Tag: Olympus

Bed Sheets As Backgrounds

When I first started shooting portraits, I made do with some very basic gear. My studio was my garage, my second light was a reflector and my backgrounds were sheets of fabric.

Fortunately I’ve added one or two more lights to my gear over the years and I have my own, permanent small home studio. My backgrounds have evolved a bit too but one of the most challenging parts of being in a studio is the limited choice of backgrounds. So in the video below I revisited my early days by buying three cheap bed sheets for use as backgrounds.

I love dark and moody studio shots, so my three bed sheets (technically they’re duvet covers) were a basic black, stripy black and damask patterned black. Each gave a very different result, as you’ll see in the video below.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pv_LX319uU[/youtube]

So what did I discover? First off, king sized duvet’s are amazing value (I limited myself to £20 max per sheet) and because they open up, adding some timber inside helps them hang well. However the creases were a real pain and took an age to steam out.

If all you want is a basic black background, a bed sheet is cheap and works perfectly. If you want a pattern, look for sheets that are advertised as crease resistant or ironing free but be aware that those terms aren’t really accurate from a photographic point of view.

As a bonus each duvet set comes with two pillow cases. So what should I do with those? Ideas below please.

Vintage Explorer – Plan It, Shoot It, Edit

This is the first of a new series where I take you behind the scenes on one of my shoots. You get to come along for the ride as I plan the shoot, do the shoot and edit the photos.

The theme for the first “Plan It, Shoot It, Edit” is Vintage Explorer.

Plan It
It all starts with an idea, then there’s the preparation and planning. A location has to be found, props need making and finally there’s a test shoot to do. Of course not everything goes to plan, as you’ll see.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri5f29WqWqs[/youtube]

Shoot It
Now for the fun bit… the shoot itself. The weather was cold, so I decided to get some banker shots in my studio before heading out on location. Sometimes you just get lucky and on the way home I stop off to shoot against a spectacular sunset.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dNqKYBZNus[/youtube]

Edit
Here’s where the photos come alive. Adding colour and contrast is all that most of the shots needed but if you want to shoot wide shots and light the model with a softbox, there’s bound to be a bit of Photoshop needed.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2onA5CUF2uk[/youtube]

Olympian Photo Shoot

It’s not often you get the chance to photograph an Olympic athlete, but recently I was very fortunate to be asked to take some PR shot of the brilliant freestyle skier James ‘Woodsy’ Woods for Olympus UK.

There was a small window of opportunity, between winter Olympic competing in the slopestyle skiing and world cup practice, when he was in the UK.

It’s not often the weather plays in to your hands but I can honestly say we couldn’t have planned it any better. We were shooting on the amazing rooftop at the ME London Hotel. There had been snow elsewhere in the UK but London was boringly snow free, just cold. But then a few flakes started.

The most intense of weather phenomenon’s hit and suddenly we couldn’t see the London skyline at all for snow. We sheltered ourselves and the gear in the very cool cable car the hotel has and when the worst of the storm passed we continued shooting with the fresh covering of snow adding the perfect level of authenticity to the photo’s of a winter Olympian!

My 2018 talks at The Photography Show

There’s just one week to go until The Photography Show 2018 opens its doors at the N.E.C. in Birmingham, UK. Running from the 17th – 20th March, it’s the UK’s biggest and busiest photography show around 30,000 amateur and professional photographers attending and I’ll be there for all four days.

TPS2016

It’s a great mix of booths from photographic businesses big and small but this isn’t just another trade show, there’s also loads of things to see and do. There’s a constant stream of free demos and talks on various live stages and that’s on top of all the smaller demos on many of the booths dotted around the show.

I’ll be there giving various talks and demos on portrait lighting and photography, so if you’re coming along it would be great to meet you.

Saturday

10.30 am PiXAPRO E91 Out of sight light (Demo)
1:00 pm TPS Live Stage Beyond beauty lighting (Demo)
2.30 pm PiXAPRO E91 One light or two (Demo)

Sunday

10.30 am PiXAPRO E91 Out of sight light (Demo)
12.15 pm Olympus D91 Creative portraits from simple lighting (Talk)
1.30 pm PiXAPRO E91 One light or two (Demo)
3.30 pm PiXAPRO E91 Out of sight light (Demo)

 Monday

11.30 am PiXAPRO E91 Out of sight light (Demo)
2.00 pm TPS Live Stage Creative portraits in tight spaces (Demo)
3.30 pm PiXAPRO E91 One light or two (Demo)

 Tuesday

10.30 am PiXAPRO E91 Out of sight light (Demo)
3.30 pm PiXAPRO E91 One light or two (Demo)

All my demos are free and available on a first come first served basis.

Show tickets are free for professional photographers and the trade (if booked in advance) and £13.95 for enthusiasts (£18.00 on the door)

Limited Color Palette Portraits

Colour can really make an image pop and catch the eye and that’s something I wanted to experiment with in my small home studio. Using some colour themed props can help give the photo’s a high fashion feel and also gives your model something to use in poses. Make up can play an important part in creating the atmosphere, especially for close shots.

In this video we look at how punchy using one strong colour can be. Don’t think that you’ll need awhole rainbow of backdrops either!

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilnJCCmprLs[/youtube]

Gloucester prison group shoot

Going to prison isn’t something I’d ever want to do. But going to a decommissioned prison and having exclusive access to all areas is my sort of event.

Gloucester prison is an incredible location to visit. Its last residents left 5 years ago but luckily Brian and P-J came along to play the part of prison inmates for the day. The cold, small cells with peeling paint may have looked grim but photographically they were perfect and both models really got into character.

