Making the image: Autumn Adventure

This is a shot I've had planned for a while. I even did a drawing!

Perfect!

I had the idea while doing my first child portrait shoot. I had the basket for one shot and had bought some balloons for another... it just seemed the obvious thing to do. I wanted it to have an autumnal feel and of course I wanted my niece Millie to come play photos with me.

I had a location in mind, I bought all the props I needed, for some reason I felt really self concious buying 4 meters of rope from B&Q. Once I got to the location I knew it wasn't right. I spent the rest of the day driving round the Lincolnshire Wolds looking for one that would work but to no avail.

5 weeks later I finally found the time to try this one again... this time in my sisters back garden.

Laura assisting me as always

Making the image: “Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.”

A few weeks ago I woke up with an image in my head. I don't mean to sound pretentious by that but I literally did. I jotted it down on my phone so I didn't forget. Looking at the note now I can't believe it's taken 44 days to get this done!

5:24am is an ungodly hour!

The idea was a bit daft and random. I originally saw it as someone sat on a chair with a canvas crudely smashed over their head and someone else casually painting them. 

I didn't really have a good location, an art class would of been perfect, or an artists studio, but they wasn't available to me. So I had to have a re-think.

So the new plan was to have myself coming out a modern art canvas, as if I am the painting. I would be reaching out to Laura and she would have paint on her cheek where I had just touched her.

I can't paint, but fortunately neither can most modern artists. So I whipped this modern classic up in 5 minutes.

 

I was trying to convey my inner most fears in this piece... you're probably not deep enough to get it. 

 

The first element I needed to shoot was Laura in position with the canvas on the wall. I really fucked up with the composition, the canvas is almost centre and Laura is cropped off! I'll go into this more later.

I only had two flashes, both the cheap yet incredibly good and reliable Yongnuo YN460ii. 

You can see from the above image I had one in an octobox umbrella with a grid to give that nice rim light around the front edge of Lauras face.  It really helps her stand out and give definition to her. I think the final image feels almost like we are both popping out the picture, the rim light is the most important part for achieving this.

The second flash is in a beauty dish between the right of the camera and the left of Laura pointing directly at the centre of the canvas. It wasn't gridded but did have a diffuser cover on it and gives a nice gradual spot light effect on the canvas as well as lighting the left side of Laura (a reflector was used to fill this in also).

 

Once I got the shot I moved the octobox out the way and took a clean shot with no lights or people in frame. 

Now for my part! I knew the easiest way to edit this would to be to have me actually coming out the painting. I needed to recreate the lighting set up I had elsewhere and lower down. I jotted a few rough measurements down so I could match both the lighting positions and the angle the camera is to the canvas.

 

I wasn't looking forward to the painting myself part. I used face paints on my face and then the paint I used for the canvas on my arms, chest & neck. The hair I would sort in photoshop!

All I could think of was the woman who died in a James Bond film of suffocation because she was painted gold... I didn't want to die this way! lol.

So covered in paint with arse crack on show I squeezed myself through the canvas loosing my dignity in the process.

They edited together with not too much fuss. The matched light worked perfectly. I did make a bit of a stupid error in that I had the canvas at a different rotation to what it was on the wall although this didn't cause a problem.

With the image finished I wasn't happy. As I mentioned before the composition was crap! I looked back through my images and found one with Laura stood further forward so her back was in frame. I decided to try and extend the right hand side of the image so I could crop away some of the left to give a more pleasing composition using Lauras back from the out-take shot and extending the wall by simple stretching the wall from the clean shot I took using the free transform tool.

Much better! I would post the first edit but I don't actually have a copy of the file... 

Oh look! Here's a pretty gif.

A note of the title, it's got bugger all to do with the image, it's (one of the many) quotes I like from an awsome book I'm reading called 'Shantaram'. Anyone read it?

50 Shades of Gary

'Gary regretted asking Laura what her new book was about.'

The re-editing of ‘old’ images is not a process I’m keen on. When you shoot and edit an image it represents where you are in that moment of time, both in your abilities and your way of thinking.  

Yesterday I re-edit one of my old images, a photo I took 583 days ago! The reason is pretty exciting, I was contacted last Thursday about the possibility of using my work in a new book on self portraiture. I’m not sure how many of my images will be used or to what extent but having only previously been published in a magazine in India I’m over the moon.

The image that brought my work to their attention was one I uploaded to flickr on 23^rd January 2011, week 4 of my 52 weeks of humiliation project. They asked me to send some of my self portraits across with some details so I sent some of my newer and in my opinion better work. I got an email back asking for this image too.

Not a problem, I love the concept of this image, it still makes me laugh! Almost 7 thousand views on flick isn’t bad going so people seem to like it (although I’m sure Lauras arse helped with the stats.) Even though when I shot it I barely knew how to turn on my camera, and this was in fact one of my first experiments with off camera flash, apart from being a little underexposed the RAW file isn’t too bad.

The edit however is pretty awful. Underexposed, dull highlights, distractions that could easily be removed and horrible HDR’d skin tones. So I thought I would start afresh.

No HDR this time, I’ve been HDR clean for months now and never felt better. Using the exposure settings on the RAW file I exposed twice, once for Lauras legs and once for me and blended together using a layer mask.

To make sure the viewers eye went first to my face and then followed my eyes to Laura I need to remove some distractions. I’m lent up a cupboard, on top is a load of crap and above is a light wall. The clutter on top I should of dealt with while shooting, that’s laziness and lack of experience, but I decided I was going to get rid of the whole wall as your eye stops there first. Also the white skirting board is far lighter than anything else in frame, I contemplated extending the curtains to the floor but decided to just tone them down, I feel leaving them in gives a definition to the room and where I am.

