May 25th, 2013

Fake it ’til you make it!0
neil posted in Travel on July 30th, 2009

I already knew what Limekilns looked like from the photos taken by other climbers, collected on UKClimbing. This meant I had ideas on how to light it. I’m a sucker for the whole “shaft of light through hole in tree cover” thing and I wanted light with direction and none of that greeny light that comes through leaves. So the first thing I did was rig up my nuke-stand. This was three speedlights running full beans, each zoomed to 50mm and aimed in a spread to cover the wall. I hoisted this as far into the sky as I dared working at over 90 degrees to the sun. This gave the image above, with the impression that the sun is off to the left and coming down through that opening. The giveaway that it was’nt the sun is the hard edge to the shadows and the angle of Dave’s shadow on the wall (its a little above him). Meanwhile using shutter speed I had control over the shadows cast by the main light.
Then it all went a bit McNally. Climbing at Limekilns has had a rather poor relationship with the landowner, who has greased holds and put up bat boxes to lure the protected species to the crag. A shame because the crag seemed kept very well with no litter and the village benefitting from hungry and thirsty rock-fiends. This and the recent arrival of “Hotshoe Diaries” gave me the idea of a torch spotlighting a climber on the crag in the middle of the night. I did’nt have night, or a powerful torch, so I faked it. Torches aremuch more powerful than deep night anyway that the real scenario would probably either blow out the climber or under-expose the crag. My night was created by two flashes side by side firing through the dead tree in the foreground of the top image. This gave fun shadows and a light I could turn blue by setting my white balance to tungsten. I then CTO’d my SB900, snooted it and brought it in close to give the spotlight.
After screwing around with an umbrella, which did’nt pan out, it was sunset. The clouds were going a fun red colour however the light was no-where near the crag. So it seemed a good time to fake a sunset. Two lights hoisted to 12ft with CTO’s on each and a single SB800 with no-gel controlling the shadows from close to the camera axis. Thats why Fraser’s face does’nt go to black in the image above.

Successful recon0
neil posted in Travel on July 28th, 2009

We set out to scope some local(ish) boulders expecting to be dissapointed. The landings were meant to be mainly large rocks and we only had one small bouldering mat. However BEHIND these boulders was a fun outcrop that led down to the sea. It looks like the perfect place for a barbecue cum photoshoot at sunset. Next time I’ll bring the pocketwizards and lightstands!

Rosyth Quarry0
neil posted in Travel on July 26th, 2009

The weather finally cleared this saturday and we headed for the fastest drying slab of rock we could find. Rosyth quarry, normally plagued by stone throwing, cider drinking, pyromaniac graffiti artists was blessedly empty. After warming up on some cracks, Fraser and Dave took on a climb called “Cathy”, aborted with cramp, and then “Heathy”. Both of these were graffiti marked for our convenience.
I was shooting mostly with my 70-200mm and lighting with two nikon speedlites. The speedlites wanted for power in the daylight and forced me to zoom them in to their maximum settings. This meant I had one small “sweet spot” on each climb and had to hope something interesting would happen in it. Fortunately Heathy/Cathy was sufficiently hard that the climbers spent a lot of time in the sweet spot and my 8 second recycle time was’nt an issue.

I have a book!0
neil posted in Travel on July 24th, 2009

I had a 10*14 coffee table book printed by Loxley Colour in Glasgow. They have a remote design software package which works and did’nt do anything unpredictable or awkward. Printing wise they did a pretty good job, the blacks are a bit off and the pages a touch shiny, but that is nit picking. Will be putting Fiona and Mike’s wedding album through their print sometime soon.

Portable photo backup/storage0
neil posted in Neil, phototech on July 11th, 2009

The requirement for a portable backup device depends on its intended use. Different photographers work in different ways in different environments, which is why there is no single solution. This is an attempt to categorise the way people shoot and the backup device I would use in each case. The assumption has been made here that bandwidth limitations preclude uploading to a backup at home. As things stand I can see two or three distinct categories for which a different device would be appropriate:

1) Hotel room backups, the backup device can be safely and conveniently stored in a secure location and the time taken to backup the images is’nt as important as the ability to do something with the photos once they have been backed up. For this a laptop with the possible addition of external hard drives would work nicely. This solution would also be valid if the shoot was such that a laptop was small change in terms of bulk and mass compared to the rest of the gear being moved or not a great deal of movement was anticipated in the shooting. This is how Joe McNally, Drew Gardener, Steve Frischling and many others appear to operate.

Travelling light...

2) Light hotel room backups, where the hotel is’nt secure and the shoot is mobile and relatively “low kit”, however the ability to get on the internet is more important than absolute minimum weight. It is acceptable, in this situation, to link multiple devices together. This allows the use of a netbook (samsung NC-10, 160GB/£290) and a rugged hard drive (LaCie 500GB/£148), a solution favoured by David Hobby or interestingly, the Archos 5 media player (250GB/£255) which provides a usb host, web browser and netbook size hard drive at a very light weight. The downfall here may well be either battery life or speed of the transfer from the card. On trips when I’m stuck with a computer for non-photo reasons, I travel with a 1kg Dell laptop which has an in-built very slow card reader.

3) On the move backups, which requires a single device with prodigious speed and battery life that can be used while shooting on the move. Backing up in this situation precludes things like cables, a boot process and extensive clicking or button pressing. The ideal here is to put the card into a device and press “go!”. This is the world of the Epson P-7000 (160GB/£538) series which are good kit but extremely expensive (review here) or the Nextto Extreme ND2700 (160GB/£163), which is cheaper and claims the worlds fastest transfer speeds. The compromise being that Nextto does’nt allow for viewing of the images and has an unusual user interface. I use an EPSON P-5000 for backups during weddings and longer sporting events.

I fully expect the technology involved to change quite quickly, certainly the model numbers involved increment endlessly. I think that the “light hotel room” backups solution is the one most likely to change with the advent of new gadgets. If someone could make a smartphone that could manage the transfer of data to a rugged hard drive at night, confirm the transfer and maybe upload selected JPEGs then that would appeal greatly, but thats probably a bit niche!

The Carry0
neil posted in Photos, bikes, Neil on July 5th, 2009

We had’nt been too far along the Pentlands because after awhile the tracks run north/south and we want to ride east/west. So we left the tracks of man and sheep and made our own. Bikes were pushed, carried and occasionally ridden. We saw no-one until we arrived north of baddinsgill reservoir, I was strongly fantasizing about a cup of tea and a biscuit. Our host, Carolyn, did one better and produced two pots of coffee and a topper dinghy. Once recovered took the thieves road north which is possibly the Pentlands best mountainbiking. A thin barely marked path between slim raised bridges over bog with drop-offs, step ups and improbable twists. Knackered again, but smiling we found a road, ate a packet of haribo and formed a swift chain-gang for Edinburgh.
 
 

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