Anyway: two speedlight set up, one low camera right at 1/4 and one high camera right at the back as rim lighting at 1/16 for the alley shots. You can see the backlight in the landscape orientation. It was pretty much full sunlight at 11 am but luckily the alley provided for a bit of shade.
About a month ago I posted what my travel kit would look like and I braved the jump and really took only that with me to Oz this year. I know I've said it before but I love the EOS M! While visiting my cousin's new house in Melbourne I convinced a couple of family members to have their picture taken in the alley around the back - Melbourne is full of these back driveways and alleys and I'm looking forward to exploring some more of them. Anyway: two speedlight set up, one low camera right at 1/4 and one high camera right at the back as rim lighting at 1/16 for the alley shots. You can see the backlight in the landscape orientation. It was pretty much full sunlight at 11 am but luckily the alley provided for a bit of shade. Moved to the carport to take a headshot of my cousin, needed to get a shallower depth of field so I had to up the shutter speed a little - lucky my flashes sync up to 1/250s! Let me know what you think! Comment here, on facebook or twitter - I will definitely reply.
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The Park+Ride garage at Mödling train station is very sparsely frequented on weekends so we decided it would be a good location for some promo shots - Time for Pride is reinventing itself and has new band members so new pictures were urgently needed! Unfortunately it was pretty damn cold with icy wind blowing through it so we ended up rushing through a few pictures. All in all we managed to get some good shots in and I'm hoping we repeat the experience sometime when the temperatures are a bit warmer! One of my all-time favourites in town? I had to be there! I've loved these guys since the early 90s and I am so glad they endured through the ages! I was there early enough to get a few promo shots in before the support acts started. ((szene)) doesn't have too many places with space so instead I opted for a really enclosed space: the anteroom of the stage. I set up three Speedlites and while I was looking at what to do with them exactly my friend Jerzy suggested I use the big circuitry cupboards as a reflector. (By the way: you should really check out Jerzy's site. He's a fantastic photographer and a great guy as well!) Anyway, here's the setup: So, set up ready, all I need is a band. Eventually Rob and Ted (guitars) show up, closely followed by Damien (bass). A few minutes later Mark (vocals) also saunters in. Now we wait. Apparently we need a drummer too (I did want to have a picture of the WHOLE band after all). Much searching goes on and phones are not an option because Will doesn't turn his on due to the high roaming costs. Julia the tour manager goes out to the bus twice and can't find him, although Rob is convinced he must be asleep in the lounge area. On the third try it turns out he was there after all but had his hood on and was thus cleverly camouflaged! OK, just a few minutes to get this done and then get the hell out of the way of the first support act! Here it is: Then on to the live show, which was simply awesome. These guys have lost absolutely nothing over the last 25 years and they played a great mix of old and new (thanks for bringing out new albums by the way!!!). I moved around a bit during the show so I got a bunch of angles - especially closeups of the Beastman Mike behind the drums! Full set is here. Days Of Loss urgently needed some new band pics as they are about to launch a CD and I was happy to oblige as always! We arranged a 6pm meeting on Thursday at the Schemerlbrücke - a really cool bridge close to home I use quite often to evade traffic. Of course it turned quite cold a few days before and the wind on and around the bridge made it a freezing endeavour... In any case, I set up Speedlites on the walkway to the left and had one on my Gorillapod attached to one of the girders on the right. It was a hit and miss sort of thing because we had to jump out onto the road part between cars and I didn't really have too much time to explain exactly the poses I wanted because it was so cold! In addition, having seen some of their other media material, I added a green tint to the backlighting to give a gloomier / more industrial look to it - the pictures are for their CD booklet and media around their CD. Using Color Efex Pro I added only the tint and reduced it on their faces and clothing. We then moved about 50 metres away from the bridge, facing the train station at Nussdorf. I got the guys to sit in their van to warm up while I set up the next shot - I thought I'd like to try floodlighting it with my car's headlights. That gave me two flashes to use as backlights and one to light up their faces from the front. It was just starting to snow lightly but it was the wind that was really my worry because we had three guys with long hair who were going to fight with keeping it out of their faces. Anyway, messed about with the settings to let in enough ambient but wanted to overpower and really have bright subjects. Here's what I came up with: I'm quite happy with this shot and I like that there are some snowflakes visible in the flash at the right edge of the picture. I got plenty of backlight in which is what I was going for and you can still see the train station and the rails so it gives you a good sense of where this was. I really love how the ground is all lit up by the car's headlights.
Ursula runs Bodyreflections - Body and Mind, a Pilates studio/program which can be found at bodyreflections.at. Some new pictures were needed and the idea of possibly making a calendar for 2014 was thrown around, so we set up some shots in the gym studio: A quick look behind the scenes reveals the lighting: I edited in a few different versions, the bleach bypass / cool background / warm skin tones look at the top as well as a black and white version: Finally we also did a few portraits of Ursula on a black background. For this I changed the lighting around obviously. I used a reflector umbrella as a key light camera right and then shot a rim light from behind camera right as well as focusing a hair light camera left.
