Blogitty blog

Greetings once again, I find myself at my desk unwilling to start work so I thought I'd check this whole blog thing that I so easily give up on.

I've been working with my Yashica D a lot recently casting my 1Ds MKIII aside for a camera built in I'm guessing the 1970's

I've been working on two projects, one for an assignment with hopeful magazine submission, (I've got my fingers crossed for BLOW)

It involves me photographing people in secret in Dublin for the kicks but has since evolved into documenting the moment in time where we drift away from reality into our imaginations, we're all guilty of this as it happens all the time be it on the bus or merely on the street.

Out of the two personal projects this is the one that interests me more.

Current body of work is 16 images-Will be reduced!!

Finally the second piece is one I shot a month ago and even had developed, I've only gotten around to producing prints from those negatives this weekend.

I haven't shared the shots around with my College friends due to the nature of the images.

I'm not one who is insanely into the whole sexy images thing!

In fact some of those people weird me out I always picture socially awkward fat people jerking of in a corner of a room instead of going out into daylight.

This was actually the first true nude shoot I've ever actually done, the others before were fake nude as I had the model wearing a bra but hide it with arms or bedsheets.

Other people whom I know who've done nude work focus more on the tits, ass, and vagina in the image.

I want to draw the viewers eyes else where for that.

I don't think I'll have a large amount of work from this work ready in time for the deadline and out of 6 rolls I'm only happy with 5 shots!

This might be some stuff I can use for a summer exhibition.

I don't have great scans of this work as I've never really worked majorly with film before so scanning involves me using my colleges neg scanner, but if I want this printed well I need to get some decent scans done and the only place I know that do that is in Belfast looks like a road trip is in store for me this new years day.

But I have done some post work on the scans I currently have.

If anyone actually reads this thing don't think I'm hot shit! These have been touched up! and are the only half decent ones the rest are pretty bad.

I also need to assemble some more models, looks like I have to start using Model Mayhem again. God I hate that thing!

Blergh

Updates are hard when you don't go home a lot :(

Blergh to work.

Eirtakon Info

Well I better start updating this thing again since I've handed out my small business card with both my website address! and this blog!!!

So for the moment I'll just state this!!!!!!

The website is online (KINDA!!!) It has gone back to the drawing board due to technical issues,

So at the moment www.lonelycorridor.com consists of just a photo of my I.T man David Kerr! at some Microsoft expo of his or something.

I'm going to push both the website and the pictures to be ready within two weeks for you all.

They'll be hosted on my website so I'll mention here when they're ready.

I'm busy in the coming weeks with some shoots!

Since I'm now advertising this blog on both my business card and website, I'm just gonna have to update this thing every two days!!!! (Watch how long that lasts)

And I swear I will talk about nothing but my technique, followed by a ramble on something.

Stay frosty true believers and follow me on Twitter will you!!!!

TWITTER ACCOUNT

P.S I had fun at the con,

YOU?

Website?

I finally had that talk that I've been meaning to have to a very talented friend of mine about making my website.

Hopefully if all goes according to plan (which it never does) I should have it up and running within two weeks.

No time for new pictures as I'm to busy WORKING on them so here's a photo of a man dressed as a cat and a vase of flowers that I took a while ago and thankfully the PSD's were on my desktop.

Sweet Christmas

This is gonna take a while.

Busy

To busy for ramblings this week,
so here's a picture of how I feel.

Edit: Man I'm skinny.

Man I need a drink!

Damn I've been meaning to post on this thing for a while just never got around to it,
But as of right now Bridge is busy uploading some pictures to my hard drive so I can some time to kill.
I did indeed do that kitchen wine thing that I was planning to do and once again turned my Kitchen into a little studio.
It's more or less accepted by my house mates now given it's what I do.

That second bottle of wine is of course a layered on copy of the other, and both the Wine Glass and the bottle were shot separately, I know it's fairly obvious to the normal persons eye, but I've discovered these last few weeks that a lot of people are morons.

I'm actully quite happy with the way this photo came out, and it all came from this little test shot I did a while ago.
I was looking around a book shop one day when I saw a cover for some wine tasting book (just to clarify, I hate all booze) the cover was a lot like my test shot. Black background with only the red of the wine taking up central stage of the piece.
I tried it out my self later that day with a wine glass in my kitchen and substituting Ribena for wine. This of course led to some trouble such as little bubbles in the drink and what not.
Only one light was used ( as that's all I have at my crappy home studio) along with a bunch of reflecting cards to get the right amount of light onto the glass.

Not bad, it did give me an understanding of where to go next with my image.
For the final piece which I did some weeks later I shot them both separately with a light shining up at them from below. So I could get that nice little light around the edges of the bottle and glass
The bottle was a full frame shot of the entire bottle but I cropped it to it's current state as I like it more this way and that's the way I shot it at the time. Finally a simple copy and some little arranging of the images gave me the lovely lovely result. I do see some troubles with the photo ( I really do never like my own work) There are some red lines of light outside of the white light surrounding the glass, I did not take care enough to check to see if the glass was marked when shooting the image was there are quite a few mark visible in the final print that I must go back and try and fix.
All and all a good first attempt.
So for now call the first attempt the beta, then the nicer second attempt the prototype, now the third will be the product release!!

