11-10T15:59:00.001-08:00

I’ve neglected the blog a bit recently, mainly because I’ve been really busy and not had much of a chance to sort through all my processing. I have a couple of posts in the works but I wanted to post a few landscapes I took at the weekend during a hike up the Pentlands.

I’ve been concentrating so much on work that I haven’t taken the camera out just for fun in months, so even though the extra weight in my rucksack nearly killed me, I made a point of taking the D300 and a few lenses with me, and I’m glad I did as we had a fantastic day for it!

So here’s a few pics from oop the hills, we went over Turnhouse Hill, Carnethy Hill and Scald Law (which should be Scald mountain as far as I’m concerned!!). This is all part of my ‘getting fit’ plan so expect to see more from hillwalks around here :)

Above is Scald Law!

One of my bro in law who is considerably fitter than me.

And lastly a pic of a fellow photographer, although I think he’d hiked up specifically for some shots. I think he was waiting for some more dramatic light. Usually a sure fire bet in November in Scotland but this day was beautiful, you can’t win em all I suppose.

If you’d like to see these larger you can check out the flickr set here

Cheers
Ian

Cosima’s World….and some food!

2009-10-15T14:07:00.001-07:00

With Home Plus Scotland magazine’s Nov/Dec issue hot off the press I thought I’d post up a few pics from one of the house shoots I have in this issue. It’s one of my favourite shoots and It’s not so much a house shoot as a showcase for a very talented interior designer and ceramicist called Cosima…and this is her world :)

As you can see by the shot above we ended up with so many nice ‘detail’ shots that the editor Leah wanted to try a montage for the leader page. I had the chance to design it with her which is always great but it’s always a double-edged sword when working on a design with your own pictures, but I think we’re both really chuffed with how it came out :)

Here’s a few more from the article…

Cosima’s portrait at her desk :) The house was mostly shot with natural light but I wanted this shot to be quite bright to suit the pinks and blues of the room so I had to use a slightly longer shutter speed to almost blow the windows out (it was quite an overcast, dull and rainy day) and I used a softbox quite high to camera right to fill in the shadows and get the catchlights in Cosima’s eyes. Really happy with this shot but I wish I’d kept a bit more detail in the desk!

Finally, here’s the food shots from Braehead Food School, well it’s the leader page for the food section…

Hope you liked the pics, as always Home Plus Scotland is always worth picking up :)

Cheers
Ian

A different kind of lighting!

2009-10-04T15:46:00.001-07:00

It’s not the usual kind of lighting I’m into but I had the pleasure of shooting a few pictures for The Meadows Lamp Gallery in Marchmont, Edinburgh recently. It’s such a lovely shop and I could have spent hours in there, but unfortunately I only had about half an hour.

Still I’m really happy with the shots I got and the one above is my fave :) Here’s a couple of other detail shots…

Cheers
Ian :)

Souper reflector!

2009-09-29T15:30:00.001-07:00

Haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog recently so I thought I’d put up this post about how I often use a wee reflector for food shots. The shot above isn’t anything to do with that though, I was just really happy with it :) I had noticed the reflections of the blinds in the glass partition and I knew I wanted to use them somehow.

I placed a flash with a Honl grid on just out of the frame camera left pointing at the subject’s face and another bare flash on the floor behind him pointing up. I did have to clone out a hotspot just above him but other than that there’s minimal pp on this one. I used my trusty Sigma 150 macro lens which I find is a great lens for portraits!

Anyway, here’s the picture of the soup that we will be most likely running in Home Plus Scotland…

The specular highlight on the soup (the bright reflection on the surface) was deliberately placed to give a visual indicator of the ‘texture’ of the soup. I used only natural light here as there was a small window camera left and without the reflector the soup looked quite ‘flat’ and not as appetising. My first attempt with the reflector was this…

The specular highlight just isn’t prominent enough for me and basically looked like an accident, so I angled it to get more of a direct reflection to get this…

For me this was too much and it made the soup look much thicker than it actually was. So after another adjustment I got the picture I was happy with. The main reflector I use is just a gold coloured cake board that I bought from Asda for under £1. They are brilliant because you can get different colours and they are easy to carry around and replace. I know many studio based food photographers use small mirrors but as I travel about and shoot food on location these cake board things are ideal.

I’m looking to expand my food kit soon by adding more props. Trip to Ikea beckons I think! Or if anyone has any tips on cheap props I’m all ears :)

Cheers
Ian

Home Plus Scotland food ‘taster’!

2009-09-15T15:33:00.001-07:00

Just another wee ‘taster’ (excuse the pun!) from an upcoming Home Plus Scotland (HPS) magazine feature. HPS are changing the food pages to make more of a food ‘section’ and so the fantastic chefs at the Braehead Cook School have agreed to help us out with recipes etc. HPS are going down the route of more seasonal ingredients which is a great idea. Anyway, had a long but good shoot today and if anyone’s looking for a nice day out or even a present with a difference I can totally recommend the cook school courses (I’ve been on one and plan to go again!).

Here’s a couple more pics from today…

I used mostly natural light today although I was tempted to get out the softbox, but I made do with a small gold reflector which is great for adding a touch of specular light. For example, I used it just out of the frame on the above shot of the chocolate sauce. Without it the light on the chocolate looked a bit dull and boring. It also added a bit of nice highlights to the edge of the slate. I shot this composition because the chocolate mirrors the slate edge a bit.

Once the feature has run I’ll probably upload a small set to flickr and post a link here for anyone who’s interested.

Cheers
Ian :)

Home Plus Scotland sneak peak!

2009-09-09T14:35:00.001-07:00

Just a sneak peak for a house shoot we did for Home Plus Scotland magazine the other day. It was a lovely house with a lovely owner. It’s also been styled by an interior designer that we’ve never featured before and it’s always nice to meet new people in the business. I thought I would post just a few of the ‘detail’ shots as a wee taster for any of the HPS readers that might be tuning in…

I actually didn’t use any lights on this shoot as it was a pretty miserable day outside with loads of cloud and rain. Luckily there were plenty of large windows to let the light in and the clouds gave me quite a nice soft, even light which is my preferred kind of light for interiors.

The full shoot has some lovely images, particularly the kitchen, so be sure to pick up a copy of Home Plus when it comes out (middle of next month I believe!).

Cheers
Ian

Water drop shots

2009-09-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

Had a terrible week and I needed something to take my mind off things, so I thought I’d try some water drop shots. After about 300 shots I had at least three that I liked. I quite like the shot above because it’s not clear that the whole cd is under water, and it’s like the music is exploding from within, well at least that’s how I see it.

The other two are…

These are processed way more contrasty than my normal stuff but it' seemed to suit the pics.

Cheers
Ian

Shady shooting!

2009-08-26T15:51:00.001-07:00

Just a quick post about shooting outside on bright days. If you’re already into photography then this is old news to you :) but I thought these images illustrated the point quite nicely so hopefully someone somewhere might find it useful :)

As you can see the above shot was taken on a really bright sunny day. I wanted to use the hedges to frame Stacey and I wanted the path to be the background but this meant I had to deal with a very harsh sidelight. I quite often hear people saying that ‘natural’ light is the best light, but that’s not strictly true. I think what they usually mean is that window light is a nice light. It’s nice because it’s a large lightsource compared to the subject and so the light hits the subject from wider angles and therefore wraps around the subjects contours giving a very pleasing transition from light to shadow.

If you put someone beside a tiny wee window then it definitely wouldn’t be as nice :) It’d look a bit like the picture above, because the light would be relatively small and so would be very hard, making a sharp transition from light to shadow. The same thing is happening above because the sun, while bloody huge, is relatively small because it’s far away. If it was a cloudy day then the cloud cover acts like a large soft diffuser and gives a much more even light, but on this day the sky was clear blue.

