A Little Light Debate…

 Gavin   Available Light, Strobist, Studio, Techniques

All through my research and reading this year one argument keeps on coming up, time and time again: studio or available light?

The arguments go along the lines of

“Anyone who insists on only using available light does so because they don’t know how to use flash”

and

“Natural light is beautiful. I don’t need flash because I know how to see available light”

And different variations thereof. I’m not going to take sides here, personally, I don’t care which is better. I’ve created beautiful images using studio flash, daylight and a mixture of flash and daylight.One little pearl of wisdom I came across was “once the light has left the flash it doesn’t care how expensive the light was” (Adam Duckworth, Advanced Lighting Course, April 2009). Such a simple observation and so very true. It is also extendable to include sunlight and moonlight too. Continue reading A Little Light Debate… »

A truly fun event…

 Gavin   Digital Darkroom, Equipment, Event, Photoshoot, Techniques, Tips, Workflow

Had a fun afternoon yesterday covering the Nokia 5k Fun Run in London and all for a good cause too. All the images are available on ovi.com, here: http://share.ovi.com/album/Nokia5k2009.UKLondon5K2009. All mine are tagged with QTPortraits.

091028 Nokia Fun Run-1133Needless to say, I jumped at the chance when asked to take part (on the condition that I didn’t actually have to run anywhere :-)) seeing this as a fantastic opportunity of gaining that all too precious commodity: experience. In hindsight it also proves that Marc Gamble‘s podcast about the Education Spectrum although this could be argued an accident rather than by design.

This was my first attempt at event photography and a real eye opener too. It was also a good excuse to practice some of the techniques that we covered on the Wedding Seminar a couple of weeks ago, both at capture time and in post. I find it quite odd, although hardly surprising, that two distinctly different genres such as Events and Weddings share so much in common.

So what did I learn from the afternoon? Continue reading A truly fun event… »

Something cool to cheer myself up

 Gavin   Business, Marketing, QTWeddings

Been having a miserable week so I spent half an hour or so this afternoon making this, courtesy of Animoto. Well worth checking out if you want to do something similar. My drop a few of these around the interweb as a way of marketing.

http://wanimoto.clearspring.com/o/46928cc51133af17/4ae1c0a477cb7b86/46928cc51133af17/8def596/-cpid/7ff9e7a4f9dc38bf/-EMH/300/-EMW/540/widget.js

Have fun and hope you feel better than I do at the moment,
Gavin

BTW – I should add that the image quality is poor because (a) I only used 750×500 images and (b) I’m a tight-wad and haven’t paid for their service yet.

Wedding gallery now available…

 Gavin   Courses, Digital Darkroom, Journey, Lightroom, QTWeddings, Techniques

I wanted to post a gallery from the wedding seminar earlier, but coming down with swine flu this week really scuppered all my plans 🙁 🙁 :-(. I’m starting to feel a lot better now so I spent an hour this evening making this.

Hope you like it. NB the image quality has been reduced to make the file sizes smaller and no sharpening applied yet. Some of the images would benefit from this extra boost. My excuse is I’m still not really with it owing to the piggy flu and I simply forgot to do it in LightRoom.

Ho hum,

Gavin