Now back to news about ME!

My Website is still as of yet not online.
BUT!!
I have the domain and all that other stuff sorted out, I just need to get that guy to do it for me, but alas or schedules don't really run right together so a meeting to discuss things is quite hard to organize.
Hopefully all will go well and I'll be able to talk to him on either Saturday or Sunday.
A negative thing about not having the website ready yet is that I've had my new cards printed up and of course they contain the websites address.
The cool thin ones I also designed (all the rage for some reason) have the blog address.

News this past month?
Not much apart from the usual, doing stuff for people to which they pay me some money so that I may pay rent and eat
FOR PHOTOS you dirty minded people!
I have one more Wedding to do come August 16th and that will be it for Wedding Photography this summer.
Wish I could do some more as it really is a great little earner and I do need to save for my rent in the winter months as I have a lot of work to do around that time which give me much time to focus on earning some green.

Still of the Red Bull, but I think my writings have suffered for it, no longer are they full of crazy ideas and rants (I miss those)

Well no time to discuss photo things in this post apart from how much I enjoyed working with that new wind machine in the studio today.
Some new photos and rants to come along sometime this week, I SWEARS!!

NOW KIERAN BRODERICK HAS A LOT OR WORK TO GET DONE!!!!!

Doomed Child

Man does it take a lot of self effort to get me in front of my computer screen lately, have I become lazy?
I certainly hope not.
Well last night I was inspired to do some work which was a welcome change from that House Boxset I've been trying to get through.
I was asked to do some photos for someones kitchen nice little food pieces and what not.
I accpeted without realising that I friggin hate photographing food.
So like I said last night I got one of the photos out of the way.

I popped out to my local 24hr Tesco at 2am I think (beat the queues) and picked up about eight packets of chocolate chip cookies.
With those cookis I simply placed them onto a nice little tray I have used in the past for photographing my mortal enemy "the cupcake"
Using my at home studio lights with a soft box attachment I was able to get a nice warm feeling in the image.

Once again I had to turn my kitchen table into a little improtu studio, but fortunatly for me all my house mates were tucked into bed.

Using a chair to elevate me up just higher than the plate I pointed my camera down and set my focal point to the top tiered plate.
My shutter speed was of course 1/125, which is the sync speed with the external flash units.
Depth of field was set to the lowest that my lens at the time could manage and that was F:4
I never changed these settings when working with this set up all I ever did if the exposure was too much or too little, was to move the lighting appartus around or increase/decrease it's power level.
Surprisling this only took me 30mins to get done.

Giving me time to work on a piece I have been planning since Gay Pride week last week.

This piece was purely for me as I love superheroes and I have always loved the friendship between BoosterGold and Blue Beetle. So on my kitchen table I photographed them standing in fairly standard superhero poses BUT I have Booster's hand placed behind Blue Beetle's body and it looks like he is touching his ass.
Most wouldn't catch this straight away in the first image it's when you move across to the next image which is simply the exact same set up as the first, expect this time I simply moved myself to behind the figures and shot them from behind.

I used once again just the one light, but this time I used a snoot to get a nice spot of light on the figures and in order to light more than just once side of the figure I just two pieces of white board to bounce the light around the subjects.
I know I should have gone for the second light, but!!! I'm lazy and it was late.

Some small post work was added to remove any traces of my kitchen in the background and whatnot in order to give it that "shot in a studio" look.

Now no one was paying me to do these photos it was something I wanted to try and do myself, which I have not done in a while and it felt good to experiment again, I must do it more often. In fact tonight I have to try and get another one of those payed kitchen shots out of the way.
(It will invole WINE) Perhaps I'll try something new afterward.
Expect for me to blog about that stuff tomorrow.

Before I go here are some other stuff I did that night with the figures.



Now I must go finish some photos I promised to have done for someone ages ago!
Sorry Amy trying to get them done now!!!

JUST REALIZED THAT BLOGGER HORRIBLY PIXELIZES THE IMAGES UPLOADED ONTO THE BLOG, BLERGH!!!! TRUST ME MINE ARE CLEAR AND CRISP!!!

Blergh

Already I am not having fun doing this blog. I have been thinking about doing this post for two days but I just kept coming up with new things to distract my attention away.
But alas it is Wednesday which means that I must get some work done in order to feed myself and junk.

Boo to all that I say, whatever happened to just killing people for stuff?

The exhibition during the weekend went very, very well and I must give some great credit to Brenda the exhibitioner of the event who did a bang up job promoting the show and getting sponsors and all that other exhibitioner junk.

