Tuesday 18 October 2011

Becki Thornber Studio Session

Remember : click an image to see a larger version.

I was recently asked by a friend of my daughter if I could shoot some portraits of her. She had recently had her hair coloured and she asked if it would be possible to emphasize her hair during the shoot.

During a recent eseminar organised by the Manfrotto School of Excellence photographer John Ricard explained how he lights models when the hair is of particular importance to his client. To emphasize the models hair Jon uses a hair light which is basically a light specifically aimed at the hair and balanced against the other lights on the subject.

Taking this idea I decided to try something similar. To light Becki’s face I set up a soft box about 1.5m from her and dropped its power down to 1/2 .  For the hair light I set up a strobe with a set of barn doors and dropped the power down to ¼ (shown below) . 



In practice I found that this setting was far too bright and put far too much light onto her. I adjusted the position of the light and moved it away from her hair but that spread the light a little too much. I managed to resolve the situation by putting a diffuser in front of the hair light and closed the barn doors in tight.

It took about 10 trial shots to get the lights and the exposure balanced before we set about starting the session.

In all I took 135 images of Becki from which she chose about 60. An example of the images I shot using this lighting set-up are shown below.

My thanks to Becki for her patience and for giving her permission to include them on this blog. 





Sunday 16 October 2011

A Walk Around Mercia Marina

Remember : click an image to see a larger view


On the 2nd of October 2011 I decided to take a walk around the Mercia Marina near Willington in Derby. 

The marina is a photographers paradise with lots of different boats from narrow-boats to cruisers. Each boat has its own personality with boat owners painting and decorating their boats in their own unique way.

Rather than cart my entire bag of gear around I decided just to take my Tamron 17-55 and my new Nikon 55-300mm along with my Lowepro lens exchange bag which is one of the most useful bags I own.



The light was really strong especially with the reflections from the water so I also took a Cokin ND4 Graduated filter so that I could slow the light down if I needed to.

I spent a couple of hours wondering around the marina. A sample of the shots I took are below. As usual all of the shots I took are in my Photoshop.com gallery, a link to which can be found on the gallery page of this blog.







Sunday 9 October 2011

DDCPSC Cheque Presentation

remember : click an image to see a larger version


In my previous blog post I was photographing the Charity Clay Pigeon Shoot held by the Darley Dale Clay Pigeon Shooting Club.

The idea of the shoot was to raise money for a worthy charity. This year (2011) the shoot was in aid of the East Midlands Air Ambulance service based at the East Midlands Airport.

On Friday 7th of October I was asked to take some photographs of two of the members of the DDCPSC as they presented the cheque for £1700 to the crew of the Air Ambulance. 

Whilst we were there we were also treated to a rare look around the base and the helicopter itself. Time was at a premium as the ambulance could be called upon at any time. 

Below are a few shots taken on the day. The rest of the shots can be viewed on my gallery the link to which cane be found on the gallery page of this blog. 




Kevin and Neil Davison present the cheque to the crew.
Air Ambulance
Rotor mechanism




Cockpit
Control Column