Anyway, yes this was taken on the way out west, about 8hrs drive from Ulaanbaatar, we pulled over and Holly actually went for a ride on the Camel. I was planning on stopping her since our medial insurance covered everything except camel rides, but hey how can you stop a girl with an idea in her head? After the ride I asked the nomads who owned them if they’d mind me taking a photo for prosperity. Needless to say this being the land of friendly people it was no problem and they were over-the-moon with the mini Polaroid print I gave them. Wish people around the rest of the world would be seduced by an English accent and a print of them with a camel!

Strobist info: Lit with an Elinchrom Ranger Quadra into an extra small Chimera softbox.

Right well that’s my break taken, back to the world of weddings!

More adventures soon,
Alex

Packing for Mongolia now. More adventures soon!

Alex

Really great day, we had some amazing models, photographers and makeup artists on hand. Really can’t wait to see what everybody made of it. Unfortunately I spent most of my day sorting things out and not shooting (damn I missed out on some AMAZING models ) but here’s a couple of mine from the lighting seminar I gave.

Hope you all enjoyed it and add us to your RSS reader if you want to know when and where the next shoot will be!

More adventures soon,
Alex

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

Story and more photos after the jump…

I decided to take her to the cafeteria I’ve been eating in all week. We got a few strange looks but I asked Alessia to get up onto a table and have some fun. Low and behold she did it and we got some amazing shots. I love the lines on this one and all the empty trays in the background.
For all you closet strobists out there lighting is from a Quadra into a Deep octa high above, an SB900 into a golden reflector down low as a bit of a floor kick, a gridded SB900 into the eyes to pop them and another SB900 on a table behind for the backlight. Quite a lot of strobes but overall I think they worked out well.

This is where it all got a bit ‘fun’. The cover was shot just to the side of the road with Alessia standing on one of the bollards. Boy did we get some looks from cars driving by! I used a 10 stop ND in order to darken the ambient mid day light and then stretched the shutter in order to blur the moving cars. Alessia was great holding still between pops of the flashes and pulling some great shapes.

Here’s one of the gang helping with the shot…

Lighting was from a bare Quadra held high camera right by Fadi, an SB skipped off a gold reflector held by Jonnie and another heavily gridded SB expertly aimed into her eyes by Dominic. Phew, keeping it easy then!

Then disaster struck. At the time Fadi (on the right) was standing a little closer to Alessia. I popped the flash and all seemed well. Then suddenly from nowhere smoke started billowing out of the Quadra head. This was followed by a few little flames and Fadi quickly handing the flash back to me! Thanks Fadi, what on earth am I meant to do with a flash which is burning? Crap. I quickly unplugged the thing and gave it a lung full of air. That seemed to stop the problem but we were still left with one very much toasted flash. Here’s hoping the Flash Centre come through again this time when I send it back. Not quite sure how I’m going to explain the scorch marks!

Anyway a ‘brief intermission’ later and we were able to carry on with a replacement head. Alessia was a trouper and opted to carry on despite almost going up in smoke; I’m not sure I’d want to be next to one of those after that!

Well I think the photos were worth it despite the fact that, depending upon Elinchrom customer service, it might end up being a very expensive photoshoot!

More adventures (although hopefully not like this one) to come.

Alex

Due to my normal crazy lighting for photographs, the director, Holly, asked if I would be the lighting designer on the show. Well I couldn’t say no and as such embarked on my first foray into the world of theatre. I have to confess I found it really quite interesting and it’s really made me appreciative of my photography lighting. Enter the theatre and suddenly I was banned from all softboxes, photoshop and flashes and instead had to contend with hot yellow continuous light which couldn’t interfere with audience vision and had to work across an entire stage. Quite a mission.

I think we succeeded though: had lots of good feedback and reviews. I did take one very quick photograph while on set, of all the major cast members. It actually made it into the Cambridge News along with the review and a photo by Hugo Vincent, a good photographer friend of mine. Hugo stepped up to take the photos of the performance since I was otherwise indisposed operating the lights. If people want, I might put a blog post up going into the photo in a bit more detail later.
Anyway my photo is the one at the top, Hugo’s is the one further down.

More adventures (and blog posts) to come!

Alex

If you’re not a camera nerd I suggest you leave this post alone. Otherwise find out after the jump…

Okay, so let’s start off with a base. This is what Old Finsbury Town Hall looked like with no flash.

