Comfort Food

I was ill yesterday. Some sort of man flu 24 hour virus thing. This meant I was generally useless and spent much of the day in bed watching rubbish TV.

Well this morning, although I felt a lot better I still had the mentality of being slightly ill and wanting some comfort food. So I rustled up some boiled eggs and toasted soldiers.

As I was waiting for the water to boil I suddenly had a thought. One thing that a lot of aspiring photographers complain to me about when I tell them to shoot more, is that there's "never enough time". I always tell them that's nonsense, you make the time! I was looking at how I'd placed the egg cup on a small plate on the kitchen table and how the light was coming through the window and suddenly thought it would make quite a good food shot (something I don't really do much of). So I rushed and got my camera ready for when my eggs were done.

Now here's the most creative I had to get for this shot! I decided I was only going to put 1 of my 2 eggs in the shot to keep it neat, but because I'd boiled 2 eggs, I'd also toasted 2 pieces of bread. This was far too much so I arranged several of my soldiers next to the egg cup. Here's the resulting shot....



I did about 5 shots from various angles in about 10-20 seconds. Then I shoved the rest of my regiment of soldiers on the plate with my 2nd egg and stuffed it in my face.

So next time someone tells me they don't have the time to take more photos, I can tell them it only takes a little bit of thought and about 10-20 seconds!

Difficult Combination

There are certain things that are just a nightmare combination to take photographs of. I had one of those combinations yesterday. I was at a car shoot, and had to take some photos of a white Nissan S15 Silvia. Ok, white car isn't too hard. This car had black wheels though! This meant trying to maintain a good level of detail at both ends of the histogram. Next add to that reeeeeeeeally bright sunshine.... so bright in fact that I couldn't see the back of my camera without finding some shade and you have your nightmare combination!

The only way I was able to get the shot was to underexpose the car by half a stop so that I retained all the detail in the bodywork, and then light the front of the car and the wheels with off camera flash.



And there you have it... 1/200sec @ f/18, ISO200. Flashes had to be on full power with one in front and one to the side of the car.

Here are some of the other cars I shot...

Back to back

A bit off topic today, but for the past 8 or so years I've has persistent pain in my lower back. It usually comes from being in one position for too long... sitting in front of the computer is the worst culprit!

Well a friend of mine is a qualified massage therapist and had a look at my back the other day. She told me I should go and visit the doctor as the base of my spine appears to be fused far higher than it should be.

Well I went to the doctor today and I've now got to have my back x-rayed to find out exactly what the problem is.

Hopefully it'll be the first step to getting rid of this pain!

It's all about the eyes!

I've had a couple of models say to me when on photoshoots that I move the camera after focusing. This is because I'm focusing on the eye of the model and then recomposing the shot.

The reason for doing this is that we naturally seek out the eyes of a person when looking at a photo. Even when using an ultra shallow depth of field where most of the photo is out of focus, as long as the eyes are sharp, the photo will appear to be in focus.

On the subject of eyes, I shot these images yesterday of Louise Newbery. I find her eyes amazing and almost unnaturally huge!

Website Redesign

I've just finished uploading my new website. I wanted to put more emphasis on the images, so now the front page has a large image which is selected at random using a cool javascript code I found on google.

It also has a direct link to this blog as well as to my videos on youtube, so should hopefully enable people to really get a feel for what I'm all about.

Anyway, if you haven't already, check it out and let me know what you think.

Vice

Vice are a new R&B/Pop group about to be launched here in the UK. I was hired to do some promotional shots for use on their new website.

I used a fairly straight forward lighting setup for the shoot. I had a Canon 580EX II with a shoot through umbrella as my main light. I then used a Canon 430EX bare to give some side lighting. Using the speedlites enabled me to underexpose the ambient light to create more of a moody atmosphere. Everything was fired using pocket wizards.

For more information on Vice check out www.viceofficialsite.com or www.randrmusic.eu

Check out this behind the scenes video of the shoot, which also features a soundtrack by Vice themselves.

Urban Strides : Shake The Room

Urban Strides were performing in Basingstoke in Shake The Room, a platform for youth entertainers. The venue was a small intimate theatre which gave a very different feel to the previous arena tour venues.

The greatest challenge I faced this time around was my positioning. During the technical rehearsal I had free reign to run about in front of the stage. However, because the stage was fairly low, I couldn't do this during the actual performance as I would have created an obstruction for the audience. This meant I had to shoot from the wings at the side of the stage. Initially I thought this may have given me real problems with the theatre using large amounts of smoke, but I managed to get a few good shots.