Archive for the ‘Heroes and Villains’ Category
Went to an arts event at Casablanca in East Grinstead tonight. Grabbed these outside. Wish I could remember the guy’s name in the first picture but I can say he was a very good singer and story teller. (Edit) His name is Xavier.
This guy is David Dempster who is a great fiddler.
A.K.A. Ludwig Amadeus.
Is a very good London based musician
who I spent a few hours with recently shooting.
We had intended to get some shots up on a roof in Central London but the rain that day put paid to that idea. These were shot in a pretty cramped flat in Shepherds Bush but we had more control over the weather there.
I was going to write “by popular demand” but I didn’t think one email would justify such language. But I did get one request so that is a good enough excuse so I am hereby posting the “evil” Gary Byrne which I have now come to prefer anyway.
the evil gary byrne
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.
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?
Well I needed to get the processing finished on Barbara’s session and I had a bunch of other non photographic stuff to get out of the way. All of which left me without having made a 365 pic for today. I could still do one but it is now 2:00am and I don’t have anyone else around. I will continue tomorrow.
So these are all from the session last Wednesday.
Chesterfield
I have this affect on women.
Hat and Mac
I like the movie scene quality of this one.
Smoking
She can be ice cold and totally hot at the same time.
Golden Mac
Love the colours of this one
A New Hat
I can just imagine her walking into Raymond Chandler’s imagination.
Head Shot
Loveable or what?
Head Shot
And then came Joey…
The Boyfriend
… and then came …
Barbara and Joey
and that was that.
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.
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.
Bogie Man
Had to be done. What else can I say?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another from the shoot with Des.
At the window
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.
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.
Two great friends Ann and Farouk (see their site here) agreed to act out one of my darker fantasies on Sunday night. I had several shots in mind but the weather (at least -50 in London) put paid to that idea in a hurry. Managed to grab this before hands were shaking so hard as to overcome the image stabilizing.
If there is a hero or villain in you and you’d like to take part in one of these types of sessions let me know. I would prefer it if you were in London or the South-East of England. I am based in Sussex but will travel for a good project.
I’m liking the idea of pictures that look like scenes from movies. This is the first in what I expect may become a long series.
If you’d like to appear or assist in one use the contact page to let me know. If you think the idea stinks or is cool let me know in the comments.