So the solution was to move Stacey back a bit to one of the shadier areas where she wouldn’t be in the direct sunlight…

So while this sorted the high contrast problem we now had Stacey standing in the dark. So this is where the softbox came in. Sometimes I can use three or four lights but in this instance one was easily enough. The softbox made the light a bit bigger and therefore a bit softer for the reasons I mentioned above. For the pic below Leah was standing on her tip toes holding the softbox high and pointing down towards Stacey.

This is the reason you quite often see a photographer using a flash on a sunny day. It allows you to light on two different levels, one is your background (or anything that’s lit by the ambient light) and the second is your flash. Of course I was limited by the power of the flash I was using and by my choice of aperture. I’d ideally liked to have blurred the background a tad more by using a larger aperture but because I wanted to use the flash I was limited to my flash sync shutter speed of 1/250th so I shot this at f4, ISO 200.

Anyway, must also say a bit thanks to Houston House Hotel for letting us use their lovely grounds :)

Cheers
Ian

ps… fashion!

2009-08-26T15:21:00.001-07:00

I’ve been so busy processing wedding images last week that I’ve not really had time to update this blog for a bit so I thought I’d put up a wee post about a great fashion shoot we did on Monday.

It was for a new ‘lifestyle’ supplement to go with Home Plus Scotland magazine called ‘ps…’ It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this and we didn’t want to go down the route of just requesting PR images because you see the same images floating around other publications so we decided to go and do our own shoots.

However, the organising that goes into something like this is incredible and as we are producing Home Plus at the same time (as well as a few other mags!!) and because a couple of larger clothes chains let us down (you know who you are) we had to scale our plans back a bit. BUT, Leah did an amazing job of sourcing some really beautiful clothes and I think we have some fantastic images.

Have to say a huge thanks also to our model Stacey who was just brilliant, very natural and had so many different looks and poses she was so easy to work with (book her for your shoots now!"), and to Jade our make-up artist who gave us some really beautiful looks to compliment the clothes, to Leah who was an excellent stylist and to Duncan, who owns the studio and also help out with lighting…(ahem)

For the studio lighting we used a grey seamless paper background, one softbox camera right as the key light and one softbox behind Stacey feathered off to the edge of the background to give a bit of a gradient effect. We also had a slaved light underneath the key light through a brolly to get more light onto Stacey’s legs to show the tights and shoes up a bit more.

I was also shooting tethered to my laptop so everyone could see the images as they were shot, and looking at the laptop screen is such an improvement on looking at the back of the camera, it makes it easier to see how the lighting etc is working.

For the outdoors lighting I used one flash only through a 60x60 softbox, handheld by Leah. It was such a bright day that we had to find some shade. Going to post an example of using shade in another post :)

I don’t want to post loads of pics before the magazine comes out so I’ll only post two more which just so happen to be two of my faves (apart from the shot above of course!)

I love these shots, the one directly above was actually an outtake as I was taking ‘walking’ pictures and for some reason totally missed my framing on the last shot. It’s not a great shot to show off the clothes but I still love it for Stacey’s expression, and the framing of the leaves just seems to work. Although, I have to admit the leaves were quite a bit greener than they are here, I changed the green to a more autumnal colour to match the clothes, and the fact that this ‘ps…’ will be the Autumn/Winter edition :) Anyway, this one might make a nice cover!

Really enjoyed this shoot and I think I’ll definitely look into doing some more fashion work.

Look out for ‘ps…’’ around Scotland as a free pick-up A5 mag end of next month, after that it’ll be bagged up with the next edition of HPS!

Cheers
Ian :)

Home Plus Scotland

2009-08-13T06:26:00.001-07:00

We received Home Plus Scotland back from the printers today. Our last couple of issues had a few colour problems so we were using a new printers. You never quite know what you’re going to get back the first time but we were really impressed with the colour, clarity and sharpness of it. I’m particularly chuffed because I had the cover this issue and a couple of house shoots, and also a wee feature on my blog, and it’s all come out looking fantastic. If you’re passing a newsagents or a WH Smith you should definitely pick up a copy.

I really think the magazine is going from strength to strength and it’s just looking so good now, very fresh design and a good balance between interesting features and product pages. Also, next issue there will be an a5 lifestyle supplement called ‘ps…' bundled with it (as well as going out on it’s own for a month(ish) beforehand). I’m going to be doing two fashion shoots, one studio and one on location so I’m really looking forward to it. We have two great models lined up and the clothes etc have started coming in for it and I’ve picked up my grey background paper :) I think it’ll be a really cool wee supplement.

Anyway, here’s a couple other tear sheets from this issue, this one is from the shoot with Lyken and I think the black really suits it,

The next is from the same shoot as the cover. The colours are a bit subdued here but in the magazine it’s much more vibrant. I think it’s to do with the pdf I made of it.

This one is from a house in Fife that we did. Worked with a really good stylist (Ali McCulloch) on this one and she dressed up the table really well, it made all the difference.

Last but not least is the blog watch feature. It’s now a regular feature we run and it’s a great idea by the editor to highlight different design type blogs. This issue she wanted to highlight mine since it’s linked in with the magazine and the Home Plus Scotland website will be up soon too so I’ll be linking to that. Took some persuading as there’s many many many better blogs out there but I’m still quite happy with how it came out, apart from the picture of the ugly bloke!

Anyway, if anyone wants a glossy mag to read I’d definitely recommend HPS and not just because I’m involved with it, I really do think it’s a great mag :) I’ll blog up about the fashion shoots too, they’re coming up in the next few weeks. Also going to try some new food shots for HPS which will be fun. Oh and I have a wedding to shoot this weekend!

Cheers
Ian :)

Lykenography

2009-08-01T15:16:00.001-07:00

Had a great shoot with a really cool artist up in Dundee on friday. I was taking the picture for a piece that Home Plus Scotland magazine are running on Lyken, an artist who has a background in graffiti (no pun intended lol). While Lyken’s weapon of choice these days is canvas he’s still involved with the graffiti scene. He’s away to Belfast this weekend to take part in an organised cross community event on the Shankill Road.

Usually when a graffiti artist gets their picture taken they have their faces covered for obvious reasons, and while Lyken’s creations are all legal he still likes to do something a bit quirky as a kind of nod to this tradition. Hence the cool 3d glasses :) He also wears them because he doesn’t take himself too seriously which is something I can totally identify with!!

The main graffiti on all three walls on these pics are Lyken’s work and they look great, it’s such a cool location. The shot above wasn’t meant as a set-up shot as I actually wanted the lights in the frame but it also shows off the place quite well, and I think it’s quite a cool shot :) It’s obviously a three flash setup. The third is on the floor behind Lyken pointed at the wall.

As well as his 3d glasses he has this really smart belt buckle that’s in the shape of his name. I saw it on a picture that he’d sent to us and I knew I wanted to do something with it. After a couple of test shots I realised we’d have to light the reflection rather than light the silver itself. So I pointed the softbox at the bright orange and green graffiti you can see behind Lyken on the shot above and had him stand sideways to it…

I love this shot. Like my last post about taking detail shots in house shoots and how that can give you more of a flavour of the house than an all-encompassing 10mm wide shot can, this shot for me says it all. You don’t need his face in the frame :)

Another shot I thought turned out well was this one…

But as Lyken pointed out it’s not clear that the colours are a reflection. It almost looks like a psychedelic buckle. If I’m honest, I’d wear one like that but he has much better taste than me :)

This next shot is one I took specifically with a double page spread (DPS) in mind…

The piece is going to be two pages and I knew we’d have some nice colourful backgrounds so the idea was to try and get a possible full dps background shot. The orange is pretty bright though so there would have to be either a dark gradient added or a faded black box over most of the right hand page. Might not run like that but regardless, I really like this shot. It’s a two light shot with the softbox off to camera right and a bare flash just out of frame camera right really close to the wall. Once Home Plus is out I’ll post up a tear sheet.

