Sussex Photographer Bernie Greene scratching out a tune while trying not to fall off the roof

room pano

This is an experimental picture of one of the more exotic rooms at ARTS House in Sharpthorne. It was made for day 32 of the 365 but never got posted.

I have decided to stop the 365 after 76 days. I loved doing it and it did me a lot of good creatively but it was also distracting me far too much from my business as a photographer.

One thing I found detrimental about it was that I am not a good instant editor. Editing is a very different hat to image making. Both are important. I found my editing job was suffering because of the daily deadline. To edit correctly I need at least 24 hours to go by after a shoot before I put on the editor’s hat. There were many times in the 365 when I made a bunch of shots and chose one that looked good at the time only to find a day or so later there was a much better one I had overlooked. This is obviously not good for clients or promotion of my work.

But I still want to post more or less daily. Well there are a lot of pictures that haven’t had an audience purely because they were made in the past that can now have that audience. The picture above for example.

This was made about 6 weeks ago as an experiment. I wanted to see if distortion was a necessarily “bad thing”. The cheap kit lens that came with my camera creates distortion at wide angles that other, more expensive, lenses I have don’t. Lines that are meant to be straight come out bent to a slight degree. I don’t use it when straight lines are important but that isn’t that often and I still like and frequently use the kit lens. But the above pic was distorted in a different and far more exagerated way.

This image is made up of nine seperate images using a relatively long focal length instead of one wide angle shot. The nine images were then “stiched” together with specialist and very time consuming software.  The software is called Hugin and you can get it for free on the internet if you want to have a play with it.

sun on wall

The blinds weren’t completely drawn and a little bit of sunshine made it through into my world today. Never mind. I’ll be making sure the blinds are fully closed tomorrow in case it happens again.

Gary Byrne

Sometimes being a geezer and a photographer is tough. As a photographer I think this guy is really good looking but as a geezer it just isn’t something I would openly admit. Such is life. Mr Byrne came to ARTS House today to meet someone. While he was waiting I grabbed about three minutes with him in the studio. We made eight shots. Any one of those eight could have been the chosen one. In the end I narrowed it down to two; the one above where he looks kind of like a good guy and another where he most certainly looked like a bad guy. It was a toss up. I chose this one mainly because I usually would have chosen the other.

So what of the 365 you ask. Well it’s back. Sort of. I like the project far too much to just drop it but I’m not going to continue it with subjects that aren’t really my bag. So if I don’t get to shoot someone or something that I want to shoot then I won’t post one for that day. It is still a 365 project but it might take 465 days to complete.

The project has a lot of value to me personally but it was becoming too expensive to maintain. It has already achieved a purpose I didn’t have for it which is to show me where my main interests are. These happily coincide with what I want to trade. But there have been many days where I was shooting stuff for the project that was not the kind of thing I want to trade. So I had some choices to make. I didn’t want to be posting stuff on my main website that I didn’t want to be shooting professionally. And I didn’t really want to start posting the 365 stuff somewhere else after having started it here. So the above is a workable compromise for me.

Pushing It

Alex Pownall doing a push up from a session today shot at the gym at the East Grinstead Rugby Club. Obvious really. Don’t know why I bothered with an explanation.

Blue 2

Continuing my “blue period” we have this offering made after watching half of Sin City. Shot with three strobes two of which were gelled with blue and red. The third was really only used for firing one of the others that was slaved.  I’m seriously impressed with how cool I can make the old rubber face look.

The Lemonade Cookie

A cookie (or cookaloris to give it it’s full name) is something placed between a light source and the surface that light is intended to fall on. It’s purpose is to make the light more interesting by introducing shapes for the light to pass through. The above pic is a demonstration using a glass of lemonade. Usually the lemonade would not be included in the picture.

The above is intended to eliminate any snarky remarks about little things and little minds.

Note also that this lemonade is Shweppes Lemonade. It probably wouldn’t be as good with a cheaper brand.

Petroula

Did a headshot session today for Petroula Kaneti-Dimmer. The above was my favourite. Just got through editing.

Headshot sessions are interesting but I have discovered they are not the same as portrait sessions and the end results might be very different. With headshots my own likes and dislikes don’t come into it. They are made for a specific audience the actor wants to communicate with. My job is to help the actor communicate and to keep myself out of the way as much as possible. So I don’t do anything that would in any way render the sitter unrecognisable! The only processing is contrast and colour tweaks and a black and white conversion which is the accpeted form in this country.

