Manchester photographer Paul Cox's website and portfolio

Marilyn inspired shoot

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 10:10 pm

It’s been a while since my last blog post, largely because my time has been taken up in other areas. I’ve now returned to photography though and have been fortunate enough to work with 8 fabulous models over the last month. My most recent shoot though was with Ashley-Jade with whom I’ve worked on a number of occasions. Unfortunately (for me at least!) our opportunities to work together were interrupted by her move to LA and, more recently, the birth of her son.

Having watched the film ‘My week with Marilyn’ I was keen to try some looks inspired by this icon and Ashley-Jade had just the look I wanted. So here are the images we managed to capture.

The images were taken either on my Nikon D3 or, my new toy, a Sony Nex-7 in the latter case I was using the legendary Nikkor 105mm AiS which is fully manual and definitely ‘interesting’ when you’re used to the modern comforts of autofocus but perhaps adds a touch of authenticity.

Mid way through processing I decided to try out Adobe Lightroom 4, this was quite a big step for me as I’ve always used Phase One Capture One and previous attempts to use LR were initially frustrated by a lack of camera profiles and, later, by poor dual monitor support. I still prefer the dual monitor workflow in C1 but LR4 allows me to work with my filter software (Alien Skin Exposure) without leaving the application which is a major time saver. I even ended up trying out the Blurb integration this evening and printed a book!

I very much hope you like the images.

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by paulcoxphotography

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Autumn Photography Workshops

Saturday, September 24, 2011 9:09 am

In October I’ll be launching a couple of new workshops, these are available for booking in the workshops section of the site but thought I’d discuss them in a bit more detail here. On the 1st October I’ll be launching a new water photography workshop. I had to stop doing my previous workshop when I changed studio as I no longer had access to the derelict space I was using. This new workshop is set in a traditional studio but I build I temporary set. This has practical advantages in that it’s clean, warm and there is access to the kind of facilities you’d expect in a studio. I’ve not had a huge amount of time to play with the new set as yet, but Emma and I had an hour or so the other day and managed to get these images

For all you Strobists out there, I used speedlights for the above images so you don’t need expensive lights and modifiers to create similar images.

You can book on to this workshop here

The next new workshop is on the 16th October and develops the techniques from the original dance workshop, this time with a street dance theme. I’ve wanted to shoot more street dance for some time now and it’s great to have the opportunity to do so in these workshops. Full detail of this workshop is here but here’s an example of the type of images we’ll be capturing.

Last but not least the original dance photography workshop will be returning on the 30th October. Full details of that workshop are here

Places are limited on all these workshop so get in touch if you want to come along!

Posted in Gear, Training, workshop

by paulcoxphotography

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How I use light

Saturday, April 30, 2011 9:58 pm

My lighting style is largely defined by the environment in which I shoot. If I were based in California I’d no doubt be trying to make best use of the brilliant sunshine they enjoy. As it happens though I’m in Manchester, a rather less sunny place, but I still want the natural light to feature in my images. This article explores how I’ve gone about exploiting the natural light that we do have and balancing it with flash.

My previous favourite location was a disused space at Islington Mill (check out the link, there’s some cool stuff going on there) this was a pretty dark space even on the brightest of days with quite small windows. It was possible at times to use some of the larger windows as the key light such as this example

But more often than not the natural light was playing a supporting role such as in this example

To a great extent even these basic images were made practical by my choice of equipment. I’ll be writing in detail in future posts about my equipment choices, but using a camera that works well at high ISO, wide aperture primes and an aversion to tripods all contributed to this developing style.

Over time I began to use natural light more creatively to try and distinguish my images from the norm and a previous post demonstrates how I used gels to warm up daylight in my images.

Laziness was another factor in my developing style Up to this point I had been using mostly my studio lights within the studio at the mill. The studio was on the 2nd floor, the disused space was on the 5th floor and there was no lift and the availability of mains power was variable at best. Suffice to say that after a while the novelty of carrying up all my studio gear wore off (not to mention gallons of water and other kit for some shoots) and I sought out alternatives. For me the most effective combination was a Quantum Q flash, a large 2 metre PLM brolly and a special flash mount to exploit the combination to it’s fullest. I’ll be covering each of these in separate posts but the resulting light was ideal for full length yet still quite contrasty and specular. Add a small amount of smoke and my images were now starting to look like this

In this space natural light was therefore used mostly to add notes of interest to the image with flash usually being the key light.

It was time for a change though and I relocated much of my studio shoots to another old mill. This time with a much greater amount of daylight called Hallam Mill. As you can see, daylight wasn’t really an issue here

The challenge now was the extent to which (if at all) I’d allow daylight to dominate the image. This next example is shot in a similar place to the one above but dials down the daylight considerably

Natural light images also became much easier and I can use my preferred style of placing reflectors in front of the model reflecting daylight from behind thereby giving beautiful back-light on the models hair

As well as the Q flash I increasingly used speedlights and I’ve long since sold my studio lights in preference for battery powered alternatives. Even in a traditional studio I feel comfortable exploiting the advantages of speedlights to give me the effect I want such as freezing movement.