I wanted the texture of the wall to show so I had it raking across the wall at an extreme angle. I thought about using the snoot like I’ve done before with graffiti but it would have been too extreme as I didn’t have much working room. Looking at it now though I wish I’d tried a tight beam shooting up from the bottom right corner. Next time :)

Next shot I wanted was one of Lyken standing against the wall with a hard light projecting his shadow over his artwork. I decided I’d use some on-axis fill since Mr Hobby himself has been really talking this up recently. I set up the shot without the fill first to get the shadow right…

This is just one flash obviously off to camera right. I actually really like this shot without the fill light in it but once I added the fill light it just brought out the colours…

I’d be really interested in hearing other opinions about these shots. I like both and can’t make up my mind which is better. Perhaps I went ott with the fill and somewhere in between? Anyway, the fill is the softbox right above me. I was half crouching underneath it.

The last option I wanted to give the mag was a lighting setup I’ve seen used quite often for sportsmen. Basically it’s just two lights, one at either side of the subject (setup same as the first pic posted). I added a third to the background…

Again, pretty happy with this shot. I had thought I might need a reflector for a bit of fill in front but I was happy without it. Interestingly, the background light was my vivitar 285 which occasionally doesn’t fire and I got a couple of shots without light on the background which I kinda like…

Again, I’d love to hear any opinions on which one people prefer. I like both! The one without the background light makes me think it’s been taken in a street somewhere with streetlights on either side. No idea why!

Here’s a full length version I took of this same setup which we thought looked like something out of ‘Heroes’ :) I think it’s a cool pose and the floor looks great. It’s just that white strip at the top that slightly bothers me.

Lastly I took a couple of shots at the end while experimenting with the lights…

For this shot I had three flashes set up. A bare flash just out of frame camera left but pointed right at the lens for a bit of flare (most of which I took out in post doh!) and highlights on his hair, and the softbox also cam left but obviously in front of Lyken. The third was pointed at the background and it also bounced a little fill back to the shadow side.

The last shot was a similar setup but without the flare.

The shoot was good fun and Lyken’s a great guy so hopefully will shoot him again in the future. I’m also uploading these to my flickr so if anyone’s interested they can probably see them bigger there.

Cheers
Ian :)

The angels in the detail!

2009-07-26T14:54:00.001-07:00

Had a really good house shoot in Glasgow last week for Home Plus Scotland magazine. The owners are setting up their own interior design and painter & decorators company (Re-decorate) and they certainly have tons of past experience to draw on. Their home was beautiful with quite a few quirky interesting things to photograph and they made me very welcome too.

The shot above was the main living room and I popped a flash up on a stand just out of the frame camera left to even out the exposure a bit. I felt that a more flat, even lighting worked best for this room since it was quite ‘deep’ in the sense that the window light fell off a fair bit before it hit the back wall. A tripod and longer exposure coupled with the flash evened it out nicely.

Another shot I really liked the lighting on…

This one was just natural light. I did try a touch of flash off to camera right bouncing off the ceiling but it just didn’t need it and I really liked the soft shadows that big window was giving.

This room really was a huge space which I hope comes through on the images. The piano was quite substantial but even that looked right at home. I can see why Karlyn & Rob say this is a great party room!

Yet again I left a house being jealous of the kitchen :)

I have a few more pics than normal to post because I took quite a few detail shots. I always start a shoot with wide angle shots of the rooms and while it still requires alot of thought about composition and whether to light or not, it’s still the detail shots that give you a flavour of what a house, or indeed it’s owners, are really like.

For most of the time I use the 50mm f1.8 lens for the details since it gives me the ability to get really good quality shots at f2.8 and so allows you to be a bit more creative. I occasionally use my beloved 150mm macro lens but that’s often a bit overkill for what I want.

Here’s a few detail shots that I thought were cool…

The next two shots below are a perfect example of detail shots that give you a flavour of the place and it’s owners. Karlyn & Rob are creative types and these details of their office space show that I think…

This next shot also shows that they are slightly mental. It’s an old family heirloom I think and yes, it’s real. It just seems to work in that room though!

This next shot shows a nice cross section of the colours in the diningroom/kitchen…

Another quirky shot which I love. This was a hole where an old plug socket used to be so they’ve added a wee door with a ‘home sweet home’ sign on it for the mice…of course!

Another thing I like about the detail shots is the ability to compose a shot that’s a ‘slice’ of a room. This last shot was one I saw while doing the wide shots but it really needed a closer perspective to get a nice shot out of it. I’m really happy with it because of the colours, the composition and the lovely natural light.

Not too much lighting info in this post since the house was nice and light with not too much contrast to worry about but I got to talk about how important I think detail shots are so it’s all good. Perhaps I’ll get a lot of my previous detail shots together and do a single post about them. That’s for another night :)

Cheers
Ian :)

Background check…

2009-07-25T16:06:00.001-07:00

I decided to experiment a bit with backdrops last night. I really believe that the background of a picture is every bit as important as the foreground, so I wanted to take a few test shots to test out some ideas I had. The shot above is a test shot I’ve been meaning to try for a while. I don’t have a light-tent but I wanted to mimic a seamless backdrop, so I taped together three pieces of A3 white paper and taped them up over my monitor (setup shot below).

You can see in the setup shot that I had the softbox really close to the subject. This effectively made the softbox as large a light as I could which made the shadows as soft as possible (since the light is hitting the subject from many different angles). On the milk shot at the top of the post I also had another flash off to camera left with a snoot on it to direct the light in a tight beam. I didn’t want a pure white backdrop in that shot and so aimed the snooted flash off to the side for a gradient of white to grey.

In order to get this gradient it meant I also had to position the softbox very close to the subject and pointing directly at it from the right. I also pointed it slightly away from the background as I didn’t want the softbox to just nuke all the paper to white. It’s very tricky to get enough separation between subject and backdrop in such a confined area but I managed it. I possibly could have used a smaller softbox or just shot the flash through some white paper, but I wanted to get as soft a shadow as I could.

Here’s a couple more shots of the chocolate brownies…

The next background I wanted to try was to create a nice bokeh effect with some nice highlights. Since my son and I found the Pixar Cars short films (Mater’s Tall Tales) the other day and he thinks Mater is great I thought he’d like a few pics of him. I now have this next shot as my desktop…

Here’s a kind of setup shot which shows how I made the background much more eloquently than I could explain it…

Yes the glasses where all fingermarks but I had just been using them to pour milk into :)

This was just a flash with a green gel and a grid. I only used the grid to control any spill of light onto the wall but when I saw how out of focus the background was I realised the grid probably didn’t matter that much. I’d ideally like to have taken the flash further away to reduce the large highlights but as I had to climb over two chairs to get to it (and one of those having the cars on it) I decided it was fine as it was :)

I had to use my 150mm macro lens not because of the macro function but because of the perspective. Obviously when you use a longer focal length your perspective is narrower, and so I only needed the three glasses. I tried the 50mm first but I think I would have needed about 15 glasses to fill the background :)

Here’s a couple more I liked…

I have another couple of ideas I’d like to try out on a black seamless so I’ll try that soon and post up.

Cheers
Ian

Truffle trouble!

2009-07-11T16:57:00.001-07:00

I only just managed to get my entry into the latest Strobist bootcamp competition tonight. Deadline was midnight and I uploaded it with a whole three minutes to spare!!

The reason I was so late was a failed batch of dark chocolatte truffles last night. I wasted a fair amount of good quality dark choc too which aint cheap. So for this batch I opted for a cheaper milk chocolate. I was in a rush though and after the wee one went to bed I was frantically waiting for this batch to cool enough so I could shape them and coat them in cocoa powder. While I waited I shot a wee time-lapse video of Ben’s Wall-e toy being chased around by a big tractor :)

Michelle helped me quite a bit getting them ready while I fiddled with the lights. They were still a tad soft so they were pretty messy. Still, they taste lovely and I’m quite happy with the final pic, even if it’s not what I was originally aiming for.