Being a winter workshop and with small windows in the cells, we needed extra light to create mood and atmosphere in the photos. The photographers on the workshop got to work with some excellent continuous light courtesy of Rotolight Aeos LED panels and the small but powerful Pixapro Pika200 flashes.

Of course you need more then a great location, great models and great light to take great photos and luckily we also had a great group of photographers. I loved watching them take my original idea and turn it into something unique. It’s not often you get to take part in a shoot like this, so it was wonderful to see so many photographers making the most of the opportunity.

The whole thing was organised by Olympus UK and was open to users of any camera, not just Olympus users. For details of their upcoming workshops check out the Olympus Image Space events page.

 

High Speed Sync Flash

High speed sync is the one flash feature I’ve been missing since swapping to Olympus from Canon a few years back. Yes I could work around it with ND filters or shooting at either end of the day but neither worked as conveniently as high speed sync.

Also known as FP flash or just HSS, flash manufacturers have been slowly catching up and now there are a couple of brands supporting Olympus, Panasonic and Fuji. The first I came across was Profoto but sadly they’re way beyond my budget. Then Godox introduced the TT350o which works like a charm.

[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=jywWCwvf7ps[/youtube]

As you can see in the video above, HSS allows the camera to shoot at shutter speeds far beyond the tradition flash sync speed of around 1/250th sec. The upshot of reducing the exposure time is that you either reduce the ambient light contamination (perfect when shooting inside with large apertures) or if you want to record the ambient and flash together, you can shoot with wider apertures for less depth of field.

The Godox TT350o flash/trigger that I used here is branded as the Adorama Zoom Mini o (O for Olympus… and Panasonic) there’s also a f version as well as a C, N and S version.

Since then Godox have launched the X1T-o also known as the Adorama Flashpoint R2-o in the USA or the Pixapro ST-iii T in the UK

Dramatic lighting with just two speedlights

So you only have two bare speedlights and you want to shoot some creative portraits. That’s the challenge I faced recently after discussing how a fellow photographer could get started in portrait photography without spending too much on new equipment.

Don’t get me wrong, bare speedlights will obviously limit how you can light your subject and won’t beat better strobes and a choice of light modifiers but I figured that if I can generate the initial excitement for shooting portraits with basic kit, the rest will grow in time.

So with a bit of help from model Fern we dusted down the Red Riding Hood cape and set to work.

I started by putting the two lights either side of Fern, at 90 degrees to the camera and in line with her shoulders. I carefully made sure they were evenly spaced and that Fern was evenly lit. The end result was a bit too much contrast but very dramatic.

 

Next I spun the lights around and pointed them at the white walls of my studio. The light was bouncing off the walls which simulated the look of light coming from a source much bigger then a small speedlight. Bigger means softer when it comes to light but it also means more spread and sure enough the photo looked much flatter.

 

I turned the light back around. If you want a sinister look, put the lights low. It’s not a lighting position I regularly use but in this case it felt right. However the direct light from the bare flashes still looked a bit too harsh for my taste.

 

To soften the light a little on Ferns face I kept the lights low but angled them up to the ceiling. The result was a mixture of hard light and soft light that worked perfectly for the look we were going for.

For more information on the shoot and the post processing, check out the video below
[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKNSqE8sdrc[/youtube]

Film Noir in a small studio

How do you sum up the film noir style? For me words like dark, moody and sinister would be fitting but there’s a lot more to it then that. There’s the style both in lighting and subject matter to consider too.

I always think of Film Noir as being high contrast, black and white scenes lit with hard light resulting in strong shadows. Rightly or not I also think 50’s style crime drama and that’s what I set out to produce in my small home studio.
[youtube]www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9o1Pc6uDRU[/youtube]

The trick here was to set my main light low and hard (No softboxes or umbrellas) That gave great shadows from the Venetian blinds and the up light gave a sense of menace, as well as the subtle feeling our hero was on a higher floor looking down.

The rest was down to Styling. So asking Brian (the model) to have a bit of stubble, giving him a bottle of whiskey (or cold tea in this case) and of course, having him hold a vintage kids cap gun all helped set the scene and tell the story.

The Photography Show 2017 Lighting Demos

The Photography Show (TPS) is the UK’s biggest and busiest photo event and last week I was lucky enough to be there for all four days. But I wasn’t there to shop, network and learn. I was there to teach.

In all I did 17 talks, demos and live streams in four days, so TPS 2017 was a super busy event for me. Along the way I met with some wonderful photographers, so if you stopped and said hello then thank you.

Most of my demos were with PiXAPRO lighting and below are some of the photos from my “Beyond Beauty Lighting” demo. The photos below are straight out of camera and give you a fair idea of what I was showing.

My idea was to set up the “classic” clamshell or beauty lighting with a softbox above and a white reflector below. Once done I then added a background light to take the mid grey background up to a light grey and then pure white. Once there I added a prop or two to style it out.

Next I added various coloured gels to the background, added two speedlights behind to “thin the face” finally broke the golden rule of photography by asking the model to hold the speedlights and point them at the camera. The result was unpredictable, random and fantastic fun! OK here’s a few more of both models with just a light touch of editing.

I worked with two models supplied by PiXAPRO over the four days. Ayla and Rosa both worked incredibly hard to make not only demos work but also the other PiXAPRO photographers who also worked the stand.

If you were one of the lucky few photographers who saw my demo AND got a chance to test out the lights with Ayla or Rosa I’d love to see what you shot… leave a link in the comments below.