With portrait sessions it is me who is communicating something about the subject to the viewer rather than just being a relay point. Portrait sessions are more fun for me and usually the sitter too. With headshots there is a certain amount of wondering what will work for the casting directors who aren’t there to consult.

With portraits I please myself first and hopefully but not necessarily the sitter too. But we are both there and can discuss the point and look at the current results and see if we are heading in the right direction. I want my sitters to like my work but it isn’t absolutely vital because if they chose me to shoot them they have a pretty good idea of what they’ll be getting. And if they didn’t choose me then I chose them and so may be only shooting for me anyway.

It is true I will not make any money if the sitter hates the work but I’m finding that if I consult the sitter more than myself we both end up with results that are less interesting.

The reason I like this one is that it is closer to a portrait than the others I shot today. And by that I mean that it shows Petroula in a way I would like to show Petroula.

I wonder if this post made any sense to anyone other than me….

Linnie

Last time Linnie stayed at ARTS House near East Grinstead she was subjected to this. So this time when she asked for something a little more becoming of her I had to oblige. This is a somewhat truer likeness.

Guru Rob

One of a set of three pictures for a website made today. The eye is a bit better today. Thanks for asking. What d’ya mean you didn’t ask?

Watching

Yes this is late. It was shot at about 11:00pm last night and processed immeditaely. At the time of the shoot my right eye was streaming tears. With every flash it was like a needle poking around in my eye. Somewhat nasty. Then I had to remove said tears in Photoshop. This was very hard as I could only see out of one eye. By the time I finished I couldn’t look at bright areas of the screen so I decided to not try and get it uploaded till today. The eye is still painful and streaming but not as bad as last night.

Not asking for sympathy here just letting you know the dedication I’m giving this project!

I’ve been asked how I manage to compose these shots. Well it isn’t as hard as it might seem. I pretty much know what I’m after before I set up so I set up to get what I’m after. I think that is the secret of all photography.

So here I have the camera on a tripod and the lousy model in a chair. Before the camera is mounted I focus on the tripod from the chair and roughly set the frame size (I’m using an 18-70mm lens here). Then I set the lights. Then I make some test shots and adjust position and lights accordingly.

For this shot I wanted the background to be dark. There was a room light on so the flash I was using had to be set to a high enough level to completely overpower the room light. The flash output was restricted by a snoot which meant the light would be in a tight beam. So I had to sit where I could see the flash knowing that if I can see the flash then the flash can see me too.  I also wanted the hat down over the streaming red right eye. This is also totally uncropped. What you see in the picture is exactly what the camera saw. So now you know how it doesn’t seem quite so remarkable eh?

Bram

Not Stoker, although he does have some similar characteristics such as getting a bit flappy late at night. No this is Bram whose surname I don’t know. But he is a Dutchman currently staying at ARTS House near Sharpthorne and thus has fallen victim to my way with a camera.

First CS/5 Pic

Working on that Bogey grimace.

Back to shooting the same lousy model again. Sorry about that. But hey. This was processed using Photoshop CS/5. Not that there’s any difference from what would have been produced in CS/3 as I didn’t use any of the new features. There is some processing but what you see was mostly done in camera.

Bond Bad Babe

Another from the session with Barbara Lanik on Wednesday. Note this is not a 365. It is nearly 9:30pm and I still haven’t got that done yet. I was thinking if I post this I might be let off but that won’t cut it so I’m going to have to find a shot somewhere somehow with someone. It’s gonna be hard to match this so don’t get your expectations too high!

Saying Goodbye

I’ve been working flat out proceesing all the images from the session on Wednesday with Barabara Lanik. This is from that session too so it isn’t a real 365 shot. That means I’ve failed. Wanna make somethin’ of it?

I’m really happy with the images we got on Wednesday. Barbara is so easy to work with. It felt like she could see the shots from my viewpoint. She worked really hard for nearly eight hours.

Barbara

This is Barbara who acts, sings and models and who lives in West Sussex. Today we worked together for about 8 hours and made several like this and others with a little film noir flavour. I love the pinup pictures of the ’40s and ’50s and so does she so we had a lot of fun dreaming them up and getting them done.

Pretty Blossoms

Trees with blossom on the West Hoathly Road near East Grinstead in Sussex. A nice peaceful scene. Hard to imagine the b*****d who drove by so close as to almost knock me down as I crouched at the side of the road to get this.

Pupak

Forest Row artist Pupak Haghighi-Brinch. This is the second session with Pupak. I could do many more.

