I’m an R2-D2 fan and though it would be great to create a shot of R2 escaping from the Skywalker’s moisture farmer in search of Obi-Wan Kenobi. I had some old R2-D2, C-3Po, & Chewbacca figurines that I got as a kid from Pizza Hut. They had been sitting in a box for 10 or so years.

In the cover of darkness grabbed a handful of sand from the spare block up the street from us. It was very weathered and almost like concrete in some spots. Much like the planet Tatooine’s surface.

I then  folded out m trusty multi-purpose ladder and placed 3 wooden boards salvaged from a crate across it. Poured a fair bit of sand onto the middle board in a mound formation and began brushing the sand around my little R2 unit with an old tooth brush.  The base of the R2 figurine is bright yellow so I needed to cover this up.

Then it was time to setup the camera and tripod. Lens for this shot was the Canon 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. Reason for this choice was that I could try closer up and wider shots without the need of changing my lens. Tripod was setup so that the camera was in a portrait position at about the same height as the boards.

I then placed my Vivitar 285 flash at the back left of the sand mound at 1/16th power. I placed an orange gel that I had picked up from reverse garbage shop a couple of months ago. The flash was directed at the white brick wall in the garage, and positioned so that the hotspot of the flash would be to the left of the composed image.

To light up R2 and give him a shadow I used 2 LED lights that I have for our mountain bikes. One was aimed at the sand and the other was held above left pointing at R2′s head and gave a nice shadow behind him.

Camera settings were

• Exposure: 1/250
• Aperture: f/6.3
• Focal Length: 85 mm
• ISO Speed: 400
• Vivitar 285 set at 1/16th power with orange gel

Post Processing in Photoshop CS 2

• Cropped image a little to place R2 on a vertical and horozontal 3rd
• Auto Contrast
• Saturated the blues a little and decreased the light level for blues by just a little
• Added curve layer, small S bend
• Sharpened image
• Added a small border by adding some guide lines and then using the paint brush with a soft edge I painted a white thin line around the edge except where the text will be
• I then added the Text R2-D2 and centered it

This weekend I plan on doing another Star Wars themed shoot once I find which box my model Tie Fighter is in. I have a few ideas for it that I have drawn up on some paper. I might scan that and upload it too.

For all things Star Wars check <a href=”http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/R2-D2″>Wookieepedia</a>

Any questions please ask in the comments or contact me via the Contacts page.

My laptop is still down and out so these edits have been made on the wife’s machine only using Photoshop. I prefer to use Adobe Lightroom2.0 for my edits as it allow for a better work flow and is much easier to do a bulk bunch of similar images.

Once again any athletes wishing to get digital copies of the images please contact me via the contacts page and supply me with your race number. I have uploaded more to my Flickr Page and will keep on uploading of the next 2 weeks.

This was my first ever attempt at a panning shot. Running athletes are not the easiest  to track while panning as their running action is rather accross yet they move up and down. Something you wouldn’t get with cars and bikes. I hope to have a tutorial on panning up over the next few weeks.

With this shot I was trying for a technique called balance. There are 2 main concept for a balanced photography. The balance in this shot is that the foreground runner is in his set position and the background athletes are also in a similar position. This photo is actually my weekly entry in a favorite site of mines competition. Digital-photography-school.com has a weekly competition and this weeks theme was balance. Check the other entries here.

I would have preferred that i got the athlete looking up but mst of these guys keep their heads down till well out of the blocks. I also would have prefered to have his back foot in the image.

Australian Olympic Silver medilist Sally McLellan who actually won the women’s 100, 200 and 100 hurdles. I have quite a nice set of her start in the 200m sprint and will upload a time lapse soon. Some people have remarked that a crop on this shot would be nice so once my laptop is back in order I’ll give it a go.

Matt Davies the  100 and 200 Qld State Champion. The backgroup is rather annoying but I quite like the body shape and determination on his face.

This was the event I was hanging for. Its one of my track favorites, the steeplechase. I swapped my 70-200m lens for my kit lens the 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. I got some interesting shots but due to the lack of a larger aperture my backgrounds are a little sharp. I’ll upload a series of steeple hots soon.

Both these girls meant business in the 200m final.

More uploads and some time lapse photo’s latter this weekend.

Have a good one and keep shooting.