Saturday, 16 November 2013

Portable studio

F5.6 | Tv 1/80 | ISO 160

 I recently did a shoot for a 30th birthday party. I've included some shots below but the one above is my favourite from the evening. The important thing to note here is that all the lights used are speedlites - either triggered wirelessly with remotes or optically as in the case of the Yongnuo YN560-II.




 The great thing about a studio setup is that once your exposure is set, you can lock the settings on your camera and just fire away. The only thing you'll need to keep an eye on is the batteries. In the space of 3 hours (and a total of 650 shots) I changed all the batteries once only.

 For a nice even spread of light where you potentially have a large group of people in front of the camera you'll have to go a long way to find something better than the old faithful shoot-through umbrella. 





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Thursday, 24 October 2013

Old-style family portrait

F4 | TV 1/80 | ISO 100 


The picture above is of one of the partners in a new Johannesburg venue called Sir James van der Merwe. When the venue opens I'll post a link here but for now suffice it to say that they needed a portrait of the fictitious Sir James' mother. I arranged a stylist for the hair and makeup, and the model brought her own dress and props. The styling took the better part of 2 hours and the shoot about 45 minutes.

I converted the RAW file in Canon Digital Photo Professional and added a bit of contrast before changing it to black & white. I added a vignette and a warming filter to get the final result. 

 



   Equipment list
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Monday, 19 August 2013

What's your dream?

F1.6 | TV 1/125 | ISO 100 | White Balance – Daylight


This campaign was for Old Mutual and it’s all about putting a plan in place to realise your dreams. It was actually a re-shoot because the first photographer wasn’t briefed properly – not their fault, but now we had half a day to ‘fix’ it.

After the initial anxiety of realising the budget was blown, the inevitable question gets asked: “Are there any photographers in the agency?” Next thing you know I’m shooting pics that will be published in the Sunday Times.


The entire shoot took about 1 hour – 15min to set up and 45min to shoot everyone. I decided to use my Sigma 50mm 1.4 because we were looking for a nondescript/blurred green background and there’s nothing better than shallow depth of field for that. The softbox to the left of camera added some fill flash to give contrast to the parts of the faces that are visible.

The pic above is my favourite but didn’t make it into the insert. It just goes to show how subjective a photo can be – the pics you love aren’t necessarily the ones your client likes.


Equipment list


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Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Self portrait





Equipment list



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Sunday, 17 March 2013

Mark Leonard_Zimbabwe


I found this pic whilst going through some pics I took on a trip to Zimbabwe in 2011. My friend, Mark Leonard - the model in this pic - was filming wildlife in the Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve, and I spent a few days with him. 

 Mark is always up for a quick shoot, so we pulled over on one of the game drives just after sunset and took this pic:


 You will notice the background in this pic is not as blurred as the final shot above.

 I wanted to give the illusion of movement so turned to Photoshop to add the Motion Blur effect. 

As it turned out Radial Blur actually worked better:




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Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Richard & Sarah


F3.5 | Tv 1/60 | ISO 100
Doing shoots for work colleagues is a great way to practice - they want pics, we want models :)

 When Sarah asked me to do a couple's shoot, I approached it with all the professionalism of a paying gig. I scoured the Web for references, put together a mood board and got a feel for what they were looking for:

Mood board

Here's some shots from the day's shoot together with the shot settings and selected lighting diagrams:



F3.5 | Tv 1/60 | ISO 100
 

F3.5 | Tv 1/80 | ISO 200 shot with Sigma 50mm F/1.4 lens

F3.2 | Tv 1/60 | ISO 100 shot with Canon 24-70mm F/2.8






















F2.8 | Tv 1/60 | ISO 100









































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Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Strobist shoot with Pixel Knight TR-322 wireless triggers

 Av f3.2 | Tv 1/100 | ISO 100 

It's hard enough to find a willing model - let alone a backdrop like this. So when the opportunity presents itself you need to be ready and it certainly helps to have everything set up before you head out. 

I bought the Pixel Knight TR-322 set a few weeks earlier and this was the 1st shoot "in the field" :)

Following the general strobist rules for balancing flash and ambient light, I set my camera to manual and exposed for the sky. There wasn't much time, so I cheated a bit and set the triggers and flash to TTL mode - one less thing to worry about.

Av f8 | Tv 1/80 | ISO 400

 Here's the 1st shot. 

Not bad. I was happy with the exposure but there was too much of the background in focus so I dropped the aperture to f3.2. 


I noticed the ISO was on 400 so I dropped it to 100 to get the best image quality; the ambient light had changed as well and with all the adjustments I ended up on a shutter speed of 1/100. 

AV f3.2 | Tv 1/100 | ISO 100

 In the next shot below it was all coming together. 

"Be more serious...turn your face more to the camera...hold it there...don't move..." 
...and SNAP!

          


I processed the RAW image in Canon Digital Photo Professional adding a bit of sharpness and dropping the saturation.

I'm loving these triggers :)


 [One last thing - get that flash in nice and close; 
in this pic it's just outside of the frame on the right]



Equipment list:





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