I wrote some time ago about shooting portraits and at the time I pondered the idea of making one ultimate image that would be the last word on that particular person. Today that idea seems even more ridiculous to me than I thought at the time of that writing. There are so many people I could spend hours shooting just because I like them as people and want to make interesting pictures of them. Part of it is making pictures and another part is getting to know someone.

London Bus (RM Type)

Fortunately I had a meeting in East Grinstead today. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have known about this bus being there in the old High Street. There were a bunch of different vintage busses and a larger bunch of enthusiasts taking pictures and buying toy busses and postcards.

I love these busses. They remind me of an age sadly gone from England when the people themselves were responsible for their own health and safety. And I of course love this particular bus for the ads.

Hillary

Hillary is a teacher. She is staying at ARTS House for the weekend up from Devon. At first she approached the sitting with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the dentist. So we chatted about teaching and football for a bit and she relaxed considerably and I got this which I’m really pleased with. I hope she will be too.

I processed it to adjust the palette and contrast

Chair

You might not believe this but this pic took about 5 hours to make. If I had set out to make the image above it would have taken maybe half an hour. But this is in fact a failure. Of great magnitude.

I had set out to make an experiment. It was to be an image that would have allowed you to zoom into it and move around in a similar way to how you can zoom in and move around with Google Earth or Google satelite maps. It began with 23 separate images. But I won’t bore you with the whole story. Suffice to say that Photoshop crashed several times in trying to merge those images properly and that in my haste to get an image up I selected the preview jpg images instead of the raw files to get the job done. The preview images were only a fraction of the size of the originals and so it turned out to be far too small for zooming around in.

But I still like it. I made a painting in 1988 that was very similar. I can now add chairs to my extremely short list of things I love to shoot. So the list now consists of people and chairs. I’m sure someone will see a connection even if I don’t.

trampling corn

Went for a walk with Aled and Rosie in Turners Hill today. He wanted to trample over the farmer’s crop so I got this as evidence.

Dude Let's go bowling

I was in Tescos in Forest Row and saw these skittles. For some reason they called to me so I bought them. Then when the person I had wanted to shoot today didn’t get back to me in time I thought “Let’s go bowling Dude”. Seemed appropriate at the time.

ice pie

25 Cents isn’t bad eh?

Susanne Lawrence

Susanne Lawrence is an artist who lives somewhere between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells.

Sarah and Rebecca

I was just testing how the camera worked when tethered to a TV. Sarah and Rebecca are always up for a shot and I liked the result. So there.

Count Baron Von Alucard

This is a portrait of my father the Count Baron Von Alucard. You can find out more about him on his website.

7 hours looking at this

Thanks to those who wondered what had happened to me for the last three days. I’m happy to say I’m alive and survived them.

Friday night was not that interesting. I set off from East Grinstead at around 6:00pm on my way to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. This is a journey of around 60 miles which normally takes an hour and a half at worst. This was not to be a normal at worst occassion. I came to the rear of the jam above at around 6:30pm and moved about 1 mile in the next 7 hours.

I got to my parents’ house at about 2:30 and would have made this post then had I remembered to bring my laptop power cable. Without the cable I couldn’t edit or post as I can connect with my blog only via the laptop as that is the only place I had the password saved.

So the lesssons learned in this experience;

1. It is always a good idea to have at least enough fuel to complete your journey.

2. It is always a good idea to have some snacks of some kind hidden away in the car somewhere. (I didn’t)

3. It would not have been bearable without an mp3 player.

Liz Lets Loose

Yesterday you saw Liz on one of her few and far between better days. Today I’m aftraid she reverted to form after drinking some camomile tea.

And today is day 50 of the project. It has gone remarkably fast. I’m very glad I started the project. It has so far been the very best creativity exercise I’ve ever done. I am much more familiar with my kit and with the whole process of image making. It is amazing how fast I can now go from the idea to the shot in the can. I can place lights and get their settings right in about the same time a waiter can lay a table with cutlery. Well maybe a little slower but not that much.

I have learnt many things in the last 50 days. One of which is that I am pretty much uninspired by inanimate objects. I can shoot them but I have to work at it. Whereas with people it comes very easily.

I have also found that scenes are a lot of fun. Noir lighting is great fun. Lighting on two or more planes in the picture gives great depth and separation of image elements. I often like to restrict the colour palette and go for comic book type images.

If you’re a shooter and have wondered about doing a 365 but haven’t I can heartily recommend it.

Edit: Just found out that 48/365 was chosen as 1 out of 2 favourites for the month on the Digital Photo Experience blog. The guys that run that blog are way up there so this is a pretty cool thing for me. You can see the post here.

