Firemonkeyphoto

If you go down to the meadows today….. (Wild Hunt)0
neil posted in Photos, Neil on October 31st, 2008

 

More fire rehearsals0
neil posted in Photos, Neil on October 30th, 2008

 

Another night of “not quite”. I tried a different lighting setup, but needed to be more careful with flash recycling times. The aim was to get a nice controlled beam of white light from fourty five degrees camera left for faces and a half CTO’d light coming from the reverse. Shooting fire requires you pick your aperture for the flames and then make the rest of the exposure up with flash. Using a long shutter speed the flames get to make shapes and the flash burns a sharp face onto the image. The problem is, with a fire ceremony full of movement and two groups dancing similtaneously, its hard to get your flash power to be sufficient. In order to do so all of the strobes were running maximum zoom at full power. To stop lighting the grass the strobes were gobo’d and angled up. This leads to a very tight “lit zone” where light falls off dramatically either side of the beam. You must be careful to meter your flash from a subject actually in the beam. Even a slight error in placement could lead you to blow out skin tones when you catch them moving through the beam. You can see the lighting actually working like I intended in the below image.

Samhuinn (rehearsals)1
neil posted in Travel on October 27th, 2008

Blundering to Brest6
neil posted in Travel on October 13th, 2008

A little more stream-of-conciousness than normal, written all day and uploaded from a shabby but pleasant hotel room in Brest.

I’m hammering these keys onboard the early morning Eurostar to Paris, currently stationary in St Pancras station. The Eurostar experience so far has been good, if a little strange. You must first go to a booking hall, or play with a machine to obtain your tickets, then you must “check in” using an automated barrier and pass through airport-style security. It all feels a bit weird for just hopping on a train, but not unpleasant. The waiting lounge is tasteful dark wood, leather seats and work desks. Unusually one section is reserved for bus-stop style seating, I guess in case you should feel unduly comfortable. Inside the actual train is bizarre, it’s the nineteen eighties does sci-fi. Styled by Volvo, coloured by British Rail and with a rattling bin where a powerpoint would be on a modern train. Not unpleasant, just bizarrely dated after state of the fashion St Pancras. The intercom reminded me we’re off to Paris, in case someone slipped by the security with a ticket for Clapham Junction. We’re off now into London’s dim night, I do hope my battered Carhartts are chic enough for Paris!

The Paris Metro reminds me of the pictures I have seen of the New York subway. The trains are boxy and square and plunge through semi-lit tunnels decorated with enthusiastic if boring graffiti. Some of the stations looked remarkable; one in particular used projectors to put text on the curving white tiles of the tunnel. The metro saw me through to Montparnasse and onto a thoroughly modern TGV. Some joker has a “peer to peer” wifi network running on the train named Free Public WiFi, a trap if I ever saw one. Someone else who has’nt figured out that they’re in France yet…

Rather thank fill up my blog with text about this non-photo trip, I’ll add further updates in the comments section. The photos I take can be found here.

Seb Rogers photo course7
neil posted in Photos, bikes, Travel, Neil, Trails on October 6th, 2008

For the third time this year, my kit is soaked through. I’m pretty sure I’m smuggling more than the allowed 100ml of water through airport security in the fabric of my camelback. For the third time this year, I’m looking forward to looking at some photographs I have made in distinctly inclement (diffuse was the word of the workshop) weather with an enthusiastic group of people. Chase Jarvis talks about the “energy” of a shoot and how important it is to have “positive energy” and that made this workshop work and the weather a boon rather than a horror. Seb Rogers’ mountainbike photography workshop brought together a group of people with this energy and Seb’s coaching had us all working a little outside our comfort zone and thus learning. This is my first ever photography workshop and the first time I have seen my full take from a shoot for the first time in front of other people (excluding Alicia). This left me feeling surprisingly exposed, even though I consider myself a confident photographer. It made me want to tighten up my technical game even more and left me discussing how strong technical ability is key in good creative photography.

Seb coped well with a group of mixed ability and did’nt have to say much negative in a critique to make you see what you were fouling and how you could fix it. Several of the people at the workshop had’nt touched manual exposure mode and had’nt used a histogram in anger before and left the workshop with a brace of confidence enhancing manually exposed images in difficult circumstances. I would consider myself happy with those elements, but Seb pulled me up on an over-reliance of autofocus and thus the dull composition and loss of sharpness generated by using AF on a fast moving subject. I’d rate my Canons AF as awesome, but when pushing the limits the cracks begin to appear. In a motor driven burst, it will find focus for some shots, but sometimes that meant I was making do with a shot where it locked in, but the rider was’nt quite where I wanted them. It also gave me a better peg of ‘where I am at’ and an idea of where the next level is. That’s the most precious of information to any photographer.

The workshop was taught with discussions of technique over tea and flipchart, shoots out in the Quantock hills and nightly reviews of that days haul. The shoots were all conducted on local singletrack at locations within riding distance. For that purpose I had rented an Iron Horse mkIII comp mountainbike, a capable steed that lacked the spark of a mountainbike I’d buy. The riding was good natural singletrack with steep loose climbs and entertaining, varied descents. There were sufficient root and roll kickers to pop into the air at will along with technical low speed root work. Being a photo workshop there was also an inordinate amount of time spent at water splashes. Tame “Rent-a-Whippet” Mike Davis (of Bike Magic fame) tested his foot waterproofing to its limits with endless ride-thrus. When he was’nt modelling he was guiding the riding using suspiciously climbing language. I’ve never ridden up a “steep pitch” before. Jeff (Jethro) also pitched in on one watersplash, demonstrating his ability to perform endless manuals on his prototype Sanderson singlespeed. I got a few shots on the Sanderson, a bike that continually whispered “Play with me!” in my ear.

The weather worsened over the weekend and almost stopped play on Sunday. We did make it out in truly horrid conditions and that is where this positive energy made the shoot. All of the factors were combining to make it miserable, people were carrying wounds, dog tired in ceaseless torrential rain. Despite this everyone was grinning and calling tough shoots in the low light. For some this was a first shoot with remote flash. We worked in pairs to prevent the onset of cold and were soon riding under trees and up rivers. Jeff was a kick ass subject and his bright red waterproof on a white bike was perfect for the saturated green of the forest.

Seb runs a good course and good folks go on it. Does the idea of a weekend of mountainbiking, photography and chatting over a beer appeal to you? More photos from me here. Seb’s blog here. Email him to get workshop info.