Showing posts with label flash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flash. Show all posts

Monday, 21 October 2013

Six Easy Steps: A Photo Essay.

One of the final three assignments we have is to shoot a photo essay while using the fill-flash technique. The photo essay was to demonstrate an how to accomplish an outdoor activity using six easy steps. 

My initial idea, offered by my brother, was to show the use of the family barbeque. But because of the recent fires there is a total fire ban, and therefore the barbeque didn't seem like such a great idea. So I decided on watering the garden instead. 


I'm not sure that I love my current shots, but at least I have something for if I don't get another chance to attempt it in the next week or so.

Sunday, 20 October 2013

The Angel Of Vengeance: Coming Together.

I've been working on The Angel Of Vengeance book cover/poster/whatever it is, and I'm liking the way that things are going so far. I took what I have so far to class on Wednesday, to ask Ben whether or not it would be suitable as my assignment, and he said I was on the right track. So that's a good thing. 

In the spirit of being more open with my work, like last time, here's some insight into what I have so far. 

These are the images that I started out with: 

Yes, even the text was a photo! I also used two pictures of the sky (with clouds) as the background for my image, but they're on a different hard drive and therefore not accessible to me at the moment. But every photo is mine, was taken by me, etc. 

Put together, here is what I have complied so far: 


I'm not quite ready to call it done yet, though I don't know what more I might be adding to it.

Thursday, 10 October 2013

The Angel Of Vengeance.

Have I mentioned previously that I might have an idea for the third part of my movements assignment, involving creating a poster/cover/something to do with a story that I am writing? Yes? Well, I am going to do it. 

I usually wouldn't post about this until after everything is said and done, because I hate to think of everything failing and me still having all this work up here as if things are going great, but I think it would be a good thing to put my planning here. It might motivate me to get things done, even if the first few attempts fail. So here it is - the first planning stages of my next assignment. 

I decided that I wanted to make a book cover/movie poster type thing for my current work in progress, The Angel Of Vengeance. I'm not going to bother finding perfect models for my characters - because let's face it, nobody's going to know the difference expect me! So this weekend I have my best friend coming over, and I'm probably going to end up using my two brothers as my two main male characters. (There is the potential of a third male character coming into play, and I have a co-worker in mind should this happen.) 

I have a general idea of how I want things to look, so I put my amazing drawing skills to practice and drew a mock-up: 


Gosh, what am I doing photography for?

Obviously, this isn't perfect. But it's an easy way of reminding myself how I plan for things to look. I also searched around on Google and found some images for inspiration, ideas, and for the way that I want things to look. It doesn't cover everything at the moment (because a lot of things are still just in my head, too) but I threw it all together and created a mini mood board: 


I want the image to be more dark than light, and I don't want the background to be distracting - which is why in the background inspiration images up there, we've got brick walls and smoke. 

Here's another thing I wouldn't usually do: give away spoilers, but in the spirit of noting down all of my idea-ing here... 

I want to try to create this image using only photos - as in, not artificially creating anything in Photoshop from scratch. It will be a challenge for me I think, but I'm up for it. Given the nature of the story, it's going to be interesting - so here are some ideas for how I intend to create the...crazier-looking things.

Zoe will potentially have lightning coming from her hands. Unsurprisingly, I've never managed to obtain a great image of lightning. I considered buying a plasma ball and taking shots of that, but then as I was walking to work on Tuesday morning another idea struck me. As I looked up into the trees, I was amazed at how much their branches looked like lightning strikes. And so I intend to use tree branches. 

Paris's hands were a little more difficult at first, but then the idea was obvious when it finally came to me - coloured smoke (or maybe just white, we'll see) and a sun flare or two. Again, we'll see how things go. 

Nathaniel has a force field surrounding him. When I first attempted a practice image on my brother, I followed a tutorial online that showed you how to make a force field. I didn't really like the look of it, but I figured it would do if I needed it. (I didn't save this image, so I sadly can't post it here!) But as I want to create this image now using only photos, I came up with a simple idea: shooting the rim of a glass. 

I also want to shoot a glass with a sparkler inside of it - both because it might create another interesting lightning shot, and because it might make for an interesting force field. 

If the third male character is included, he will be behind all of the others - looking back at the scene over his shoulder. 

This is obviously going to take quite a bit of work, and I don't have all the time in the world, but I have my hopes that it will work. If it does, then I'll tackle the issue of how I'm going to print it.

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Complex Subjects.

Today's practical lesson had us looking at ways to light "complex" subjects - that is, product shots that involved skin tones. 



I had Jessica modeling for me, wearing my Pandora bracelet. The first shot is simply lit from the left side by a softbox, with a reflector to the right. The second still has a softbox to the left, but there's also a softbox to the right and behind her. This softbox also half-lit the background, giving it a nice grey gradient.

And yes, that was the desired effect.

Wednesday, 3 April 2013


We've been lighting different things in prac lately, and today was all about lighting glasses with liquid. One of our briefs specifically was to capture pouring liquid in two different states - one frozen, and one smooth. 

My group was using the Broncolor floor-pack flash system, which gave us an upper hand over our classmates. While they were fiddling around with ambient light and shutter speeds, all we had to do was change the duration of our flash. First shot here is taken with the flash at 1/85 sec. The second is taken with the flash at 1/3250 sec.

So... Broncolor is officially awesome.