The Flower

Liz wanted a picture showing this plant that had suddenly flowered after years of not flowering. I wanted to do more lighting on different planes similar to yesterday’s shot of Dave Press. This was the result.

Dave Press

Dave Press is an amazing guitarist.  I am proud to say that this is the first shot of a series I will be making over the coming weeks that will amount to the first of my unusual local people projects. The idea of the project is to create a feature type profile of local people that interest me.

This picture wasn’t shot in the store room of the local guitar shop but in Dave’s living room. He has quite a collection that aren’t all shown here. But more interesting than his collection is his playing. He is a virtuoso in many genres of music. Go check out his website or better still catch him live.

Wolfgang

We had just done a fairly standard, safe, profile portrait and then I switched the lighting and props around so as to get this. Quite like it.

Pupak Haghighi-Brinch

This is Pupak. A very interesting lady who got a group of local artists in the Ashdown Forest area together and helped them form a group to facilitate collaboration and help each other with marketing and such. We met today and had a talk about how we might help each other. There will quite possibly be more to come on this in the coming weeks.  Then we made some pictures. This is one of my favourites.

Leaving The Scene

Conceived and lit in about three minutes. Then about 45 minutes to process. Some people think it all happens in a snap.

Crumpet

I was advised that if I wanted to get more readers then this was what I had to do.

Today’s picture was a hard one to come up with. I’ve found more and more that I am easily inspired to shoot people or dogs and possibly other critters but other things are very hard work. I had no one else around and I didn’t want to use myself again, even though I had a recent shot featured on Don Giannatti’s site again (thnks a lot Don).

So there I was without an idea and thinking that I just did not want to do this today…. but I am committed to doing it. So I knew I had to. So I had to come up with something. The result isn’t exactly as I had conceived it. I might have got there after a couple of hours but it had already taken about 30 minutes to get this. It is very difficult to get a playing card in just the right spot as the flash fires. This was about the 100th attempt and was the best I had.

And there is a lesson here. I know that if this was for a client I would have continued on until I got it perfect. Or I would have figured out another way to get it perfect. It wasn’t so I didn’t. But maybe I shoulda…

Cards in the Hat

There is nothing, although freshly ground coffee comes close, that is quite like the smell of a humidor full of quality cigars.

Smoker's Porn

Saw Max today. He begged me for another portrait. I eventually gave in. Then he spent an hour and a half in make-up and another hour getting his hair just right.

At the end of that he was so excited he just wouldn’t keep still. So I told him to meditate on the meaning of his life. After about 15 minutes he settled into a contemplative mood.

We exchanged some thoughts on philosophy and then listened tothe radio for a bit. We heard about the election being announced today and Gordon Brown saying “the future is within our grasp”. Max was immediately gripped with the profoundness of this thought. And I got this.

"The future is within our grasp"

Bogie Man

Had to be done. What else can I say?

Selma is a guest in East Grinstead from Holland. Her mother recently featured here and her father may do as well some time soon.

Selma

The family are staying at the best guest house in the East Grinstead area, ARTS House, which also just happens to be where I live.

The shot was made with an SB24 flash at camera left. It was snooted and aimed at the side of her face. The window at camera right provided the fill. There was some work in photoshop to limit the palette and bring out the colours.

At Desk

Look I know what yer thinkin’ but I had to do it. Every time I have a pic of myself the stats go up and for the last few days they had dipped. What d’yer mean what stats? The site visit and subscription stats. Would I lie to you?

Okay. Well even though I spent a good part of the day with a beautiful female model in East Grinstead all we did was talk and plan some shoots while all my gear was no more than 100 yards away in my car. There are some very interesting shoots coming up.

I know promises promises. But you’ll see. Really you will.

Promise Of Spring

Weather still quite cold in Sussex but there are signs of spring all around.  Spotted these along the A22 today between East Grinstead and Forest Row. Actually there are lots of them around but these were nearby to where I could park up.

I wanted to have them backlit and ideally without having to setup light stands and flashes but the sun was behind clouds. It was too cold to stand around and wait so I decided to sit around and wait in the car. Only took about two minutes and the sun was poking through.

I love the brightness and enthusiasm of those yellows.

If you are an East Grinstead resident you are probably familiar with this place on West Street. In fact you are probably one of the many reasons I have to queue whenever I go there. I think it is one of the best fish and chip shops in the country and I’ve sampled quite a few.

the fish and chip shop

Very close to the East Grinstead Rubgy Club lives a man who, well, let’s just say lives a man called Andy. I want to keep this site family safe.

