Switchphotography have been kind enough to invite me to their studio in Ford, West Sussex. We have the wonderful Kayt Webster Brown as model and an excellent makeup artist. There are 6 places available and 2 have gone already, get in touch with Switch if you’re interested. Link to their studio page is here
Last Sunday I met up with Chrissie for a quick shoot in Dunham Massey. I’d hoped for a glorious sunset but ended up with a rather overcast evening, I’ve not done a lot of work outside recently so this gave me an opportunity to try out a few ideas with the aid of Chrissie’s partner who was an excellent flash / reflector holder! Anyway here are a few samples from the shoot, please let me know what you think.
show 3 comments
I’ve recently started doing one to one training, now that I have more time in Manchester and easy access to Hallam Mill Studio. Yesterday Dan came to see me for some help with lighting. He had many years of natural light experience but wanted a little help with flash. We were lucky enough to have Carole model for us, we’ve worked together before and you can see more of our images on my Flickr Stream
We started out with a basic headshot and built up the lighting to include key, rim and fill until we ended up with this
I took the iPad with me and we found the ability to see the images on there, transmitted from the camera by the eye-fi card, really useful. You can read more about this set-up on my earlier blog post here
We then applied the skills learned in the headshot set-up to other settings such as full length and 3/4 shots such as this one.
All our lighting was done with Strobist style kit, using small ebay softboxes, Manfrotto Nano stands, Nikon SB800s and Alien Bees PLM brollies.
One to one training can be tailored to your particular needs so any photographers that are interested in something similar please drop me a line. The training and studio time is only £45 an hour and you can either supply your own model or I can find one for you with no mark up.
show 1 comment
You often see posts about using CTO (colour temperature orange) gels in images to add a bit of warmth to certain parts of the image. This is a really good suggestion and it also makes the background look more blue as well. However what I wanted to do was to make rather dull natural light look more interesting by creating a ‘sunset’ effect. Trouble was, if I ‘warmed up’ the natural light by dialling in a lower colour temperature the light from the flash got warmer too. This is where CTB (colour temperature blue) gels come in, this will make the flash light appear blue (a higher colour temperature) and if you balance your image to this blue light then the natural light will look much more orange creating the sunset effect. Add a smoke machine and, perhaps, an unfiltered rim light (to put a warm rim around the model) and the effect is complete.
The great part about this is that it can be done at almost no cost, assuming you have some sort of off camera flash. The Strobist gel pack is about £10 which includes several strengths of CTB as well as a wide gamut of other filters at a size that will fit most flash guns. If you have studio lights then a sheet of CTB gel will run to less than £5. I’d suggest getting a quarter CTB that way you can layer the gels if it’s not strong enough.
To get an approximation of what the image will look like in camera I turn the colour temperature up as high as it will go (10,000) but shoot a grey card so that I can set the colour balance correctly later in Capture One when working on the RAW files. I’ve put a few examples of images using this technique below but you can see others on my Flickr stream here
show 3 comments
One of the things I like to do during workshop is show students the images as I take them. So far this has been achieved by taking a Mac mini and NEC Spectraview screen to the location and shooting tethered with a long USB cable in to Phase One Capture One. This set-up works great but getting it to and from the location is a pain (literally!) and the USB cable is quite limiting. I’m considering doing some workshops outside in the near futre and this set-up would be unworkable there and I didn’t fancy forking out for a Macbook Pro just yet.
Enter the iPad. The iPad is a device that’s simple and intuitive to use, has a great screen and battery life and is therefore, ostensibly, ideal for tethered shooting. There is a major problem though in that tethering to cameras over USB is not supported even with the camera connection kit (which is great for normal transfer of images off cards by the way).
A new piece of software is available in the app store though called Shuttersnitch which allows you to transfer images to the iPad wirelessly either by using the proprietary wi-fi adapters from the likes of Canon and Nikon or the increasingly popular Eye-fi SD cards. This is where I hit another ‘gotcha’. Eye-fi cards are available in SD format only and I shoot with a Nikon D3 which has 2 CF card slots. I did some research and discovered many tales of woe about users not being able to get the cards to work, especially the new X2 models with Canon cameras although many seemed to struggle with the D3 also. The cards aren’t very expensive though so I persevered and obtained an SD to CF adapter from ebay which stated it had been tested with the Eye-fi card and a 8GB Pro Eye-Fi card. I went with the pro version in the end because although RAW and ad-hoc connections are not supported in this setup at the moment they may be in the future.
The lack of support for ad-hoc connections is the next gotcha. This means you have to connect from the camera to the iPad via a router and is a limitation of the iPad at present. Fortunately though I have a Three MiFi device which acts as a battery powered router and I decided to put this in my pocket to allow location shooting.
With more than a little pessimism I started to configure the card by connecting the supplied SD card reader containing the card to a spare USB port on my Mac. I’ll not go through the full set-up process here as it’s covered in detail elsewhere on the web but it’s fair to say it took a reasonable amount of patience with the software, firmware and Adobe Air all demanding updates and the software refused to register my account stating that the password could not be used. As it turned out the actual issue was with my email address which, to prevent spam, I prefer to use a slightly unusual format for. It would have been nice for the software to let me know that this was the issue though rather than complain about the password.
I then took the card out of the reader, inserted it in to the adapter and then put the adapter in to the D3. Before shooting I changed my settings so that the second card slot (where I put the Eye-fi) only received a basic jpeg with the raw being stored on the card in slot 1. I also changed the settings so the meter didn’t go to sleep and the camera monitor kept on for as long as possible (many of the issues reported online were due to the camera going in to sleep mode).
I then took a photograph. Much to my surprise it transfered to my Mac first time! After a couple of more tests I followed the instructions here and sent the upload key to the iPad via email, copied and pasted the code in to the Shuttersnitch settings, opened the application and took a photograph. Nothing happened. I quickly realised my mistake, I needed to open a new collection and after I did so I tried again. Still nothing. However closing the application and opening it again resolved all connection problems and it’s worked every time since.
One of the frustrations in traditional tethered shooting with Nikon cameras is that you can’t also use the cameras LCD and images are only stored on the connected computer with no option to also store them on the camera. The eye-fi card overcomes these limitations but in doing so introduces a slight delay in to the process which is the time it takes to download the image to the card, it then initiates a connection to the iPad and sends the file across. This means there is a slight delay from taking the image before Shuttersnitch starts to download the image. In testing though, other than the first shot, I found it took about 7 seconds for a basic jpeg if the previous image had been full downloaded. If I shot a series of images in quick succession they took longer, obviously, but all did get downloaded and each appeared on the iPad as it was received. Sending RAW files is supported by the card and Shuttersnitch will receive (but not display) raw files. In my view though this is pretty much a waste of time, at least for my purposes. The download time is in the region of 30 seconds and, even if I could get the iPad to display the image, I believe it only renders the embedded jpeg. I will therefore be shooting with just basic jpegs at the moment, but for more critical work jpeg fine only takes 12 seconds or so.
Overal I’m very pleased with the set-up. It’s very unintuitive compared to pretty much everything else about the iPad. It’s more like going back to Windows XP (or even Linux) in some ways as you have to bring several things together to get it to work but work it does! Please put any questions in the comment section and I’ll try my best to answer them.
show 23 comments
by paulcoxphotography
no comments