My first idea was for quite a low key ‘luxury’ look, with some silky red background, but as milk choc is lighter I had to re-evaluate. I had wanted to use a nice light brown towel I’d bought specifically for food shots but I couldn’t find it (DOH!) so I used a piece of carpet/rug thing that Michelle bought a wee while back. and I think it works pretty well. As usual with food shots it’s the styling that can make the difference. The shades of brown in this picture really work with the white line of the dish I think.

The lighting for this shot was a shoot through brolly high and camera right and another flash handheld camera left but kept low and quite close to the rug so as not to cast a shadow onto the truffles. That also had an orange gel on it to warm up the background a bit. Without this second flash there was a bit too much shadow on the rug from the dish.

Anyway, glad that’s in, here’s the only other contender of my truffle shots…

I thought this one might have been a better choice because it shows more of the consistency of the truffle, but I feel the specular highlight on the chocolate kind of takes away from the muted tones of the other shot which I liked so much. Anyway, can’t change it now :)

Last pic I’d like to post is of my backup plan. When my truffles went wonky last night I snapped a quick shot so that I’d have at least something to post. It’s a bit of a cheesy sweet shot (not a cheese sweet, that’d be gross!) but needs must :)

This was shot in a light tent with a spotty tea-towel hanging over the back. I had a flash on either side of the tent.

Must log off and get some sleep now. I’ll be dreaming of truffles, well nightmares!

Cheers
Ian

Title has to be…..’A Bog post’

2009-07-08T15:24:00.001-07:00

Had I used flash in these shots then the obvious title would have been ‘Flash in the pan’ *badumtish*!!

Had a very interesting shoot the other day for a client who is a very talented designer and now has her own company called ‘Four dots design’. This was to document an earlier job that Kate had done at Tebay Service station south of Carlisle, which is more of a ‘hotel’ than a service station.

We had an early start (left the house at 5.30) to try and avoid the busy times since they didn’t really want to close the toilets off for us, which is fair enough. Kate thought she was getting some funny looks standing outside the gents toilets, but you should have seen the looks I was getting loitering around inside with a camera and tripod :)

I had to set up the shot then wait for a space in the ‘traffic’! Even though I was being careful I’ve had to clone out one or two poor guys whose reflections I had missed when taking the shots lol.

Anyway, the place was lovely (It’s not often I recommend toilets to people but if you’re passing!!) and I think we’ve got some really good portfolio shots. Few more below.

For the shot above I had originally wanted the black top to be all dry but it was so busy there were always people washing their hands (thankfully) so there were spots of water everywhere. So I had a cloth and kept running up and down manically in between hand washers trying to get it looking all glossy. Unfortunately it’s still a tad streaky but it doesn’t show up in the pics unless you look quite closely. I still like the reflections of the lights in it.

I’m still kicking myself for not using at least one flash somewhere so I could use the title ‘Flash in the pan’….next time :)

Cheers
Ian

Industrial Photography

2009-07-03T16:35:00.001-07:00

Had a job on last week that’s a little different to my usual assignment. It was to shoot some pics for one of our business magazines to accompany an article about a fabricators in Renfrew. As I’m looking to expand into industrial photography I jumped at the chance :)

Unfortunately, the bosses didn’t want their pics taken (which was a shame as there’s tons of really great backgrounds for portraits there) but there were still plenty of pics to take. They basically fabricate huge metal structures and so the working spaces are huge. To get a decent pic of it I even donned a harness and got up in a ‘cherry picker’. I used the 10-20 for the shot below but if I’d have been on the ground then I’d have far too much boring ground in the frame so the extra height worked really well.

One thing I found problematic was the lack of light. Despite all those skylights it was actually pretty dark so I had to boost the ISO when up on the crane because the cage was vibrating too much to use the tripod effectively. With my old D200 this would have caused a PP nightmare but the D300 handles noise much better. I don’t usually worry about this as I rarely go above ISO 200 for interiors or portraits but it’s nice to know the high ISO performance is there when/if you need it!

I REALLY wanted to take some pics of the plasma cutter machine but the operator wasn’t available :/ Bummer. So, here’s a few more pics that I quite liked…

Is the pic above too dark? Looked ok on my photoshop but now looks a tad dark. My calibrated screen is playing silly buggers atm.

Not sure why I like the hook pic, I just do :)

Supposed to be shooting some more pics at their Leith base sometime soon so I’ll blog up about that too if I get anything worthy! I’m definitely looking forward to doing some more of this stuff, hopefully with some portraits included too. David Tejada look out….NOT!

Cheers
Ian

Kitchen Style!

2009-07-02T15:25:00.001-07:00

Shot a really nice kitchen the other day in a beautiful big house. The job was to only shoot the kitchen which was a shame as I’d love to have had a chance to take pics of the whole place.

As usual I didn’t have too long and I was also keeping the family from their breakfast :) So I grabbed some wide shots with the Sigma 10-20 then some close-ups with the old 35-70 f2.8 and the 50mm. This kitchen was particularly nice to shoot because it looked ‘lived-in’. Quite often when people know a photographer is coming they clear away anything that makes the place look like a home, which is a shame and why styling makes such a difference. This kitchen didn’t need a stylist though as it all looked great already :)

Cheers
Ian :)

Artist focus!

2009-06-23T15:22:00.001-07:00

Had a nice wee job to shoot a portrait of an artist for our regular artist feature today. The weather was lovely but I didn’t have too much time so we opted for a quick picture at the piano backlit by the window. I had a shoot through brolly camera right for this one. Then we headed down to the studio which presented a bit of a challenge as it was a smaller room. Still, I like the ‘lived-in’ look so I shot a wide angle shot…

For this shot I had a shoot through camera left at the side of the easel and another flash with a Honl grid on it pointed at the subject’s face. The shoot through gave me a general feathered light on the paints on the table. The shot didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped for but I like it because it shows the environment quite well. We only needed one shot so I think the editor will probably choose either the first one posted above or the one below

Once we get our new website up at work I’ll start linking to stories there when I blog about them, so I’ll be a bit light on details here for now. Had a good shoot though and the subject was such a nice guy.

It’s encouraging to meet so many successful people who are also really nice people.

Cheers
Ian

Father’s day… ok Beer & nuts!

2009-06-21T16:49:00.001-07:00

Was playing around with a friend’s light tent and I thought I should post this in honour of Father’s day! I’ve never really tried product photography before (apart from some food photog but that’s more from an editorial perspective) so I thought I’d try this bottle of beer before I downed it (it was lovely btw!).

The tent is one of those daft ones with the blue backing that curves down. I mean I THINK it’s blue to make the background easy to select in PS so you can take it out because I can’t think of any other reason for a blue bg *shrug*.

Anyway, I had it sitting on top of the cooker with an SB600 to the left and an SB 26 to the right and, since I wasn’t using it the right way up because I didn’t want a stupid blue bg, some silver foil across the top to bounce a little light back in. For the shot above I also had some silver foil behind the white at the back which bounced enough light back into the bottle to give it that nice light. Without the foil in the back the liquid in the bottle looked alot darker. It adds a nice glow to it.

There’s tons of probs with this image, like the clear plastic on the bottom doesn’t go anywhere near the edges of the image and the strip of light on the right is perhaps a bit bright and the background isn’t totally white but for a quick attempt I’m quite chuffed!

Here’s a couple more pics I took with just the pistachios…

Anyway, it’s a bit late now but hope any dads who read this had a nice father’s day!

Cheers
Ian

My spirit guide.

