Architecture in Leeds

I was on a shoot in Leeds last week that called for some architectural shots so I headed for the townhall with a view of doing something with the columns. I wanted to concentrate on the transition of light to shadow on the circular pillars and the shadows they were casting, as I had a feeling I would be doing a mono conversion. I was using my 70-200 lens as I wanted to isolate certain details, I knew if I had my wide angle on I was bound to get some bystander as it was quite busy and I didn't want to spend hours cloning out afternoon shoppers. I took quite a few shots like this but I stuck with this one as I liked the leading line element to the black door, I was lucky with the shadow of the lamp above it too. This was taken at 70mm, f/4 @ 1/400 ISO100.

1 Strobe, Choose your background

Hi folks, I've been playing with my pocket wizards again just experimenting with exposures with one flash off camera and some light coming in from the window. This was quite a quick setup in the living room with no clear backgrounds, I have done a shot to demonstrate what was in the background (a couch!). I didn't have any willing subjects so I had to use my wii guitar.

I think ambient exposure was about 1/100 at 2.8 ISO400. From this I can now choose if the background can be blown out white or Black, obviously for a white background there also needs to be something lighting your subject or you would get a silhouette, in this case the light came from the window.

So to blow out the background I had my flash pointed at the ceiling at 1/4 power, my camera set to 2.8 ISO400, 1/200sec, the window light exposed the guitar and the flash blew out the background.

Now to make the background black I had to eliminate all ambient light so I set my camera to 1/200 (I couldn't go any quicker as this is the 5D's x-sync speed) ISO100 and f16. The drop in ISO and aperture would also reduce the effect of the flash. The flash was now lighting the guitar, it was still at 1/4 power but I set the zoom (on the flash) to 85mm to reduce the spread and had it coming in from about 45 degrees to the right, this was important as I didn't want any spill onto the background, not to mention the horrible sharp shadow it would have produced. Instead of increasing or decreasing the power of the flash I just changed the distance between flash and subject and thats about it. I did a very minor tweak in lightroom to ensure the blacks were black and the whites were white but nothing else.

Sports Portraits

I did some more outdoor lighting yesterday with my nephew playing football (a big man city fan). This was a 3 light setup with two speedlights behind and to the side of the subject, providing rimlighting, and another just off to camera right. This was quite tough as there was only a small area of space that was lit by all three lights, I could have probably made it easier by removing the one to the camera right behind the subject and increasing the spread of the remaining lights but then I wouldn't have got the rim lighting I was after. The light levels were also dropping quite quickly but I wanted a small amount of ambiant light to get the motion blur. This was taken in full manual 1/125, f11, ISO400 34mm.

Off Camera Portraits

I've recently bought a couple more pocket wizards that allow me to use more lights off camera, this was from a few quick shots we got in the garden. It was a two light setup with an umbrella to camera right and a bare light behind the subject to camera left providing a little separation light from the background. I'm going to use another light behind the subjects to the camera right. This was taken on full manual, both lights and camera, the exif was f/11, 1/200 sec. ISO400 at about 150mm. Sorry for the quick post but will do a more detailed version when I get a better shot.

More Bales

There was some really nice light this evening so I dashed out to my nearest field that I knew had some hay bales in it. Nothing extraordinary really but it was nice to be out doing a landscape, I'm doing quite a lot of strobist type shots at present and hope to post some soon. As always with my landscapes I did a mono conversion and decided it was slightly better but there wasn't much in it. I used my trusty 3 stop ND grad filter but thought it was a bit strong so I brought the sky back about a stop using the local adjustment gradient in Lightroom. The exif was my safe 16mm, f/16, ISO 100, 1/6 sec, I forgot to take my infrared filter with me, must remember for next time.

Pre Wedding Portraits

I had a pre wedding meeting yesterday with a couple we are covering in a few weeks and I thought I might use some off camera flash, I've been reading a lot of strobist, if you haven't been it's worth a look for techniques and inspiration. Anyway as the sun had pretty much dipped over the horizon I wanted to do something with the sunset, but not have the couple as silhouettes, so in full manual I metered for the sky and got f5.6 at 1/160 sec (ISO100) I had a flash to the left through an umbrella and it was just a case of changing the flash power (I ended up at about 1/4 power with an old SB28, I know, a Nikon!) I could have darkened the sky by simply adjusting the shutter speed. I tweaked the shot in lightroom, I originally added a textured layer in photoshop but decided it made the photo look like it was on a backdrop so I binned it. I was going to do a mono conversion but decided it wasn't necessary

New Macro Lens

I recently bought the Sigma 150mm Macro (after reluctantly selling my 50mm version) so I decided to have a few test shots with it. I used a 580EX off camera to let me use a narrower aperture (to increase DOF). I didn't spend too long on these really, I just wanted to get some pictures as it was raining quite hard outside. These were taken at ISO200, f8, 150mm, 1/125 sec, on full manual mode as I was using a flash, the shutter speed was enough to cut out any ambient light.

Chester Zoo

I went to Chester Zoo at the weekend, I wasn't expecting to get too much but I was quite surprised with some of the ones I came away with. I had to pump up the ISO on some of the shots and was thankful of the image stabilizer on my 70-200 lens. I've processed them all in mono because I quite liked the effect and did a little doging and burning in photoshop, the gallery with the 12 I processed can be seen here.

Crazy Stunts

We went to the Llangollen Balloon festival at the weekend, didn't see a great deal of balloons as the weather was pretty poor but the stunt bikes were pretty amazing, the lads did a victory lap at the end and they all looked about 12! Anyway this is a little different from the stuff I normally shoot so it was a nice change. I was shooting on Shutter priority as I needed to freeze the action more than anything, so that was set to 1/800, ISO 200 using a 70-200 focal range, the appertures were usually about f9, AF mode was set to Al Servo.