Andy

This is what you get when you when you push your luck. I’ve been shooting the two guys on the left for months. Tonight I wanted to play with panos a bit more. I was firing the camera with the 10 second timer and didn’t bother to check what I had till I processed the images. These guys were trying to have a private meeting and I had just interrupted them. The pano wasn’t that interesting but there was something about the bunny ears joke that amused me.

Bunny Ears

tomas and car

I wanted to test the new noise reduction capabilities of Lightroom 3.2 and this was partly for that purpose. Shot at 1600 iso then processed first in Lightroom and then in Photoshop. The NR is amazing. Truly amazing.

In other news my previous post about editing a shoot is coming back to haunt me. In that post I wrote about coming back to the pictures from a session at least a week after they were shot so as to be able to stand back and get a more objective look at them. Doing this I can often see shots that worked that I had previously overlooked. Well by the same process you can also see shots that don’t work. I think yesterday’s was one of them. Adding Max to the picture did not help it and should not have been done. Wondering about an aspect of a picture is part of what keeps a viewer interested so providing an answer to a viewer’s question isn’t always a good thing.

Tomas and Max

This was an experiment. The main idea was to shoot the scene as a pano that when stitched together would have some interesting distortions. I had made a few panos today just to see if I was on the right track. I was but they weren’t very interesting to me without people. So I got Tomas to sit for me again while I made 6 seperate pictures. I had him hold a kitchen tool so as to make it a little more interesting. Though I didn’t provide any motivation for what I had hime do with it.

When put together it looked okay but the motivation thing glared at me. Just glaring back didn’t seem to fix it so I brought in Max. It made a difference but I’m not at all sure it really worked.

Liz

At last I got to shoot my good friend Liz who I’ve wanted to shoot for the last two years. And yes I acknowledge at last someone who is a pleasure to look at rather than myself.

How did it come about? Well Liz finally figured she needed to get a handle on social media and would need a profile pic for this and some others for her web site. She teaches German to English speakers and English for German speakers and is very good at it

Ideas

Every day that same lousy model. I hear you.

Spent about 10 hours today working on marketing. Things are happening but because of that I didn’t get to even leave the house.  And as usual at around this time of night no one else is around.

So I only had this one model and no idea what to do. So I asked a friend for an idea. He came up with something awful and in that moment of telling him what a bad idea it was I was inspired to come up with this. Ain’t that the way?

I promise something/one new tomorrow.

Aled

This is Aled who I have shot before with his axe in a cemetary in Forest Row at some ungodly hour in the early morning. He lives in Turners Hill which is about 5 miles from East Grinstead. I shot him at home today. I give him private tuition in photography.

It must be said, or I’ll get a roasting from Aled’s Mum, that the house does not look anything like as grungy as it does here.

here's looking at me

Well what can I say? No client shoots today. Got some bookings but currently all after Easter. Some interesting ones in East Grinstead and Forest Row and another in Turners Hill. So lots more marketing to do. That is becoming easier now that I’m figuring out what is working and what isn’t.

So without anyone else around I had to shoot myself. That is a pretty tricky thing to do. You have to focus and compose, light and direct all alone. Then you chimp and adjust, chimp and adjust, till you get it right. Much faster with a good subject. This took 15 shots and about 10 minutes. Processing was minimal and took about 2 minutes. Most of the work was in getting the light right. Three strobes; one on the background wall gelled yellow, one from above and behind gelled blue, one from in front bare but snooted to just light around the eyes without spilling over too much.

Old Wrinkly

What do you mean it’s no different from yesterday’s post?

Jasmine has left. She was a great model. I’m having to resort to using myself again. Too bad eh?

Bernie

Anyway back from London now sitting near East Grinstead.  Good to be able to work with a decent monitor again and a proper keyboard. It is very difficult to process images using a laptop display.

I’m continuing with my experiments with Hollywood photographic lighting from the 1940s. I love it. Fun and dramatic stuff. This one uses three light sources. The one from behind and above is at full power and is a bare strobe. The other two are at about 1/8th power and are also snooted so as not to spill light into areas where I didn’t want it. See if you can figure out what the placement of them was.

This is Danny. A cool looking Dude.

Danny

I’m working on my laptop without a proper keyboard and without a decent monitor. For those reasons I will not be writing much and I will not be sure exactly how the colour and contrast of the pic will look.