2009-06-20T17:23:00.001-07:00

Had a few people asking me about the Sigma 10-20 recently. I’ve always loved this lens since I bought it a couple of years ago and I use it for most room shots I do. However, I think there’s a bit of a learning curve with any extreme wide angle (WA) lens. All the reviews I read about WA lenses rated their distortions and the Sigma seemed to come out on top most of the time and that’s one of the reasons I went for it.

However, when I first got it I couldn’t believe the amount of distortion I was seeing. Now this is clearly user error as I was totally new to WAs and I actually had some fun with the WA ‘look’, but when I used it for house shoots I was spending quite a while ‘fixing’ things like converging verticals. Then I read up on it a bit more and realised I needed to make sure the camera was as level as possible to minimise distortions. Hence the above pic.

Anyone who is buying a WA lens MUST have some form of spirit level. This little thing is THE BEST piece of kit I have. It cost me less than a tenner and yet it’s saved me bloody hundreds of hours at the comp. Sure it’s not perfect but the files that still show a bit of distortion only need minor corrections now. I look back at the ‘corrected’ images when I first started out and I cringe because they’re still a bit crooked one way or another! I’m sure most people know this already but there could be a few people out there as clueless as me so I thought I’d stick this up.

Sometimes though I do need to resort to heavy distortion fixing in photoshop even though I’ve used my spirit guide! The picture below was taken recently for one of my clients who wanted some street pictures of one of their developments. I managed to capture some from a different angle but I really wanted one showing this row but I had to point the 10-20 upwards to get the whole place in and when using such a WA this leaning back effect is what you get…

So once in photoshop I used the ‘Lens correction’ option which is in ‘Filter | Distort’ to move the image horizontally and vertically until I got close to the picture below…

It’s not as perfect as a Tilt-Shift lens would get it but then a decent TS is around £1k. It’s on my shopping list at #2, although I might have to relegate the 85 f1.4 in favour of bumping a TS up to #1, have to wait and see how much I get for a kidney on ebay.

Incidentally, I was also up on the top of the scaffolding at the top right there to get a few scenic shots. It was bloody windy though so we only had 5 mins before that section was shut down. Fun fun fun! Here’s the view…

Luckily, I made it down in one piece! Had to go through the whole health & safety thing before being let up there even for five minutes but the guys were cool and watched my back in case I fell off.

Thinking of starting a wee project for myself soon, perhaps a weekly one and maybe even a theme. Thinking of something like ‘natural pairs’ kinda like the sigma 10-20 and a spirit level :) Have a few ideas so far!

Cheers
Ian

Couldn’t resist it!

2009-06-10T16:14:00.001-07:00

Had to take a snap of the cake I made with my mum and my son for his 4th birthday today! Came out really well with mum’s improvised butter icing for the filling :)

Had too much direct reflection from the window behind and left of the cake but I still like this. Couple more below. Really going to try making some things soon specifically for practicing food shots at home.

And this last one has far too much direct reflection on the glossy icing. It’s that glossy because it hasn’t set yet. If this was in a studio or a commercial shoot I’d want some direct reflection to show the glossy quality of the icing but not as much as this. Perhaps have a small strip softbox right behind the cake.

Also, I wouldn’t have used such an old wire tray :)
Larger versions here if anyone’s interested.

Cheers
Ian

A two and a one flash environmental portraits!

2009-06-02T15:19:00.001-07:00

I had the pleasure of taking the pics for our ‘designer profile’ pages again and this time it was of a very talented design student. I’ll post the layout once the magazine is in print with more details but we had quite a few cool locations to play around with. The above picture was taken with some of Thom’s work and I used two flashes. One was obviously camera right with a honl grid on to give me the harder light I was after, and another was slightly behind Thom on the right with a honl snoot.

The reason for this second flash was to give me a highlight on the picture which shows Thom’s cool light in a shop window, and also to give me some separation between Thom and the background. Looking at it now I wish I’d raised it a tad higher but as a highlight I think it works ok.

Just outside the room above we had a really cool wee corridor. It was actually the toilets but I couldn’t resist trying a shot because of the cool colours (I had to clone out a ‘gents’ sign on the door beside him though!).

I love the pools of light on the floor and the green light above. I think I should have tried for a darker shot by using a faster shutter speed. Since the corridor was so narrow this was a one light portrait, the flash had the honl grid on it again and was handheld camera right pointed at Thom’s face.

I really enjoy working on portraits like this. So much so that I think I’m gonna have to save up for an 85 f1.4, the ultimate portrait lens imo :)

Cheers
Ian

Two Flash Environmental Portrait

2009-05-28T16:10:00.001-07:00

Just a wee post tonight. Thought I’d put up this portrait of a very accomplished chef we recently shot for our recipes feature at work. We spotted this really cool glass walled wine store so we knew we had to try and use it somehow.

I lit this with two flashes. One on the floor behind David pointing up with a blue gel on it (I hardly ever use coloured gels but I thought this needed something and I think it worked pretty well) and another camera left with a honl grid on it handheld by Ali who was a great assistant!

Here’s a pic of the setup shot. I got the background how I wanted it first as I knew David was busy and I didn’t want to keep him too long.

Looking for locations is always the first thing I do when I arrive and I wish I was always as lucky as I was here finding this cool wee room.

Cheers
Ian

Macro for food!

2009-05-26T16:04:00.001-07:00

Haven’t put a post up in a wee while so I thought I’d stick this one up. It’s a shot from a recent food shoot and again it’s one where I used a reflector to camera right and window light camera left. Thing I’d like to mention about this one is that I always take my Sigma 150 macro lens with me on food shoots. I don’t always have time to use it on every shot but it works a treat on desserts and it lets you get something a little different. Even though this shot has some blown out areas I still really like it, partly because of the composition but also because of the nice pinky pastel colour on the napkin in the background. The shot below was taken with the 50mm and is a more ‘standard’ shot.

Here’s another pic shot with the macro but this one is an older shot from my portfolio. Being a macro lens it picks up all the crisp details in the food and also gives that nice shallow DoF look. For most of my food shots I use the 50 f1.8 but there’s nothing like a good macro lens to really bring out the detail.

Cheers
Ian

Shiny cake board reflector thingy

2009-05-18T14:56:00.001-07:00

Thought I’d through up this wee post about a great cheap reflector I use for food shots. Ages ago I read about how some studio food photographers use small mirrors to bounce light into very specific areas. Sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me but I can see the logic of having smaller reflectors for this sort of thing, so I always carry a shiny cake board in my kit bag :)

You can get these wee boards in Asda for under £1 and they come in all kinds of colours and sizes. The shots above are from a recent location food shoot we did. As usual we asked to use a table beside a big window. Sometimes I don’t need a reflector if the weather is nice and cloudy and the window is big enough to give enough wrap around, but on this day it was quite bright so I just propped up my gold cake board reflector against a glass of water to camera right and it was enough to balance the exposure.

I’ll post the other food pics from the shoot at a later date and once Home Plus Scotland gets their new website up I’ll start posting links to the recipes too!

Cheers
Ian

Leah Parker Balls

2009-05-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

We had a good food shoot at the Rutland, Edinburgh today. BUT as I’m feeling a bit rubbish tonight I’m not going to process any of the food shots just yet but I’ll put up a couple shortly!

However, we’ve been meaning to get a nice picture of our Editor Leah for some time and I was chuffed to see this on my screen as I was sorting the pics tonight. Leah stood in for the Chef so we could set up the shot while Ally skillfully held the light stand.

Leah will be starting her own blog soon so once it’s done I’ll link to it here. This is a possible photo for it but we might even do some more shots when we get time. Anyway, I’ve also processed a B&W version which I think looks just as strong.

Sorry Leah, couldn’t resist that title ;)

Cheers
Ian

Stripes, blinds, spotlights and laughs!

