So for those of you that haven’t heard before, I’m organising a big photo pow wow/shootout for the 25th of April. The location is a derelict RAF base just North of Cambridge. The base is huge with plenty of space for us all to work and create some really unique photos. Just to whet your appetite, here’s one I took at the location before:

Sign up form and more details after the jump…

OK so I basically want this to be a big get-together, social, learning and fun experience for all. The possibilities are there to get some truly unique and awesome portfolio shots. The shoot was originally designed to be free however the owners of the base have somewhat scuppered that one. In order to use the base for the day we’re going to have to put together some cash. I’m hoping we can get enough people to the point where it comes roughly £5-10 each. I’m hoping nobody minds this since it really will be a unique experience. To take part everybody must agree to work on a time for CD basis. Photographers must agree to provide models and makeup artists with digital copies of photographs taken.

One other quick note. The base is derelict. This means there’s broken glass around and some parts of it are completely unsafe. If you want to take part in this shoot you must do so at your own risk. The buildings (in general) are structurally sound however you will need to practice discretion and work out all the risks before shooting in an area. I’ll give a briefing of some things to be aware of before we start and as long as you’re careful it shouldn’t be a problem. Just to reiterate again though everybody taking part MUST be over the age of 18 and must be willing to take full responsibility for their own actions.

Right, on with the sign up form. I’m going to try and group people together of slightly mixed abilities. Ideally I’d love to get some people to also hold some mini-lessons for those interested. These might include things such as lighting techniques, posing styles etc. As such I’ve asked everybody to rate their ability. I know rating ability can be hard. Try to use this as a guide though:
For photographers:
Beginner – I have my own DSLR and still use it mainly on Auto or Aperture Priority.
Intermediate – I am fully proficient with my camera, am happy using it fully and getting along on my own.
Advance – I know everything about my camera, I shoot lots and am happy posing subjects and creating interesting photographs. I’ve also started to get to grips with the basics of lighting.
Expert: I shoot a lot. I have lots of gear and can cope in pretty much all photographic situations. I’m comfortable working with models and lighting. I carry out paid work regularly. I wouldn’t mind teaching some of my immense knowledge to newbies.
For Models:
Beginner – I’m just getting into this modeling malarkey. I’ve not done much before but am very keen.
Intermediate – I’ve been modeling for a while and started to build up a portfolio.
Advanced – I’ve been modeling for ages. I’m quite successful and have shot numerous paid assignments.
Expert – I’ve been modeling for ages. I mainly shoot paid assignments for big names. I’m happy to help out some of the newer models with tips and advice.

I think everything else should be fairly straight-forward. Hit me up in the comments though if you have any more questions.

Edit: Sign up now closed!

Never work with children or animals. At what point did I forget that golden rule?? Well anyway I know I promised to do a little techie post on some of my more recent photos so here goes nothing.

So let’s start with the horse shot. The back story to this is that it was inspired by a mixture of Lord of the Rings and Drew Gardner. What I wanted to do was put Carys in the middle of a sunny forest with beams of light shining through the trees and her riding through them. Here’s the shot again, do you think I made it?

Hit the link for all the techie details behind the shot and some of the issues I had to overcome to make it happen.

Well OK here’s the story of what actually happened. This being a commercial shoot, time was tight. After makeup we had about 10 minutes to shoot the photo before the horse had to disappear. Unfortunately that meant that I couldn’t get Carys to ride out to a proper forest as I had first envisaged. Time meant we had to go with what we had around us and that happened to be a small clump of 5 trees in the middle of a very protective gardener’s lawn. With all the best will in the world sometimes it’s better to go with a shot which isn’t quite as amazing as you had wanted rather than with no photo at all. In this case though it meant sacrificing those lovely rays of light I’d wanted bouncing off and streaming through the trees. Not ideal but hey, you can’t complain since we got to do a very ambitious shot at all.

The second compromise is that Carys is stationary on the horse. I’d have loved to have had her galloping through the trees to get some real movement but alas it was not to be. Unfortunately as good as our four legged friend was, he just wasn’t used to flash and got spooked with every pop of the main light. Manageable while stationary but not something you want to be dealing with riding bareback and with no helmet. Turns out he also didn’t like the big wafters we were using to get the smoke going in the right direction. Apparently horses don’t like big bright things flailing around them. Who’d have guessed?