This weekend I am in London and have less resources than at home in Sharpthorne Sussex. No studio and not much of a computer. Less gear too.

goal

I’ve been looking at the studio pictures of the ’40s see. You know the ones. They used to send them out to all the fans with a fake signature on ‘em. Anyways so I got to thinkin’. I wonder if a mug like me could do that kinda stuff. So I gives it a try with Thomasz, my Hungarian friend.

You got a light mac?

So it isn’t exactly the same. It isn’t black and white. It has some of my twisted processing going on in there too but it works for me.

This might seem a bit lame but it was fun all the same.

yesterday's post goes national

This one was entirely made today but has been brewing for more than a year. As you might guess I have a use for it in mind and am having my people speak with their people. I may or may not go into detail at a later point on this site. I’m debating as to whether it is appropriate to talk about poly tics here. Anyway here’s the pic.

This Season's True Colours

(Update: I decided to show the proper version as without the strapline the picture on it’s own is merely a hint of the message)

From what is known in America as a high school senior shoot today. Had a bunch of guys to shoot messing around with cars and bikes. Good fun. There are some other pictures from this session in one of my Facebook albums.

Raoul

I hadn’t seen Des to talk to for at least 10 years. We met today by chance and later organised a session which took place around 11:30pm. This was one of several keepers.

Des

Jasmine is back.

Red Hot

This was one of those times when the idea came in a flash, the setup took about 5 minutes, the shoot took less than 5 minutes and the processing took two hours.

For those who might not know what processing is it is a bit like sculpting. You know the image you want is in there. You just have to chip away at it toning down certain parts, toning up other parts, adjusting the colours and contrast and level of sharpness and blur and light and dark, etc. until it finally comes right.

This was always going to be a composite image, meaning there were two images shot that had to be put together for the final image. The hands were to be disembodied so the body had to be removed. (Don’t ask where I put it. Nobody has to know. And besides that if there isn’t a body there isn’t a case against me.)

Thomasz

No prizes for guessing the inspiration behind this. I had planned a completely different concept with two or even three models but one of them dropped out at the last moment and I had to come up with something quick. This was the result.

10 minutes setup. 5 minutes shoot. 90 minutes processing. Good fun all round.

Caroline is a management consultant.

Caroline

She wanted a picture appropriate for a biography.

Shot with a single Vivitar 285 in a softbox camera right and quite high up pointing down. Two minutes setup and no more than 4 minutes for the whole shoot. Processing took a little longer as I swapped out the background for something that would make the whole thing pop a little better than the blank wall of the studio.

chandleresque

Okay so what’s the story with this? Well I had several opportunities to make pictures today but I decided to “leave it till later” when I thought my best opportunity would come. So of course it turned out that wasn’t possible.

So it was getting late and I was wondering if I should fall back on Jasmine as I knew she was around. Then I thought I wanted to do something more with a hat as a hat all by itself has a great deal of character. That led to the raincoat I had acquired a few months ago as a prop but had never used. So then I grabbed the coat and hat stand and put them all together. Then I thought it needed something more so I put the gun in the picture. Then I just thought it would be amusing to add a flashgun. Maybe not but it’s there.

Then I wanted the light to be the light of something like a neon sign or that of the sun through blinds over a window. Didn’t have any blinds. So I made them from a cardboard box and some gaffer tape as you do.

Then I made 51 exposures adjusting the light for just the right placement of shadows and light on the scene.

Then into processing and I restricted the palette and made some other tweaks to get what I was thinking was a ’40s look. Not that I particularly know what a ’40s look would really be it is just what I conceived of as a ’40s look.

“I was just thinking about buying a Nikon D3S”.

You want to buy what?

This is Linnie who is actually a very nice lady from oop North.  The idea for the pic came to me a few weeks ago when I was speaking to two different people who were far enough apart that I needed to turn to look at each of them. At one moment they both had the same “You what?” kind of look. From then on I kept thinking about that and wondering how I was going to use it. Tonight it came to me.

Linnie was amazing. It took about 10 minutes to get the lighting right and less than two to get the shots. Then about 20 minutes to process.

fruit bowl

For at least a week I’ve been avoiding this picture. I just hadn’t come up with an idea of how to light and compose it. Tonight I was not feeling like making a picture for today. The last few days I’ve made plenty but the rule is that I can’t use something previously done and just post a new image. No no. I have to shoot and process a new image each day.