It’s quite a mix of different colours; harsh pinks and blues from gelled hot lights then some strong yellows on the stage. The dancers are generally in shadow with very little light hitting them. This was taken at f/2.8 iso 4000. If I wanted to get the dancers correctly exposed via natural light I’d be down in the ‘hail-Mary’ shutter speeds…

Okay, so I had to do something. Some options I came up with:

1. Use a very fast prime and be glad you have a D3 – Well yes that could have worked. However all I’d have done here is swap the hail-Mary shutter speed range for the hail-Mary aperture range. With subjects dancing, performing fast swing outs and aerials getting anything in focus would be next to impossible.
2. Use on camera direct flash – Well yes that would work. It would end up looking icky, like they’ve just come out of a point and shoot, and people would start throwing rotten fruit as my flash pummeled them directly in the face. Not really an option for the discerning photographer.
3. On Camera Bounce – Could work a bit but getting consistent results would be a nightmare. The ceiling is high and a mixture of blue and white. As such I really wouldn’t be able to be sure of the colour temperature of the light coming back. Also it being so high my flash would be working overtime trying to get any light to hit the subject. Chewing through flash batteries is not a good way to tackle global warming.
4. Off Camera, hand held  – This seems to be pretty popular with dance photographers and can produce some quite good results. By holding the flash in the left hand and camera in the right it allows you to position the light anywhere you want for each shot. There are drawbacks with this though. It’s very inconsistent. You really don’t know what you’re going to get from one shot to the next, you could get lucky, you could completely miss. Another problem is that most photographers using this method use a stofen on the top of the flash. The idea here is to bounce the light around the room and hopefully fill some shadows/create some cool effects. The problem is that it robs your flash of power and ultimately drains the batteries pretty damned quickly.
5. Off camera, pre setup flash – Yep this is the method I used. It allows you consistent lighting (important when trying to photograph pretty much everybody on the dance floor) and allows you to create different lighting zones to give different effects.

Here’s how I chose to light the hall:

Light one is an SB900 with a 1/4 CTO Gel on it. This is fired through a white window curtain to the side of the hall. I think my diagram is slightly wrong here in that it was actually more central to that wall. Anyway the curtain was big and white so by firing a flash into it I effectively created a huge soft box. This was my main light and threw quite a nice, even light over all of the dancers. The CTO warmed it a touch, just the way I like it. Since it’s so diffused and quite high most dancers don’t even notice it firing.

Light two is on a high light stand in the stage. This is pointed directly at the dance floor. This creates quite a harsh light spread evenly over the floor. Since it’s so high it’s out of most dancers’ sight lines and again they don’t really notice it going off.

Light three was clamped up high to a massive curtain rail. Quite handy that being there: it was being used to hold a heavy curtain to help with the acoustics – I simply re-purposed it to also be a make-shift light stand. The flash was pointed at a white patch in the ceiling creating quite a nice fill.

Here’s the room with all the lights in place:

The key here is that I have now created different lighting zones to work in and have boosted the exposure so I now have some room to walk the aperture and get the different exposures/depth of feels I require.

Right so onto the lighting zones. I’ve effectively created three zones here, one by light one, one by light two and (yes you guessed it) one by light three.

As I come close to light one, light one becomes a really nice big diffused key light. I can then use flash three (the one on the stage) as either a hair light, to create separation from the background or as in the case below as a special effect light. All I have to do is move my position relative to the flashes and walk the aperture as required.

If I move close to the stage, the bare speed-light really takes over as the main. Here we get quite a harsh light creating big shadows. Lights one and three act as fill and hair lights but generally it just all gets a bit harsher with a much quicker fall off into the shadow areas:

If I move between flash one and two I get quite a nice combination. Here you can see that the male lead dancer is lit by the bare stage flash. This creates quite a harsh light with fast shadow fall off. It also acts to rim light the female follow. The follow, in contrast, is lit by flash one fired into the curtain. This creates a much more diffused light source slightly below (in exposure terms) the main stage light. Flash one also rim lights the male lead’s hair and arm. Flash three here creates the baseline and helps prevent areas from falling into deep shadow.

So yes anyway, that’s how I chose to light London Lindy Exchange. Any questions, feel free to hit me up in the comments below.

Alex