I don’t often quote the parameters for my images but I will in this case: ISO6400, 0.5s@f11, handheld. That’s probably about the limit of what I can reasonably achieve wiht the 5DmkII. Nevertheless the image was very noisey and won’t reproduce at much over 12″x8″
So, what was I thinking when I set this shot up? Continue reading Another Shot in the Dark… »
I love working in low light conditions but the shoot I did a few days ago over at Greenwich really stretched me and my equipment to the limit. This wasn’t just low light, for the most part we had no light. If that wasn’t challenging enough, add the beautiful Dilsa wearing a black dress and black hat and you guessed it we have a serious issue to contend with.
Now I’ve found a good lighting diagram tool on the web, http://lightingdiagrams.com, I’m planning to write a series of posts that describe how I made an image and in particular how I lit it.
This article is the first such post and I’m going to start off really, really simple with the light-trail image I made on one of my twilight fashion shoots earlier in the year.
This is just about as simple as it gets when starting to add flash to light an image and the whole this was made from a single exposure, a single flashgun mounted on a light stand and a radio trigger. I did add a little spice though in the way that I created the background effect but I’ll explain how I achieved it and also why it works below. Continue reading Behind the scenes – Light Trails »
Last weekend I followed David duChémin’s seminar on creative vision over at Creative Live. It was a fantastic session and really got me to thinking about the way I create my images. On reflection I have been doing exactly what David was encouraging albeit unaware. Case in point would be my recent visit to Lanyon Quoit just outside Penzance.
I went there at probably the worst time of the day. There was hardly a cloud in the sky. The light was very bright and very hard. The scene was one of extreme contrast with hot, bright highlights and dark, black shadows. Even the 14 bits of colour depth of the 5D mk II were going to struggle to capture that amount of dynamic range.
The image below will give you an idea of just how bad the light was. In hindsight I could have tried making an HDR image but that thought never crossed my mind. Besides I’d neglected to bring my tripod.
So, how did I get from the original scene to the image I’ve shoen at the top of this post? Continue reading Creative Vision… »
As I was capturing the images for my post on Bending colours to make a sunset sizzle I realised that there are a couple of flaws with this technique:
There are always workarounds: one could carry a whitebalance card for example but that is just more stuff to carry. If time is of a premium and you’re likely to be swapping filters then time to calibrate could become a big issue.
But what if you have a library of calibration images on a CF card that you can use? I don’t know about you but I have a few smaller cards lying around that are next to useless these days. The 16MB card won’t physically hold a full size RAW image from the 5DmkII and the 64MB card might just take 3 but that’s you’re limit. So, useless for capturing images but could be pressed back into service to hold a library of WB calibration images. Then, every time the gels are changed it is simply a case of loading the card, selecting the right image and creating a custom WB setting.
Haven’t tried it yet so I don’t know if it will work. It’s just a theory but could be very useful 🙂
Hi, I'm Gavin the photographer.
I used to work in IT until a few years ago. I was under a lot of stress at work and getting really p*****d off. Then one day I chose to give it all up and follow a dream. Everyone I knew thought I was nuts, that just made me try harder :-)
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