I was approached by Donnie Bishop’s Co-Owner Jason Sandhar to come up with a theme for a shoot with Reinaldo. With Donnie Bishop Clothing being such a casual/dressy urban style, and Reinaldo being such a skillful professional footballer, I wanted to bring the two elements together with a Street Football feel. Brisbane has some great alleyways in the city, and these provided us a great environment for the theme. Anna and I inspected the alleyways the week before the shoot to formulate some ideas. Its amazing what you can learn about your city if you just go for a walk with your camera and get lost in the back streets.

We decided to do the shoot on a Sunday afternoon as A) Reinaldo had time to recover from him Friday night match and B) the streets would be a little quieter. The majority of the shoot was done with 1 Cactus KF36 strobe on a shoot through umbrella mixed with available light. Oh and here is a tip for if your planning on doing a shoot in alleyways anytime soon. Take a towel to lay or sit down on as there can be a fair bit of broken glass and generally yucky stuff in the alleys.

Reinaldo was a champion subject for the whole shoot. He had a very relaxed attitude to the shoot and it is apparent in the photos. His football skills are amazing, the ability to juggle a football with those square toed dress shows was awesome to watch. I was somewhat star struck to be shooting such a great athlete.

Checkout more pictures and the clothing @ – www.donniebishopclothingco.com

Our friends Jayne and Simon are expecting the birth of their first child this Friday, September 11th 2009.  And before its a little too late we headed out for a maternity shoot.  Not only was it my first maternity shoot but it was also my first non family shoot and well my first ever outdoor strobist attempt.

Zack Arias has challenged us to Serve someone with our cameras, in such a way that we as photographers will break free from our self criticism of “ I’m not good enough yet.”

So after a little research online at flickr looking at maternity photos and sending links to Jayne to gauge the style she was after, I needed a location. My wife and I had spent the previous weekend scoping out general landscape photography locations at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Cootha. Turns out its also a great free and very diverse location for such a shoot.

I decided to go with a 1 light setup. A Vivitar 285 with a 43 inch shoot through umbrella setup on my monopod. Anna my wife helped out as a voice activated light-stand and more importantly she continued to encourage me throughout the whole process. I doubt I could have pulled it all off without her support.

We had 6 distinct locations selected at the gardens and we started in the Japanese Gardens. It had great natural light that I wanted to make good use of first. To tell you the truth I was absolutely terrified and didn’t know where to start. once we reached the gardens. Where should I sit them? Should they sit? What angle will I shoot from? How do I make them feel comfortable? So I just sat them on some open grass and just began shooting. I just asked them to sit and talk and ignore me. About 30 frames latter my brain clicked, I was checking my backgrounds, composing frames with the rule of 3rds in mind, making sure they didn’t have trees or other objects jutting out their heads. The months of reading about what to look out for while shooting just became 2nd nature. Then I found myself conversing with them encouraging them and hopefully making them feel comfortable. I guess its just like Joe McNally says “The Moment it Clicks”. That book has been a great resource of mine since August. Well recommended no matter what your level of ability.

Here is a small slide-show of shots from the afternoon. I ended up presenting them with just over 100 processed image. All post processing done in Adobe Lightroom and a few minor edits in Photoshop.

Stay tuned for a blog on my voice activated light-stand monopod rig.

The first assignment for this year was to take a nice headshot of someone unemployed or similar that they could use on their resumé so as to stand out from other applicants.

So my subject for the shoot was my wife Anna who is just about to finish a Masters of Environment – Education for Sustainability. She has been applying for relevant jobs like crazy and has had a few interviews of late that she has finished up 2nd best even though the relevant HR Departments couldn’t give her a decent reason why she was just overlooked for the position considering she fulfilled all requirements well. I nice headshot on her resumé may be just what she needs.

So I had my subject but now I had to decide on how I wanted to shoot her and where. Considering Anna is in the environmental field I wanted to give her a natural and warm look. The assignment also happened to begin while we were preparing to go on holidays to the bottom of Australia. At first i was worried the holiday would stop me from getting the assignment done but then it dawned on me. We are going to a massive national park with prehistoric ferns. What better environment to shoot in to convey my subjects passion.