For me one of the key advantages of battery powered flash is that they can go to very low power to allow them to be easily balanced with even the dimmest daylight with the use of ND gels the light can be even further diminished if needed.

I now teach this style of lighting to others enabling relatively low priced equipment to be used to create exciting images that not only replicate expensive studio gear but also have the potential to add something a little different to images. Future posts will explore individual lighting set-ups in detail and others will consider my equipment choices but I hope you found this a useful overview. Please use the comment feature below to ask any questions or to request specific areas to be covered in future posts.

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by paulcoxphotography

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Using the Eye-fi card with the Nikon D3 update

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 6:14 pm

Since I published my first blog post about ‘tethered’ shooting from the Nikon D3 to the iPad, using the eye-fi card, shuttersnitch and a battery powered router it has become a regular part of my workflow. Sure there have been frustrations along the way, not least the ease with which I seem to lose the router just before I’m heading off for a shoot! I’ve also been slightly frustrated at the need to balance the speed of transfer with the JPEG image quality.

So what have I learned along the way? Well first of all, if you’re going to be checking your focus carefully on the back of the camera don’t use the ‘basic jpeg’ setting as even shooting in RAW+ JPEG mode the image displayed on the back of the camera is the basic jpeg and it can be quite disconcerting when you zoom in to find the image quality so low. I’ve recently been using the ‘standard jpeg’ but could often be waiting in the region of 20 seconds for the image to appear. That said it was usual at the end of shooting a set of images to only have to wait for the last few to download. The ability for models and other clients to look through the images on the iPad is an absolute boon. At workshops I find, quite often, that photographers who began as sceptical of both the iPad and wireless transfers are ready to order both by the end of the day.

The latest iteration of the software is pretty stable and brings with it a new limited mode which allows you to offer the iPad out with greater confidence to clients without the fear that they may delete the images or mess around with settings.

D3s and D700 users are, I’m afraid, out of luck as Nikon in their wisdom have decided to only provide a type 1 CF card slot on these cameras and the adapters require a type 2 slot. Quite why Nikon decided to change the card slots when upgrading from the D3 to D3s I have no idea as the body seems otherwise identical. D3 and D3x users are both provided with the correct type of slot. Following the excellent article on Rob Galbraith I modified the adapter as they suggested which did seem to improve the range.

What has really caused this update is not so much Shuttersnitch but the free update that Eye-Fi have recently launched for all their X2 cards which provides a new ‘direct’ mode which purports to do away with the need for a router.

Frustratingly I’ve been away from home for the last few days and couldn’t try it for myself but I did note that the forums were alive with folks having issues with the update and the launch (on a Sunday) didn’t seem to be handled particularly well with cards being advertised and sold as supporting direct mode but it not being available and when it did launch it only went to those who bought the newer cards and at a time when there were no support people online.

It was with fear and trepidation therefore that I plugged the card in to my macbook when I got home and downloaded the (now fully available) firmware. I activated the direct mode and altered the settings so that the network was always available and would always listen. I switched off the 3G data on the iPad and asked it to ‘forget’ my home wifi network. After I took a photograph the iPad recognised a new network which began with the words ‘Eye-fi card…’ I clicked on it, entered the password (which I’d forgotten intially to note) and sure enough….. nothing happend. A reboot later, still nothing. Just to be sure I clicked on ‘set-up eyefi access’ within shuttersnitch and ensured it recognised that images were to go to the card. In the end I killed the app by double-clicking the home button, tapping and holding an icon, and pressing the red minus-button on shuttersnitch. I restarted it and, hey presto, it was downloading images immediately.

A 12mp fine quality jpeg was downloading in around 10 seconds, a RAW in around 20. This is at least twice as fast as I was getting using the router most of the time. Although I’ve always advised against using RAW and wireless cards I’d actually consider it now. Most of the delay seems to be writing to the card and rendering the image on a 1st generation iPad. No doubt these times would improve on an iPad2.

I then moved further away from the iPad with the camera, my fear being that it would lose signal. So far I’ve been 8m away from the iPad without problem and I’ve even shot upstairs and it’s appeared on the iPad downstairs.

So far so good then. One of the great features of the latest version of Shuttersnitch though is the ability to upload images automatically to Smugmug (Flickr, FTP etc. are also supported). I can’t yet find a way of doing this when direct mode is activated. The wi-fi connection is taken up with the eye-fi card and when I activate 3g and try it the app crashes. I’ll raise the issue with the developer but this may be a hardware limitation I guess.

Following a further update by the developer Shuttersnitch on a 3G iPad will now receive an image from the Eye-Fi card over Wi-Fi and then upload it to the web by 3G – very impressive!

I’m overjoyed with the new direct mode and it will ensure Shuttersnitch and Eye-fi become an ever more important part of my workflow.

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