Truffle trouble!

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’

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

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!

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!

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!

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.

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