It was getting late into the afternoon and we came across this perfect location for the shoot. I wanted to have Anna backed up against the tree and have the ferns in the background.

Gear for the shoot was:

• Canon 40D
• Canon 50mm f1.8 mk2
• Remote shutter control
• Canon 430ex
• Home made light mod(shown below)
• Cactus remotes
  
• Tripod for camera
• Voice activated light stand

With the camera in manual mode I set my exposure to 1/200th and an aperture of f1.8. My ISO was set to 400. I setup the camera on my tripod right next to the ferns trunk seen in the location shot. I then used myself as a voice activated light stand to camera left shooting the flash (1/32th power) with my mod through the ferns branches.

I don’t own a light stand or umbrella yet and there was no way I was going to bring one with me to the other side of Australia on holidays. So it was now time to test my newest flash mod.

Yep that’s one massive yogurt container converted into a diffuser sort of thingy. I have been keeping a keen eye on the container ever since my wife bought the yogurt. After a nice clean and removal of the label all I needed to do was make a nice X cut to the lid and BAM.

After a few test shots I had something i was liking and it was Anna turn behind the camera. I made sure she set the focal point to my leading eye and using the shutter remote she held the flash in a similar area to where I had it and lets just say us photographers are not great at smiling of que. Anna did get a few laughs out of me and she has done very well considering the complexity of the situation.

Next time I may use an aperture of around 4 or 5.6 so as not to blur as much of the background ferns. Also the addition of a 2nd light would be a luxury so as I could have a rim light for our heads to stand out more from the tree. Anna’s blonde hair was a savior here. But overall I’m very happy with my first ever headshot and my first proper go at a on location shoot. This is what Strobist boot camp is all about, pushing our boundaries and exploring the awesome world of off camera lighting. Bring on assignment 2.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/06/22/headshot-boot-camp-ii/feed/ 3 http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/03/27/my-first-self-portrait/ http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/03/27/my-first-self-portrait/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:16:52 +0000 Scott http://www.thephotojourney.com/?p=287 Well I have seen plenty of self portraits of people in their bathrooms (Clothed thankfully) on flickr in the past. Mainly used for Avatars but also a way of finally getting their mug out there. So I decided to give it a go after doing some product photography the other night.

I wanted to have a photo that displayed the camera as the core subject and me as merely the driver. So a nice amount of DOF was required. The lens choice was easy, as for a greater DOF I needed a larger aperture setting. So out came my Canon 50mm f1.8 II.

As you can see from the photo I was using my Cactus wireless remote to fire my Vivitar 285 flash with my small homemade snoot with grid (I’ll blog about this soon). It was to the camera’s right and about as high as a toilet. Why the interesting height well that’s where it was sitting. I had angled the flash towards the back right-hand corner of the small room. By bouncing the flash off the wall and roof the light will spill over the camera and not leave a massive flare in the mirror. You will notice plenty of people on Facebook and Myspace have self portraits with massive flares in the mirror. This is from on camera flash. It looks crap.

So the lighting was sorted. It was time to throw the camera in to Manual and set the Vivitar 285 to 1/16th power the lowest setting possible. I set the camera to a shutter speed of 250 and the aperture at f1.8.

I positioned myself outside of the bathroom perfectly head on to the small 40cm wide mirror, but I had the camera body inside the bathroom.

For the Autofocus points I selected the centre focus point only. This made the camera the focal point not me. If I wanted to set myself as the focal point I would have selected the left corner focal point.

As you can see in this photo the door frame is intersecting my hand so its no good. Its actually not a bad photo otherwise. I needed to shift myself left. Now I had positioned myself correctly and just needed the correct relaxed look on my face.

Because the photo was taken in a mirror I needed to flip the image in Photoshop. I also gave boosted the sharpness and saturated certain colours like the blue in my shirt. Using the burn tool I tried to patch up the brightness on my arm. I still have a lot to learn about post processing but hey its a start.

Next time I do the shoot I would probably check my background wall, as the framed photo kind of annoys me. Also the brightness on my arm is something I would be carefull of. Otherwise I’m very happy for a first time attempt.