So tonight I was playing around with light. Throwing different colours on the far wall and shooting some plastic flowers in front of it. It was supposed to end up as a sunrise type picture made entirely artificially. But it wasn’t very interesting as a subject. Then I saw the neglected bowl and decided to replace the flowers with it. I instantly had me a composition that showed the shape. I lit the back walll with a blue gel on an SB24. The bolw was lit from above and slightly to the left with a Vivitart 285 in a softbox with a small reflecting card to the right. Don’t recall the settings.

And there it was.

Jasmine

Jasmine is easy and fun to work with and she is perfectly happy to carry on for hours working with me till we get what we want. She is a student of photography so I think that might have something to do with it.

Family day today. Took my two year old son to the park. Got these amonst others. They aren’t perfect but they really capture the delight and de light isn’t bad either.

Josh 1

Josh 2

Charlie

This is Charlie of London wedding and portrait photographers Charlies Pictures. Shot with two strobes. One camera left is blue gelled and is fired through a wooden box lid that had some holes in it. It gave an interesting background to a plain white wall. The other strobe is slightly to camera right and is red gelled and snooted to prevent a lot of spill. There was also a window letting in daylight which was between the two flashes. There is a tiny adjustment made to colour balance in Photoshop but this is otherwise straight out of camera.

You're never alone with a shadow

I’ve been meaning to shoot with Lee for a while. He can be a hero or a villain with ease and I had this particular image in mind for a few weeks but we hadn’t managed to get together to do it. Friday night was the night.

Lee has set up a new model/photographer/agency/marketing/training site that I’m expecting to go places. He is a very creative guy with lots of energy. The site is in beta right now and there are very few members. But that makes it a good time to get involved. You will certainly get noticed and you can contribute ideas as to how to make it better.

I daresay most of you are too young to get the title of this post. Back in the late ’50s or early ’60s there was an ad campaign for a cigarette called “Strand”. The strapline was “You’re never alone with a Strand”. It was memorable but not perhaps for the right reasons. Actually I’m happy to say I’m too young to remember it as a current campaign but I saw it in a marketing documentary back in the ’80s.

This is the patio at Saint Hill Manor. I was here today shooting garden furniture for a web site. There are these great aged flagstones and gorgeous pillars and the sun was getting low and I thought this was a good spot for an HDR.

The Set

Today I had a call from a client who asked if I were free today. I said yes. He said good. Be at blah blah in one hour for a shoot. Well okay. I like to work. But this was with zero preparation. Fortunately all batteries were charged and I had memory cards at the ready.

What kind of shoot does a portrait artiste extraordinaire get at such short notice?

It was to shoot pictures of gutter cleaners at work for a gutter cleaning business!

Don’t knock it I thought. Michelangelo once painted a ceiling and took 4 years doing it with a bunch of assistants.

These are the guys involved in the shoot fooling around during a break.

the boys

the boys 2

And this is where they were at the time.

the boys 3

Okay this probably isn’t what you’d expect to see in a 365 and I promise not to do many more like it.

What should the headline be?

This began as a simple concept and rapidly became more complex. Originally it was just to be a girl’s hand reaching for an apple. But then I had Jasmine get behind the apple just to see what it would look like and I liked it a lot better.

Here is a setup shot.

setup shot for girl reaching for apple

The SB24 to camera right at the back is snooted and pointing at the apple. The Vivitar 283 is behind the model pointing up at the wall. The Vivitar 285 is snooted and pointing at some A4 sheets of paper just in front of the girl’s face. I don’t remember the exact settings but the 283 was the main light and was at full power. The others were somewhat toned down.

So it was shot with the idea of being a full page magazine type layout, hence the large amount of white space at the top of the shot. What do you think would be an appropriate headline?

This is Angelo.

Angelo

A frequent question from sitters is “What shall I do with my hands?” One solution is to give them something to hold. In this case it worked out well. Angelo skimmed the book, a treatise on economics of course, and read passages to me and a discussion was underway. I like to encourage and sometimes goad my sitters into giving me thoughts, rants or anything at all that get’s an emotional or thoughtful reaction. Of course the type of expression I’m looking for largely depends on who the shoot is for and the purpose of the pictures that come out of it.

orchids

Well today’s pic was quite a bit of work. I had shot two other setups before I did this one. The first was daffodils and it had some merits but I really didn’t like the composition and couldn’t find a way to do better with it.

The second attempt was with these using a shorter lens and again the composition just wasn’t working out. So I changed to a longer lens and adjusted the setup a bit and got this which I liked a whole lot better.