2009-05-08T15:18:00.001-07:00

Since it’s been over a week since I posted anything (had a long weekend family hol which was great, thanks mum!) I thought I’d put up a few pics from a job we did last week. In the next issue of Home Plus Scotland we’re doing a piece on the very talented interior designer Susan Bremnar. One of my first jobs for the mag over a year ago was to cover two houses that Susan had made over so I was looking forward to meeting her again and getting some great shots, and the house didn’t disappoint.

The shot above was a room tucked into the middle of the house and was totally unexpected. Susan had made a lovely wee room out of what otherwise could have been a wasted space.

This was the main living room and there’s a couple of things I wanted to mention about this shot. Firstly, since I was there to get shots to support the piece on Susan rather than to do a full house shoot I didn’t really have time to set up lights etc. To combat the bright day outside I shut the blinds and just exposed for the interior. Because the window was way brighter than the rest of the room it ALMOST blew out.

I possibly looked a bit strange taking a pic of a room on a nice sunny day with the blinds shut but if we’d left them open the light would have bled into the white panels beside the window and robbed them of any detail and I probably would have also lost detail in the cool wooden floor. But because the window almost blew out the blinds don’t necessarily look like they’re shut. It basically acted like a very large light source which gave me really nice soft side light which lit the room and also brought out the detail in the very cool wallpaper.

Oh and the second thing about this pic is the importance of having someone with an eye for design to ‘style’ the house. Susan actually brought that couch with her, as well as various other things like flowers etc, and had it all set up for when we arrived. More and more I’m realising the value of styling whether it’s for houses, food or portraits!

Ok have to finish off with two cool kitchen shots. LOVED this kitchen with it’s split level seating/dining area. One thing I’d like to point out about this shot are the spotlights. Anyone who shoots interiors will know that you always use quite a small aperture when taking wide shots not only to get max DoF but also to get that ‘star’ effect from lights. Well spotlights are great for this and really add a ‘sparkle’ to the shots. Whenever I see alot of spotlights like these I shoot around f11 which gives me a nice look. Another reason I see a tripod as a necessity.

Just thought I’d put this one in too as I love the heater on the left which basically heats this room and the livingroom (which you can see through to!). As usual the owner of the house was really nice and we had a fun shoot. Susan might kill me for posting the next pic but I think it’s great and shows her sense of humour :)

For this shot we had a shoot through brolly high camera right and used a fairly long shutter speed to let the ambient behind Susan soak up. Exif for this is: 20s f4.5 50m(f1.8) ISO 200.

Have another food shoot coming up next week as well as a couple of house shoots so will pop a couple of shots up when I can!

Cheers
Ian :)

I want that kitchen!

2009-04-30T16:08:00.001-07:00

I did a house shoot for Home Plus Scotland (HPS) the other day and I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw the kitchen. It was just so spacious and, like the rest of the house, beautiful! This has to be one of my fave kitchens so far from all the ones I’ve snapped.

It was quite a bright day and so the sun has burned away some of the detail in the above shot. The table in particular has suffered even though I was careful with the exposure so as not to nuke the floor. Still, in an ideal world I would have had an extra hour (or ten!) to set up some flashes to light the interior.

However, I only had two hours to get round the whole house and so I didn’t really have time to set up flashes etc. I’m still quite happy with the natural light though and as this is going into the Summer issue of HPS I thought a bit of bright sun would fit the bill nicely.

Here’s a couple more shots…

I was a bit worried about the top of the bath burning out but there’s actually plenty of detail left in it. A great reason to always shoot RAW, there’s so much more detail left in the files even when you think it’s burned out.

This one looks quite nice in black & white but unfortunately black & white is quite hard to fit into an otherwise colour editorial layout. I think you need to have a black & white theme in the article for it to work. Strange really, but one black & white shot in an article full of colour shots just doesn’t look right to me.

Rather like this wee detail shot. The owners like their animals and there were a couple of these beautiful brown leather chairs around so I thought this gave a nice ‘flavour’ of the house and its owners.

Had another shoot today in a really cool house but off on hols over the weekend so wont process the pics until next week.

Hope anyone reading this has a nice holiday weekend too.
Cheers
Ian

Group Shoot!

2009-04-27T16:30:00.001-07:00

Well we had another fun group shoot on Sunday thanks to Tom and everyone else who came along. Tom had found a cool location and I think we got a lot of great shots out of it. I think it’d be a great place for a car shoot but unfortunately we’d need a helicopter to get it in there :(

So here’s a few of my shots from the day and I’ll try to get a link or a copy of the group shot as it was cool :)

One more big thanks to everyone who came along, in particular Kayleigh and Charlie who braved the broken glass and dead birds to make some really great pictures.

Cheers
Ian

Post Processing

2009-04-25T13:52:00.001-07:00

Been meaning to put up this post for a while since I’ve been asked on Flickr by a few people about a Post Processing technique I’ve been using a lot for portraits.

The picture above has been processed using a black & white layer technique that just seems to work for certain pictures. It’s quite a basic technique and so anyone can try it as long as they understand how to use layers in photoshop.

I basically start with my TIFF file which has been converted from my RAW, then I duplicate the layer and create a black & white version of it. I find that a slightly more contrasty version works best. Then I change the layer’s blending mode to ‘soft light’. ‘Overlay’ can work if you want a much stronger effect but I prefer the ‘soft light’ mode. I then usually lower the opacity a touch until the image looks good

I like the de-saturated look and the almost cinematic ‘feel’ it gives a portrait image. It also tends to work if there’s some slightly over-exposed skin which can be quite complimentary in a portrait. It definitely doesn’t work on all images but it’s just another handy tool!

For comparison here’s the same image but with a ‘normal’ post process applied…

I always end up de-saturating portraits as, even in the ‘Neutral’ or ‘Portrait’ settings my D300 is still a bit strong on the colours.

Cheers
Ian

New website finally

2009-04-15T15:47:00.001-07:00

I’m in no way shape or form a web designer. I have problems doing this blog sometimes!! ALWAYS forget to change the font before I post. Anyway, I thought this was blog worthy because I’ve not only finally got my revamped website up but I’ve also linked in this blog. I like the idea of having a frequently updated element to a website which itself might only be updated once or twice a month with new pics etc.

So follow this link to see the wonders of my website design :) Oh aye and I’ve also emailed Zack Arias about a critique since I’ve applied what I’ve learned from watching his critique videos, although he must have thousands of similar emails so I wont hold my breath, but if anyone else has any comments whatsoever they would be mucho appreciated.

Cheers
Ian

[edit] font DOH!

location location loc…in print.

2009-04-15T14:55:00.001-07:00

Just a wee post as our mag comes back from the printers tomorrow so I’m ok to post this now, I’m sure the editor Leah wont mind me jumping the gun a bit. I thought, since I blogged about this portrait at the time I would put up the actual page. I’m quite chuffed at how it’s turned out, Paul and Leah have done a good job of the layout.

Was wondering the other day if I now automatically compose pics for editorial use. I like negative space and it fits in with rule of thirds and all that, but I don’t want to end up taking the same compositions all the time.

I suppose we all fall into ruts from time to time!

Cheers
Ian

The Flashy Pad…

2009-04-15T14:27:00.001-07:00

Whoops, a few very busy weeks have got in the way of the blog, tut tut. Anyway, I had meant to post this as a wee follow up to my previous post. The image above is one of those where I prefer the natural light blowing out the windows. This is partly due to the view being a mix between a building site and views of a rival house builder’s development ;) It’s also partly due to the cool looking lights in this room. I liked the reflections I was getting but if I used a faster shutter speed to get the views outside in I lost the nice reflections and the warmth that the lamps gave the room. You can see this in the pic below…

While the sky looks nice the room looks colder and not as inviting. The lamps and main light are still on but the exposure is for the outside, while I have 2 flashes lighting the interior. I also had problems with even coverage, partly due to the configuration of the room and partly due to the colour of the walls. Had they been white then it would have been easier to get an even bounced light. Still, I much prefered the natural light shot.