So my new edit isn't massivley different, just a few minor tweak with exposure and a little after thought on the composition & what's in frame... But is the new edit better or should I of left it as it was? What’s your view on re-editing your old work? I'd like to know peoples thoughts.

Here's the original... (new at the top)

Smoke Bombs...

 "Just hanging around in a shed full of smoke in a dress... like you do."

How much smoke does a smoke bomb let off? A LOT! That’s what I learnt creating this shot.

Laura was kind enough again to let me use her as a sexy crash test dummy in my attempts to become better at model portraits. I seriously don’t see this as where my future in photography lays but I want to improve none the less.

Yet again the ‘Urbex Shed’ was my location. I was unsure about using the smoke bombs here, the roof is full of holes and I could imagine if smoke started pouring out the roof of my shed in the middle of town it’s not going to attract the right kind of attention…

I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve. Laura stood just inside the door, with a gridded light on her from the front and a big light source coming through the door behind. The smoke was required not to look like the place is on fire but to make the light from outside show up better.

Once I got the lights set up (see below for details), I prepared the smoke bomb! I figured I only needed a little smoke so I would need to put if out before it filled the shed and alerted the attention of the emergency services… I taped the smoke bomb to a stick and filled a mop bucket full of cold water.

I lit the bomb, wafted the stick around like a camp wizard and then shoved the stick deep in the bucket… Oh… that doesn’t work! How can a bucket of cold water not stop it from smoking?!?! If anything it smoked more, the shed filled and I ran outside with my witches’ cauldron and attempted unsuccessfully to put it out…

The bomb ran its course, the back door to my house was open, downstairs was filled with smoke, the area I live in had a burny smelling blue haze in the air for the next 20 minutes. No firemen came though so all’s good!

Anyway, no one cares! I’m babbling.


Lighting:

 I used 2 lights for this shot. To light Laura I used a YN460ii in a gridded octobox over head on a boom looking down at her. It was maybe 2.5 meters away from her.

The second light was through the door, just a bare YN460ii pointing back into the room we are in and hitting Lauras back. Although I didn't get quite the look I was after, (light rays cutting through the smoke), I still think it looks pretty cool and I like the rim light that seperates her from the dark environment.

The Edit:

I know I know! Where's the smoke? This was my favourite shot... it was also the 3rd from last one and the smoke had mostly cleared. Fortunately I had the camera on a tripod so all the shots were composed (almost) the same. The smoke I used was actually from a shot the front light didn't fire on due to slow recycling time...

I brought the highlights in the dress out as it was a little flat. The only real other work I did was curves, some dodgy dodge & burning and colour toning.

Northern Off Road Club Comp Safari at Manby Motorplex

Mud! I love it. So spending Sunday afternoon ankle deep in the stuff, traipsing round an old airfield, one eye on unexploded bombs and the other on beastie 4x4 monsters is my idea of fun.

Only a few miles away at Manby Motorplex (yours for £3.5 million) was the 'Northern Off Road Club Comp Safari'. I’ve done some motor sport photography before, a rallying event at the same venue last year and several trips to nearby Cadwell Park, this however was quite different.

With the racing much slower, apart from on a few straights panning wasn’t really going to be doable. Plenty of splattering mud leant for more interesting shots than what a simple pan on a tarmac straight could offer.

Also, you got free reign of where to go. No barriers or restrictions meant your life was in your own hands, as Weebs found out after he moved away from the outside of a bend only for the next car to fuck up and plow straight through where he was stood. Yikes!

I managed to get a few shots… as always with things like this, a lot of the same! But if you like this kind a thing I hope they will be of interest.

**More to follow**

Urbex Safari - Gorilla

I feel like I'm always saying it but I'm in a rut. I'm short of drive with my photography at the moment, I never seem to have the time... I'll not dwell on that any more in this post, I may write my thoughts down about this in a future blog. Lucky you!

So this is the first photo-manipulation I've worked on in a while. It wasn't particually planned and I didn't realy give it the time it deserved although I'm pretty pleased with it... just feel there could of been more.

The "Urbex Safari" theme may become a little project. I shot a few animals during a trip to Longleat safari park a couple of weeks ago, not as many as I had hoped because my car over heated... in the tiger enclosure. Scary stuff! So I had to put my foot down and get out quick, I must be the quickest person round in the history of the park. Tigers, lions, cheetahs and wolfs all missed because steam was pouring out my bonnet and I was soiling my pants!

I'm not going to go into details about the techniques I used. I'll leave tutorials to more talented people who's results are better and actually know what they are talking about. Instead I've made a GIF! Will my talents ever cease? Yes.

See the shot on flickr
See the shot on 500px

Untitled Self Portrait - Before & After

Where I live is currently in the middle of a drought so naturally it's rained all week. Unable to get any of the shots I was hoping too I went for a quick play in my "urbex shed". 

Gear:

Canon Eos 7D
Sigma 17-70mm f2.8
Yongnuo YN460ii (x2)
Gridded octobox

Settings:
Focal Length: 28mm
Shutter: 1/125
Aperture: f/8.0
ISO: 400

It's not the most spacious area but it does has some cool walls for back drops.

The lighting set up for this shot was pretty simple. I had a YN460ii in a gridded reflective octobox umbrella…thing, above the camera. I was just over 1 meter away from the camera with another YN460ii on a stand, bare, right behind my head facing the wall that was about another meter away.

The Edit: