Self Portrait

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Great Photoblog - [daily dose of imagery]

I’ve recently been adding a lot of new photoblogs to my Google Reader in a bid to find a bit of inspiration and to keep up with the Jones’s, as it were, and one of them in particular has stood out above the rest.  I’m not a massive fan of the site design (though looking at the images from Google Reader means that isn’t a problem), but the images are excellent, providing a marvelous insight into modern city life.

Check it out if you get a chance … [daily dose of imagery]

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Some shots from the walk to work

Here’s some shots from my walk to work.  I walk from Liverpool Street Station to Lavington Street, just behind the Tate Modern on the Soutbank.

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A studio, three lights and a reflector

As promised, the lighting setup from this post.

It’s a fairly standard setup I supposes.  The shot above doesn’t actually give an accurate description of the final setup, it’s just the only shot I had that showed all three lights.  The actual setup used for the final shot is described in the lighting diagram on the left.  The backdrop light was mounted on a floor stand so as to be out of the way.

All the flash heads are Bowens GM250 units. The backdrop is a grey colorama roll.

I really shouldn’t try to write blog posts while I’m watching movies.  It makes it hard to concentrate!  The Iron Man DVD just got released and I’m getting it out of the way. So far so meh. Robert Downey Jnr is good for the role, but there’s hardly anything in this that sets it apart from the roller deck of bland comic book adaptation movies we’ve been forced to endure these last few years.

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A portrait techique for getting both smiles and thoughtful expressions

This is my buddy Ross. I’m doing a website for him at the moment and he wanted a few formal shots taken to go on his bio page. As with quite a number of the shoots I do, the actual shots that meet the brief of the project aren’t that interesting to me. They’re professional and functional, but don’t say anything interesting.

So to satisfy my creative urges I take a few shots while I have a victim under the lens, of which this is one.

One cheeky way to get a nice thoughtful looking pose like this one is to suggest a technique for getting a natural smile to the subject.  By looking away from the camera for a moment before the shot is taken, you explain, taking care to keep an neutral expression on your face and then only smiling when turning to look at the camera, a healthy natural smile is achieved, helping to avoid that held-too-long-forced-smile that everyone is so keen to avoid.  This technique actually works quite a lot of the time, but it has the added benefit of allowing you to snap off a shot of your subject looking thoughtfully off into the distance in between smiles.

The setup for this shot was to use three Bowens GM250 studio strobes.  One with a softbox camera right and in front of and pointing at the subject, one through a snoot camera left and to the rear of the subject to give the edge highlight on the left of the subject’s face and head, and one on a floor stand with a beauty dish to the rear of the subject pointing at the backdrop to give the glow on the backdrop.  I’ll post some shots of the setup soon.

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Balancing ambient light with another source

In this shot, I’ve combined the ambient light in the room with an external flash unit (Canon 580 EX II) that’s placed to the left of the scene.  The flash unit is lighting the subject (my Mum ), while the rest of the scene is lit by the ambient light, which is basically that lamp on the shelf, although there was another light on in the kitchen but it wasn’t really adding much light.

Now why would you want to do this, you may ask.  The problem is that the ambient light isn’t enough to light the scene evenly.  If you expose a scene like this so that the subject is correctly exposed, the settings will have to be so open that you will over expose the lamp on the shelf.  If you expose so that the lamp on the shelf is correctly exposed, the settings will be so closed that the subject will appear in darkness.

To overcome this, you introduce another light source that you have fine control over and then balance the exposure settings on your camera with the power settings on the light source to achieve the overall exposure you’re after.

As I’ve said, I used a Canon 580 EX II flash head as my controllable light source - the method for achieving the balance is as follows:

1. Make sure the flash is off
2. Take a reading that will expose the ambient light (in this case the lamp on the shelf at the back) put your camera into fully manual and set your camera to those settings.
3. Then turn the flash on and take test shots, adjusting the power of the flash until you’re happy with the balance between ambient and flash.

Of course, you don’t need to use flash.  You can use any kind of light, as long as you have pretty good control over how much light it can put out.

In the image below, my other source was the sun, which was setting to the left of the scene and lit my brother up nicely.

I don’t of course have control over the power of the sun, but it’s a legitimate source of light!  Use it any way you can

For lighting techniques like this, and much more besides, head over the Godfather of external flash lighting David Hobby’s Strobist.com site.

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The eyes can’t lie

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A coffee, cigarette and morning chat

I pass the Monmouth Coffee Company every morning on my walk to work.  This little bench is a prime spot for morning commuters to get their early fix of caffeine and have a quick read of the paper or a friendly chat.

The Monmouth Coffee Company is one of those lovely places that makes you feel weird because everyone who works there seems so happy.

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The Tools of the Modern State

The image above is an old image taken in 2003, when I was studying part time for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and History.  One of the courses was called ‘The Rise of the Modern State’, and this image of a security camera framed by barbed wire, taken outside Queens Road Peckham train station, where I lived at the time, resonated with Max Webber’s influential definition.  This image was shot on film, with a cheap Minolta - my first SLR - and was scanned in and edited in photoshop.  I think the film I used was Illford Delta 3200.

The image on the left was taken last month, five years later than the image above, which I state only as a way of outlining my own surprise at how much has changed and how much hasn’t since then, changed in life in general and changed in photography.  This more recent image was taken using a Canon 350D, my girlfriend’s camera, and was processed using Adobe Lightroom 2 (which is a buggy piece of shit and not worth the £80 I shelled out for the upgrade).

These security cameras are interesting to me.  They are ominous and portentous, representing the darker side of modern governance, at once necessary and the beginning of the end.  So much of what they represent comes across in the way they look in photographs; emotionless and mechanical, like the machinations of the bureaucracy they serve.

The inspiration for this post came at least in part from stumbling across this excellent blog covering the protests at the 2008 National Congress in America - the images are really excellent, featuring the work of Tim Hussin, Noah Rabinowitz and Danny Ghitis.

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August - a write-off

In August, the following happened:

• I moved in with my girlfriend.  We found a nice flat in Dalston and took the plunge.  It’s worked out lovely in the end, but it’s been remarkably disruptive.  The flat we’ve moved into is a new build, so we’ve had to deal with a tonne of niggling teething problems, almost all of them centred around utilities companies refusing to believe you exist because your post code doesn’t show up an address in their computer systems.  British fucking Telecom have been the worst offenders.  We moved in on the 26th July, and yesterday, the 6th September, we had our Internet finally turned on.  Trying to get BT to do anything was a total nightmare.  It was only after Natasha, silicon.com reporter and afore-mentioned girlfriend, threatened to write a negative story about our experience that they finally pulled their finger out and sent an engineer round to install a new line, a service they charge a staggering £130 for.
• I had my appendix removed!  On the evening of August 5th, I developed what I thought was just bad wind, but upon doing several loud farts the pain refused to subside and by the time I was doubled over in agony at about 2am I conceded that something more serious might be up.  I went down to A&E and within 24 hours they were knocking me out and cutting me up.  That put me off work for 2 weeks and it’s only now that I’m starting to feel OK again.
• I stopped smoking.  I’ve smoked Marlboro’s since I was about 15, which is near as damn it half my life.  Well having gone into hospital, where smoking is somewhat frowned upon, I decided that having had the break in habit forced on me, I might as well give quitting another go.  So far it’s been pretty good - not a single puff in 5 weeks.  However, my body has gone into shock in the last week as it pushes 14 years worth of tar and toxins out of my lungs and I’ve had a really bitching head cold and cough.

Now why are you interested in any of this, you may quite legitimately be asking yourself right about now, and the answer is that you probably aren’t and that I should stop waffling.  I just thought I should explain why my newly created blog has had such a tumbleweed feel to it for the last few weeks.

August was a write-off.  Events overpowered my ability to do anything productive and I’ve done very little but move house and then get better.

Well, I’m back now, and of a serious mind to start making images again, so expect more regular updates from here on in :)  I hope you had a better time in August than myself.

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