In the following pics I was faced with a brightly sunlit room on one side and a dark en-suite bathroom on the other. There were also bright ‘stripes’ across the bed and walls that burned out when I exposed for the room in general. I used 2 flashes in opposite corners of the room so I could use a faster shutter speed and to stop the sunlight burning out detail in the bed. I then had to stick the vivitar 285 in the bathroom to bring it up to the same level.

First, 2 flashes behind the cam into the roof joints, and a balanced exposure to retain detail in the sun lit areas…

Then with a flash in the bathroom…

And finally a wee shot showing again how you can bring in the sky. This one looks like a photoshop gradient but it isn’t, it’s just one exposure using 3 flashes…

Cheers
Ian

The Flashy Pad continued…

2009-04-04T15:19:00.001-07:00

I had a job a couple of weeks ago for one of my house builder clients to photograph some showhouses for them. It was a lovely sunny day which is great for the beach, but obviously not so great for photography. I had sun streaming in from the windows producing high contrast scenes everywhere. Of course it looks great to the naked eye, but if only they could make a camera with the same dynamic range as a human eye!!

Anyway, I resorted to using my flashes as I usually do in these situations. As you can see from the left image above, which was taken with just natural light, the sunlight was causing me to get burned out highlights in the floor and had a blue cast since I was using auto white balance (shooting RAW of course!). The image on the right was created using three flashes: 1 hand held behind me bouncing into the roof, a second in a stand in the kitchen pointing backwards again bouncing into the roof joint and a third in the living room at the end of the hall bouncing into the wall.

The image on the left was 1/5s at f8 while the right hand one with the flashes was 1/60th at f8. Using a 60th of a sec shutter speed meant that the hall light didn’t really register which is why I cut it out of the composition.

Here’s another flashy pad pic…

This one is a matter of preference I think. I prefer the image on the right as I think it shows the colour of the floor and cabinets more accurately, but the one on the left isn’t without it’s merits. I also wanted to bring in the blue sky and so basically exposing for the outside and lighting the interior with the flashes enabled me to do just that. I think I only used one flash in the kitchen, bounced off the wall of course. Bouncing off a wall turns the wall into the light source and so, since it’s a (relatively) bigger light source, it’s a softer light source therefore giving softer shadows.

Again, a matter of preference. Sometimes overpowering the ambient can take away some of the warmth of an image. I almost lean towards the natural light version of this one but I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because it’s a livingroom and the streaming sun looks more inviting. Not sure, but again I used three flashes for this one, all bounced into the roof joints. The bigger the room the harder it is to light with just a few flashes and you start to get harder shadows. Having white walls to work with does help alot though. I just put the flashes on their widest settings and lowered the stands a little to get more coverage.

Basically, if you have to use a small flash for an interior and want softer shadows then the golden rule is to bounce bounce bounce! ‘Because bouncin is what us photogafurs does bestest doncha know!’ (Ok, watching too much Winnie the Pooh with my wee boy!!)

I have a couple of other pics to post where I definitely prefer the natural light but I’ll leave that for another post as it’s getting late and I’m working all weekend!!

Cheers
Ian

Group Shoot

2009-03-31T16:01:00.001-07:00

Had a great group shoot kindly arranged by Adam a couple of weeks ago. I’m just getting around to processing the last of the pics since it’s been a pretty hectic couple of weeks for me. Had a shoot of some sort every day for six days running so I had a mountain of PP work to do. Really must streamline my workflow!!

Anyway, here’s a wee slideshow of the pics processed so far. We were a bit photographer heavy (more togs than mods that is, not too many heavy togs, although…) so I missed out on some of the other models but I was lucky enough to fit in a shoot in an underground car park with Zoe who is just a complete natural in front of the camera!

Really enjoyed it and looking forward to the next one, kindly being arranged by Tom…

If you click through to my Flickr page you can get a full screen slideshow with better resolution.

Cheers
Ian

Location location loc…

2009-03-28T17:29:00.001-07:00

It’s been a mad week with a shoot of some sort every day since last Sunday! It’s been good though as my new year’s resolution this year was to shoot more. So far so good!

Had a job on to photograph a portrait for a full page regular feature (Artist Focus) that we run. The brief was to get an ‘edgy’ portrait (thanks Leah!!). However, I went into this one blind as I hadn’t had time to see the location or do any research on it. When I arrived I found a very nice but very small shop. Plus the subject was in the middle of fulfilling a large order so could only give me around half an hour!

Luckily, I noticed that the panels of fabrics and paper at the sides of the shop were on runners and could slide out into the middle of the room. We pulled a few colourful ones out and placed a cool chair in front of them so the subject would be nicely framed. Since the shop had large windows that were right behind me I had to stop down to f7.1 to darken the rest of the shop. I also had to use the 10-20 at around 18 to get the framing I wanted. I wouldn’t normally use this lens for portraits but I used my spirit level hotshoe thingy to get it dead straight which helps with the distortions.

I set up a flash with a grid on it to camera right pointed at the subject’s face but I think I need a tighter grid as it spilled out a touch more than I wanted. I also set up another flash behind the chair pointed to the right at the red panel to keep some colour in that part of the frame. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a lensbaby so I thought I’d try getting the effect in PS and the shot at the top of this post is the result. Here’s a copy without the processing…

And here’s a wee shot showing it without the lighting…

Have to admit I was a bit nervous going into this job with no idea of the place but it certainly teaches you to think on your feet. I had a back-up idea for a nice black & white shot in the alley next door but unfortunately we didn’t have time.

I’ve a couple more posts to stick up soon, including a few pics from Adam’s great group shoot last weekend. I just haven’t had time to process many of the pics this week!

Cheers
Ian

The good, the bad and the tasty

2009-03-19T18:00:00.001-07:00

The Good…

Had a good day today. Normally when I do the recipe shots for work it’s either a drive into Edinburgh or Glasgow and a battle to find decent parking not too far away from the restaurant. But for this issue I had to head oop north a ways to a wee place near Aberfoyle. Wow it’s beautiful up there and I kept taking mental notes of places to head back to on a day off.

The tasty…

This was a slow roasted venison stew that smelled fantastic. Stupid me turned down a bowl as I was in a hurry to pack up :(

I can’t post any of the recipes here but once we have our new website up at work we’ll be posting all the recipes from previous editions so I’ll post the link when it’s up.

The bad…

Here’s a wee set-up shot of the ‘sweet’ at the top of the post…

I had the flash set up to add a bit of sparkle to the dishes. I usually point the brolly away so as to feather the light a bit and further soften any shadows. Tbh I found the corner of this cool table to have some really nice natural light and so the flash’s addition to the exposure was minimal at best. I used a combo of 50 1.8 and a 150 2.8 macro which is my normal kit for food shots.

I know proper studio food shots blow mine out of the water (soup?) but I never have that much time or space, nor can I ask for more than one dish to be made. It’d be great to get one for getting the light right then a fresh one to shoot. As you can imagine, when the sweet comes out I have a few mins to get the best shots. At the very least it’s a good exercise in quickly scouting out a location for good backgrounds/tables/lighting. You’d be surprised how many great places have crappy looking tables. I was lucky today as this one worked well. Still, this shoot took almost two hours in total! Also had to get shots of the chef etc

Such a nice place with nice people, I’ll def be taking the family up there sometime soon! Once this has been in the mag I’ll put up a wee post with the layout and links to the place etc etc.

Cheers
Ian

Flashy pad

2009-03-13T15:42:00.001-07:00

Had a tricky wee job in Glasgow this week. As some of the feedback we've received at work asked us to feature some smaller homes, our editor opted for a cool flat in the centre of Glasgow. It was tricky because of the smaller rooms with large windows. It was a really bright day outside (unusual for Glasgow I know!) so when exposing for the interior I was getting so much over-exposure in the windows that I was getting flare which not only robbed the image of contrast but also of detail in the lovely wooden flooring.