There’s no getting away from it I keep going toward a painter type of finish in my processing. It is not deliberate. I’m just looking at the tones or the details and looking to emphasise one thing over another or tone down another part. I just don’t care if it looks like a photograph as long as it works as an image.

In case you’re interested the flowers were in a pot on a small table in the studio with a green blanket way back behind them. The light came from a Vivitar 285 in an overhead softbox. There were three exposures used in this with the same settings on camera but with the flash fired at different power settings. The three images were then brought together and tonemapped.

Not a conventional type of HDR photography and it may have been completely unnecessary. I’ve not heard of anyone else getting different exposures in that way. It was actually incredibly hard to do even with a tripod because of the length of the lens. The tiniest movement of the camera would jiggle the image about wildly. I had to fire the shutter using delay as I dont have a remote for it.

Enough ramblings.

apple and bananas

Lit with two large softboxes one to the rear and the main one to camera left. Plus lots of processing to keep the fruit more or less natural looking while giving it centre stage over the wooden background.

Meet Max.

sad-max

Not sure if the mood matches the face. But what a face. He’s a wow with the girls.

Rosie

Well if the rest of this 365 is as interesting and revealing to me as the first two days then it won’t just be worthwhile it will be worthwhile in spades.

This is Rosie. She lives with a private tuition student of mine. I had wanted to  shoot her for ages, just as a lighting challenge, but what I got from this was far more than that. I’ve found that I like shooting dogs. This is the second one in two months. The first was with her owner so this is the first solo dog.

I treated it much like shooting a portrait as far as lighting her.  The processing is quite a bit different.

The cheese yesterday was fun and quite a change from shooting people. I will do a lot more food type shots in this project but I don’t expect them to be as satisfying for me as shooting live subjects.

Cheddar

I thought I’d start off with something different. I’ve never shot food before. It was a learning experience. Among other things next time I’ll know to make sure everything in the shot that isn’t part of the food doesn’t have a lot of distracting texture.

I started with what I thought would be simple. I love very strong and mature Cheddar cheese so this was a good excuse to go and buy some. This is a crumbly cheese rather than a creamy one and I wanted to show that.

I was in too much of a hurry with this. I washed the board before using it here but it wasn’t entirely dry and so the dampness shows up as darker than it would have if it were dry. But I don’t think it bad for a first attempt.

Here is a shot of the setup.

cheddar-setup

The camera was on the tripod. Behind the cheese is a mushroom softbox with a Vivitar 283 fired into it at full power triggered by a PT-04. The second light is a bare  SB-24 at 1/4 power fired at the ceiling behind the camera to provide some fill on the front of the cheese without removing it’s shadow completely.

So I’ve just this minute decided to do a 365 thing. Was it just an impulse? No. Truth is I’ve kinda been thinking about it for months. The reservation was that I thought I might not have the time to shoot and process every day. Well maybe the time will be tight sometimes but if I make the commitment then I will adjust the time accordingly.

Enough on the difficulties. On to the reason. I keep reading about the idea of developing a style and I keep thinking that most of what is said on the subject is b/s. I can shoot in many styles right now and so can most photographers who know their basics and are aware of styles.

A photographic style

The above pic is mainly created in the studio as opposed to in post processing.

An Old Master painter's style

This one is from the same shoot. The lighting is different and the clothes were changed. The post processing was also different. The result is a different style. You may prefer one to the other or prefer something entirely different. The point is they are completely different styles.

So why am I writing about style?  Dunno really. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Well style is the thing that is supposed to make you unique. It is supposed to be your trademark. That thing you are known for. I don’t know about this. It seems to me that anyone who comes up with something different and interesting will be copied immediately by others anyway. Regardless of whether the copiers are right or wrong in copying the fact remains they will exist and many potential buyers will not know or care who the actual originator was. So I’d like to refine the first three sentences of this paragraph.

Your style won’t make you unique but it is something you could be known for. I don’t believe it is possible to come up with a style that retains some aesthetic qualities without it being copyable by others. Neither do I believe it necessary.

The kind of style I want to develop isn’t really a style at all. What I want is to get my attention away from any kind of technically derived “look” and on to communicating something in the most powerful way I can develop. Technique will certainly be developed. Looks might be more developed. Everything I know about technique might be used. But the primary purpose of any image I create should be to communicate something to a viewer.

So I want to do a 365 project with the sole purpose of leaning how to communicate better.

I love shooting portraits but I think this project will involve many other subjects as it will not always be possible to find a new sitter every day and it might become dreary using the same sitters too frequently.

* A 365 thing is a commitment to making at least one image per day, every day, for a whole year.