So there you go, those were the main problems. Here’s the techie details behind the photo (remember this isn’t like a recipe you need to add salt and sugar to taste. If you want to try living without the recipe try some freestyle baking ):

Shot on a D3, full manual mode.

Shutter and Aperture:

1/200 F/8. 1/200 was set since it’s the max sync speed my camera will do with big lights and we really wanted to kill the mid day sun. F/8 is the aperture which allowed us to do that.

Focal Length:

70mm. Most telephoto I could get without hitting a fence. I wanted the tele in order to compress the background and make it look like we had more trees. In a big forest I’d probably have gone wider to make the scene more epic.

Back Flash:
Elinchrom Ranger 1200 W/S on full blast. Needed as much light as possible to make the sun coming through the trees in the background. There is also a little smoke in between which helps give the ‘early morning sun’ look. If we’d had more trees I’d have put the flash further back and with that smoke we would have hopefully got the nice beams of light.

Left Rim:
There’s an SB900 Camera left and behind the horse. This just brings up the back of the horse and provides a bit of rim light separating Carys from the trees behind.

Main:
Elinchrom Quadra (yes, the since-deceased one) on close to full blast in a small softbox camera left. Ideally I’d have gone for a larger light source here but due to the power limitations and having to overpower mid day light we went for a small softbox. This just helps soften the shadows a bit. It’s also gridded to help prevent light from hitting all the trees around.

Posing:
Well there wasn’t much posing going on here other than stay on the horse and try and look like you’re in the middle of a forest rather than a small clump of trees with a man staring at you for taking a big horse over his perfectly manicured lawn. Oops…

Post Production:
Very little post production on this one; only minor aperture adjustments, a bit of contrast and saturation.

So there you have it. Any more questions feel free to hit me up in the comments.

More adventures soon!

Alex

Edit: Apparently this also works on the D300s and the D3s! Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.
Edit2 -The non-techie way… OK this subject appears to get an awful lot of attention and some people are having problems following all the steps/not liking using the terminal. As such I’ve decided to be nice to you all and package up an automator script which does all the heavy lifting for you. No need to use the Terminal with this method. Check out the method section for details.

So this is the first of a couple of techie posts to my blog. I know, I know you all come here for the pictures of Orcs but hey this is my way of helping other professional photographers save a bit of time and hair pulling.

The D90 is a Nikon camera used by Holly and myself which allows the recording of HD video. What makes it special is the fact that it has a large sensor and can use any nikon lens, this in turn means you can get truly cinema like depth of feel. If you don’t have a D90 and Premier, I suggest you bail out now, else..

The D90 unfortunately shoots a bit of a bizarre format which premiere claims is an unsupported compression type. However it lies! Thanks to Jean-Luc for helping me to figure it out but I think the main problem is that Premiere is an old Carbon based application and can’t quite understand the D90 file type.

Method1: The non techie way:

1. Download your movies as per normal and place them in a directory on their own
2. Download this zip file
3. Extract both files to your /Application directory (Note that SetFile must be in this directory or else the script won’t work)
4. Double click to run SetFileApp
5. Select the directory with all your D90 movies in it which need to be changed
6. Profit!

Method2: For those who like the gory details:

1. Download the movies as you normally would and make a note of where you’ve stored them.
2. Either install the Mac Developer tools or visit this page to download the setfile application
3. Fire up the Terminal application (yes I know this is scary and I may try and automate this for people in the future…)
4. if you downloaded setfile rather than installing the developer tools, cd into the directory where is it located eg: cd downloads/setfile – tip: if you press tab twice the terminal will autocomplete things for you!
5. In the terminal run this command to set the correct file type  SetFile -t "VfW " pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVI eg (SetFile -t "VfW " movies/test/*.AVI)
6. In the terminal again run this command to rename the files to .mov:  rename -v 's/\.AVI$/\.mov/' pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVI
7. You should find all of your movies have now been renamed to .mov and will now all open in premier!

So there you go, that’s how you open D90 movies in premier for editing. If anybody has any problems hit me up in the comments.

Alex