I've been using flash for interiors more and more recently to keep at least some detail in the windows. It's tricky though (well it is for me) because you really can't just flash the room straight on as you'll get horrible shadows from ornaments or fireplaces, or really anything in the room. Obviously bouncing is the answer but this can introduce colour casts depending on the colours of the walls. I tend to bounce into ceiling joints or corners and in this instance I had 2 white walls and a white ceiling I could use so after messing around with the setup I managed to get the shadows just where I wanted them.

One great place to learn about interiors is this flickr group. It's mainly large US houses but the members give great feedback and quite a few still use multiple flashes to get an even exposure rather than succumb to the use of HDR. I never seem to get an image I like using HDR for interiors, and whenever I end up looking at a pic and thinking 'wow' it always turned out to have been done using flashes. See, David Hobby hasn't only helped my portraits but also my interiors!!

For example, for this first shot I exposed for the outside as I wanted the blue sky and the tower to be visible and I used a shoot through brolly for the subject (a really sound guy actually). I’d have preferred to use a gridded flash on this portrait and perhaps one raking across the blinds, but we didn’t have the time as I knew I’d have to wrestle with the flashes for the interiors.

For the livingroom I used two bare flashes bounced behind me into ceiling joints. I wanted a smaller aperture to get a nice sharp image so the flashes were working hard at around half or full power, I can't remember exactly now. I asked if we could have the telly on since a blank panel of grey is never very purdy and luckily we found Top Gear (not hard as it’s always on Dave). As our subject is into his cars and has a really cool one himself it was perfect. I snapped a few then saw this Lambo and made sure I got one with it in. It think it works pretty well and having met the subject I think it’s pretty appropriate :)

Have a location food shoot on Thursday next week and then a strobist group shoot at the weekend so that should be good!
Cheers
Ian

Cramond shoot with Kayleigh

2009-03-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

Had a good shoot on Saturday with a new model, Kayleigh. Despite horrible weather we came away with quite a few really really nice pictures. A friend of mine, Leah, came along to help with styling and Kayleigh’s partner David helped out with lighting. It was a group effort and it was worth it.

Cramond Island is a great location if you can get the weather and the low tide times right. I thought we were going to be lucky since sunset was 6 and we could get to the island a couple of hours before that so I had planned on dropping the ambient easily by a couple of stops and getting some wide angle shots of Kayleigh on the walkway, but alas it was P'ing down and bloody windy too!

We ended up shooting round the back of one of the old sub defense bollards but we used the wind to our advantage :) Also, I used a bit more harsh light that I normally do. Since using a brolly might mean someone taking off and ending up in Leith I opted for a gridded flash and it worked really well. I also found that it worked great for B&W conversions. But I also found that my Cactus triggers aren't as reliable as I thought they were. Bring on the UK radiopopper please!!

Minus 3 photography

2009-03-05T02:20:00.000-08:00

We had a nice clear night last night so we headed up to a wee car park at the top of Livingston to try and get some night shots of my friend's car. I had wanted to go for a series of 30s exposures over the course of an hour so I could stack them into not only a cool picture but also a time lapse movie. Unfortunately we didn't quite have enough time (or body warmth) to last that long and we were having so much fun trying out light painting that we decided to treat this as a test.

I can see the final shot I want in my head and I now know it's possible. I think it's even worth losing a finger or two to frostbite!

So here's a couple of pics. The first was around the 2 and a half minutes exposure mark at f5.6 ISO200. I was using the 10-20 lens. The second was about the 4 and a half minute mark because I'd stopped down to about f8 to get the 'star' effect on the flashes. I just obviously walked around the car with the flash on a light stand (to keep the height similar). I was taking two big steps each flash to try and get the spacing even.

The light in the sky isn't sunset, it's the distant lights of either Livingston or Edinburgh. You could see the faint yellow glow with the naked eye and it just burned in nicely during the exposure. It was enough to add interest but not too much to flare out the stars. Also, for the first picture we used a shoot through brolly and basically popped it about 5 times around the car during the exposure. The brolly gives it a softer look as does 'layering' it by using multiple lower power 'pops'. I think we used 1/4 power on the SB600.

We're quite pleased with how these turned out and will be going back to try the full shoot very soon :) Have to say thanks to Paul for braving the cold and the late night :)

See these bigger on my flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32978793@N05/

or smugmug
http://imonk.smugmug.com/gallery/1489634_LaqVq#P-3-20

Cheers
Ian

Rained off AGAIN!

2009-03-03T14:22:00.001-08:00

Looks like I've been foiled by the weather again. Had hoped to get out and try some star trails/car photos tonight. It was looking fine but then the rain started just like it did last night and now it's chucking it down.

Thought I'd post a recent photo anyway even if it's just of my gorgeous wee boy. We were out in Edinburgh at the weekend and I'm always amazed at how many people you see walking through the gardens with digital cams, especially dslrs. i think it's great that so many people are into photography, digital is just so accessible! The only problem is it's getting harder and harder to be original. I saw about 5 or 6 people all bending down trying to get macros of the tulips!! So Ben decided to try something a bit different, he picked one, tut tut.

Anyway, if all goes to plan I should be able to try some star trails at some point over the next few nights and have a shoot booked for Saturday so I should have some more stuff to post soon.

Cheers
Ian

2009-02-26T12:57:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to do something a bit different to the normal stuff I do at work. I was helping a friend with a car magazine he's putting together for a car club he's in. It's amazing to me that you can google 'photoshop bullet hole tutorial' and get loads of hits! (no pun intended).

Anyway, I'm not sure if I went a bit OTT with the red splodges but it was fun.

We're planning a night car shoot soon as I'd like to try and leave the shutter open for some star trails while popping a couple of flashes on the car. Just need to find a cool location.

For a while I've been wanting to try out some different styles and while car photography will be fun what I really want to try to achieve is a more 'lifestyle/advertising' look. I'm a huge fan of Nick Onken's work. It has a certain modern vibrant look about it that I love and wow is he not afraid of any flare. He uses it brilliantly :) So I'm a happy snapper tonight because I just found this link www.nickonken.com/Stories It's the page with all his 'stories' on it, basically photo stories of the places he's been and some of his shoots. There's so much inspiration here for anyone interested in his style of shooting.

I'm hoping to get some lifestyle shoots booked up soon but first I need to find a location that you can drive a car into, has a fantastic backdrop and has a chip shop close by! South Queensferry anyone?

Cheers
Ian

2009-02-25T16:08:00.001-08:00

Hello and welcome to the first post on my brand new blog. What do people generally talk about on their first blog? I've no idea. I just hope this will be a positive experience for me by giving me further encouragement to get out and take more pictures.

I generally take interiors and some portraits for editorial purposes and while I enjoy that and want to constantly improve, I'd also like to branch out into more 'lifestyle' and possibly fashion work.

I'm hoping that this blog will be a place where I can follow my own progress and lay out any thoughts I have on the way. Perhaps someone else will find it useful in some way but even if I'm talking to myself I think it'll still be worth it :)

I'll be doing something I've been thinking about for a while. I'll be posting up some of my earlier pictures and comparing them with more recent stuff. I'm a big fan of David Hobby's 'Strobist' site from which I've learned loads about lighting for portrait and that one site has improved my pictures no end.

I also still love landscape photography but having a wee boy of 3 and a half doesn't leave me as much time to get out and do it so hopefully I'll use this blog as an incentive to get out and make a little time to take some new pics.

So I thought I'd post an older picture just now that I'm actually fairly happy with. It's of the Forth Bridges taken a few years ago as a test for my then new Sigma 10-20 lens.

Cheers
Ian