I love Iced Earth. I really do. So I was quite a happy chappy when I saw they would be in Vienna again and supporting Volbeat on a huge tour which meant they would be getting to use the big stage they deserve. In addition, my friend Jon Dette is playing drums for them now, so I got to see him too! I met up with him a bit earlier as he is wearing a load of Archetype Apparel gear at the moment - so we got a few shots of him in one of his new shirts just before soundcheck. Before the show I did a bit of promo with Iced Earth while the first band of the night was playing. It was done behind the stage and unfortunately it was completely dark down there so I had to use my phone to shine some light into Stu's face in order to get a focus point. I messed it up on the first couple of shots where I tried to focus one and then set to manual focus and keep shooting - that wasn't a good idea as it turned out since I must have moved a bit and the first shots were out of focus. The next set of pics worked though as I just kept my phone up with one hand and shot with the other - it also gave the band something to look at in the dark. Here's one that didn't make the final cut - the final pics will be used in press and marketing material. Lighting info: one 600EX Speedlite as backlight, 1/2 power, two more camera left and right at 1/8 and 1/16 respectively. 35mm, f/4.0 at 1/125. Ambient light: zero. The show itself was awesome. Iced Earth was really appreciated by the Vienna crowd and played a wonderful set which also included some new stuff from the upcoming album. Of course I didn't actually get to see too much of it because I was running around the venue! I have posted only 10 pictures as the rest may be used in material as preparation for their headlining tour in 2014. Of course, Volbeat also produced a great show! They started off with a banjo player right at the front of the stage and I was just getting really close with a wide angle lens when the first set of explosives went off right in front of me. I had seen "fire" written on the setlist but I didn't realize where it was going to be! The other photographers in the pit, the security guys and the first five rows of the audience all had a "whoa" look on their face which must have mirrored mine! Full set of the gig here. Michael from Volbeat is a huge Iced Earth fan (and personally asked Jon Schaffer to do this tour with them) and so it is particularly cool that he plays the song Iced Earth with them every night and then Jon comes on to do Pool of Booze during the Volbeat set. They have great chemistry on stage. All in all a fantastic evening which I thoroughly enjoyed!
Christmas will bring the Advent markets to the melarium and a little advertising is necessary. My friend Roland needed a picture to put in various media and the idea was to bring across a warm cosy atmosphere inside but have the bee products in the foreground. In order not to have to mess about with the colours too much, I faked a cool white balance with the camera by shooting a test shot through a blue gel. I then used the gel on the flash for lighting the products and thereby had a warm background but neutral foreground. Not sure which picture will make the cut but having high resolution certainly helps as any crop can be used!
So I went to play wheelchair rugby with my friend Shadi and his team at the rehab center Weisser Hof up in Klosterneuburg yesterday and had a really great time - apart from the fact that my arms and shoulders are hurting something horrible today... Anyway, I also shot a couple of portraits and did something completely new for me: used my itty bitty EOS M with the 22mm pancake lens which translates to 35mm. I had the 90EX Speedlight mounted on the camera and used it to trigger a 600EX-RT at camera right which I had put a blue gel on to get a harsh and direct light. I wanted the gym in the background underexposed but visible and I wanted the fluorescent lighting to shine through a little. I used Nik's Color Efex Pro to run a bleach bypass and a blur filter for the edges. I dialled down the flash slightly for this second one and let more ambient in, but ran the same processing on the image. I like both of them though!
What I learned though is that I will be taking my EOS M with me on trips as a travel camera but I won't be giving up my ability to use off camera flash. Since I don't want to travel with the 600EXs, I will look at getting two cheaper slave flashes to have with me. Throw in a set of Strobist gels and the whole kit still fits in my laptop bag! enlight photo came to my attention as I was looking for better hotshoe adapters to hold my new Canon 600EX RTs. They're expensive hotshoe flashes so I don't want them falling off light stands due to me being cheap and trying to use the standard Canon adapters delivered with the flash. The frioTM coldshoe adapters are simply awesome and well worth the moderate investment. I feel really comfortable using them on light stands or my Gorillapod - there is no doubt as to the safety of my flashes in my mind. Here's a pic I took yesterday of Patrick and Carina with a two light setup: the primary flash was shot through an umbrella and gelled orange to give it a bar/cafe feel - the secondary flash was used as fill and shot up at the white ceiling of the cafe we were in. And here's a quick pic of the frioTM in action!
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My Photoblog
Just a place to log my photographic activities and share some thoughts. Archives
November 2015
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