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July 1st, 2009
While walking late one morning in Castlefield, I happened across some guys practicing parkour on the steps leading down to the canals near Liverpool Road.
I happened to be carrying a Nikon D3 and its nine-frames-per-second glory. A perfect (and lucky) match.
I got to talking with them and they were happy to have me do a few shots while they practiced their moves. They were rehearsing for a short movie one of them was making in which I eventually had a role. If you ask me, I nailed the role of “Man on Bench” and I was robbed when I received no awards.
But I digress…
I had never really seen anything like this in person before let alone photographed it, so I was in foreign territory. Looking back on it, there are a number of different ways I could have approached the situation, but I do find this method interesting.
Click to see a larger version on flickr:
The largest version is here.
With those nine frames per second blazing through the D3, I opted to follow the progress of this jumper without a tripod. I thought it might convey not only his movement, but also his movement within the environment. I’ve seen a lot of sequence shots with a stationary camera, but not as many where the camera is allowed to track the subject. I think either way could have worked and I probably would have played with both methods given the time and a more formal setting.
Putting this together in Photoshop is just a matter of getting all the individual photos onto layers, positioning them roughly and then masking off the bits you want to keep or discard from each layer.
June 29th, 2009
Last year, I was in Cape Town, South Africa for a couple weeks on a product shoot with work. It was a hectic schedule though – it left almost no time for seeing the city. That was a bit of a shame, of course since Cape Town is a captivating place with a lot to explore.
The top of the list of things to see is Table Mountain. Ok, you can’t help but see Table Mountain if you’re in Cape Town; what I mean is to see Cape Town from Table Mountain. It took until the last night of my two weeks there to get the chance to ride up the cable car with a camera in hand and gaze out at the magnificent views of the scenery below.
It’s a rather astounding place and I imagine the person in this photo has found nirvana. Perched on a rock high above the city, the sun gleaming in the sky and an endless ocean stretching into the distance – that’s contentment.
Click to see it larger on flickr:
June 28th, 2009
I decided to play around with more high-speed macro photography and since I did water the first time, I thought I would go with a different element: fire.
With a fast shutter speed to capture the flame and some low-powered sb-800s to the left and right of the match stick (stuck straight up with a tiny bit of blu-tack), all that’s required is another lit match to ignite the subject.
A lot of matches went up in flames and this one turned out the nicest. Click the image to see it larger on flickr.
And of course, soon after it burns out, a match looks like this.
June 27th, 2009
On a quiet Saturday where I have little to do, I bring you a few peaceful images to help bring about some tranquility.
These were all shot on one of my trips home to Canada in the Rocky Mountains. Banff National Park and its surrounding areas may host a lot of tourists, but it remains wild. It’s not just the wildlife that occasionally will cross your path for either a welcome photo opportunity and connection with nature or a terrifying reminder of the dangers one can face in the forest if not cautious. There’s more than that. There’s a sense that if you walked just a little too far and didn’t pay attention to the way home, these wide lands could swallow you up, for better or worse.
Somehow, to me that wild, untamed nature is visible even just ordinary stretches of river. These are waters that haven’t been dammed or overfished or harnessed in any way.
Click the thumbnail to see three at once:
Or see each of them individually on flickr here, here, and here.
June 24th, 2009
Today’s photo of the day is another addition to my food photography portfolio. This time, it’s some strawberries tumbling through the air.
This shot is one of the better ones that resulted from a number of tosses of the bowl into the air. Things could have gotten a lot more messy if it weren’t for some padding underneath covered in garbage bags. That kept the strawberries from getting smashed every time they were thrown (and kept the bowl intact too.
Click the thumbnail to see it larger:
Lighting info: One sb-800 towards the back left, an sb-600 adding some fill from the left side and the main light was an sb-800 to the right and above. All of them on a fairly low power to be able to stop the motion.
June 22nd, 2009
One chilly March morning, a couple nights after a rare English blizzard, we drove along back roads near nameless sections of Hadrian’s Wall. The sun dashed in and out of the thin, high clouds. The cold didn’t deter us from stopping the car and walking along a random ruined stretch of the former Roman wall.
The visit was all too brief and Hadrian’s Wall deserves far more than the couple clicks it got from me on that abbreviated morning stroll. I would happily take on a project of landscape photography in that area. That would mean early mornings in isolated countryside watching and waiting for the light to change over rolling hills intersected by a centuries-old stone echo of history. Sounds like a good way to spend some time to me.
Click the thumbnail for a larger version or see it in the landscape section of my portfolio.
June 20th, 2009
Given that I am currently attending the Redeye Photographic Symposium which is being held at Chetham’s Library, I thought I might post one of my old images from the photo shot I did there for the Royal Exchange Costume Department.
More images from the shoot here.
Lighting info: Model was lit by an sb-800 shot into an umbrella to the left. And I think that may have been it. There was a window out of frame which would have been giving the light light coming from the back right.
June 18th, 2009
A short while ago, I worked on some nice food photography and the theme was chocolate. We had the chance to go for some dark and moody shots and we took it. The trend in food photography these days leans towards very bright backgrounds so it was good fun to buck that trend and do something a bit different.
I may have had the ideal stylist to have on a shoot featuring chocolate: she didn’t like the stuff! Me, I was drooling through most of the shoot and probably put on a couple pounds after all was said and done.
The results of the shoot are below. I can narrow my favourites down to five or six of these shots. They have been added to my food photography portfolio, so you can see larger versions of the best ones there.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these images in the comments.
June 16th, 2009
Since yesterday’s photo of the day was from the studio, today’s will be from out in the big, wide world. This is, after all, a site focused on travel photography. (I hope you like the studio work too – it pays the bills after all!)
This swimming giant is a white tiger at the Singapore Zoo who was treading water in the hopes of getting some of the juicy meat the keepers were tossing to the beautiful beasts.
Click the thumbnail for a larger view or see it on flickr here:
More photos of the Singapore Zoo.
More wildlife photos in my portfolio.
June 15th, 2009
Last week, I posted a shot of some water drops after I was inspired by this strobist post on how to photograph water drops. I liked my results, but I was pretty sure I could do a bit more with it.
So, in the interest of pushing myself, I thought, “No, I don’t have to just drop water…”
Here’s my favourite shot. Click to see it larger:
I stuck with a liquid theme, but rather than just dropping some liquid, how about a container for liquid? And rather than just have said container simply ricochet off its landing surface (a piece of black perspex, in this case), how about it lands on the saucer that would normally accompany it? Smashing.
On reflection, I could have dropped the cup and saucer together, but I had a couple reasons for dropping the cup onto the saucer. First, it made a good target – I could line the saucer up in camera and be sure that if I hit it with the cup, it would be in the frame. Second, I was working by myself and had to both trigger the camera (with a little remote button) and drop the cup. Adding a saucer into that equation might have made things a bit too cumbersome for me.
I like both the overall composition and the details of this shot: the off-centre cup, the sexy splash coming out the left side, the surreal splash rising upward that looks like it was being poured, the large shard on the left that is rising just off the surface, the pulverized mess beneath the cup, the random little fragment escaping in the top right…
I ended up doing about eight to 10 of these shots in one morning. Each smash lasted a fraction of a second. If only the cleanup lasted that amount of time.
Lighting info: One sb-800 on 1/16th power below the set and aimed at the background. Another at camera right and above on a very low power (I think it may have been right down to 1/128th). A bounce card at left of the teacup to fill.
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