The venue itself was lovely a nice big open space, normally now a lot of new gallery's and halls are new and have the awful pure white modernist look about them.
I for one can't stand that look. Just seems to controlling for my taste.
But this place "Black Loft" was absolutely perfect and for sure I will be using it again in the future if I can as it is really close to where I live and quite near the city centre so it makes it easy for all.

But for now I must get back to work.
I have a meeting with a web designer this weekend to sort out what I want for my website and I guess I have to pay the guy :(
Plus I have to get some Wedding stuff finished by the end of the week in order to send it to the printers in time for the deadline.

God gone are the humdrum days I used to have where I just watched TV.
I used to be cool.

On the plus side all my old friends seem to be getting Fat!
Kieran Broderick +1
That's what happens to stupid people!

Man this blog is very random I didn't even talk about any pictures I took

I took this photo along with a series of model shots over the weekend for a model looking for a decent set of portfolio shots to show agency's.
The image above is my personal fav that I took that day. So much so that I have put it into one of my new business card designs that I have just today finished and hopefully tomorrow I'll send the order through.
Also on that day (Sunday) I learned the greatness of having a make-up artist at a shoot no matter what.
I kept this shoot bare bones and only used one light, granted it was a softbox but still that only counts as one light.
Thanks to the black background the green parts of her outfit and hair really stand out more.
The soft blueish filter is something I applied in the post work stage.

I hope this women appreciates the work I put in.
Who am I kidding they never do!

Cupcakes aint for fools!

I freaking hate working with cupcakes, they must be the most annoying things in the world to shoot.
So last night I was of course worrying about a job I had to get done in order to make some dough because with all the stuff I bought recently I certainly need it.
So like I was trying to say I was up last night baking cupcakes which is surprisingly easy.
What is not so easy is decorating them I must have gone through 15 cupcakes before I gave up and just went out shopping the next day in the search for cupcakes to shoot.

I think I found cupcakes that should do the job perfectly,
(They’re in the image above.)

What is not fun of course is shooting the bloody things which is what I did today at the studio and never before in my life have I found an object/piece of food so difficult to light.

I shot them on some white perspex along with a nice porcelain
candle stand that I had brought from my house, Combined with
the perspex it gave me some a lovely soft look around the edges
of the stand.

Of course I used my all time favorite studio lens for this shoot
my beautiful 50mm f/1.8
Good god I love that lens. With it’s low f-stop I got a nice wide
depth of field onto the subject and thusly only the first cupcake is
slightly in focus where as the rest blur out the further out you go.

(Basic photography here people, I should charge for lessons.)

Of course getting six different interesting shots of these cupcakes
was another trial I had to get through which is why I wasted
three hours inside the studio today just to get this done.

But now that I have it out of the way all I have to do now is to
mount the images onto some foam board and collect my sweet
sweet cash. Of course I also forgot that tomorrow is a bank
holiday so I doubt I will be dropping these off tomorrow.
Nor Collecting cash :(

Also on Friday I have to go the black loft to hang up some of my work for an eexhibtion that is on during this weekend.
I have two set pieces of work on display
The first being a set of some 8x9in images of people whom cloak themselves in fantasy whilst interacting with the real world.
I'm not the best at explaining it but the pictures speak for themselves.
The secod set is some b/w white work i shot of the Dublin Docklands this last November using Medium format.
Come on come all to see the work!!!

Blackest Night

As I sit here actually planning out and making my website that I have been talking about for years,
I still can’t help but slide into my old ways of just giving up and moving onto something else only to abandon that only half done.
But these things must be done and I’m quite surprised how much I’m enjoying it.
Anywho since I’m a Photographer I going to guess what you want to see in this blog is me talking about photoesque stuff and of course what I have shot lately.

*sigh*
I guess I must conform with the masses, I swore I’d never blog! Even when I lived in Japan I never blogged even though every white guy over there does.

Just going through some model head/full body shots I did for a models portfolio, not exactly the glamours life I led but it pays.

Before I made it to the studio I dropped into Chapters on Pearse Street and picked up a fantastic book of B/W portraits by the Photographer Clay Enos, I can’t recommend that book enough fantastic shots. I should really mention what the book is called: Watchmen Portraits. It’s a lovely large hardcover book containing shots of all the actors of the Watchmen movie, even some props are documented in the book.

Back to my story and enough of the micro review, I guess after looking at the book so soon before the shoot it must have influenced me as I started using a white background that was light with two lights at +2 Stops over the exposure of the model without even thinking why.
Then using two lights with spill attachments which in turn used two white umbrella reflectors to give me some soft spread out light.

What I got out using that equipment was of course an insanely over exposed image, BUT!!!! I was planning for that!
Here is the original and of course the edited final piece

Before you even think “that must have taken hours in photoshop”
Nope not at all at most 20 mins, Most of my editing is done in the Camera Raw window that I open from Bridge then the only edits that I ever do in photoshop really is just simple old spot removal, patching, and of course resizing the images plus the addition of a border when printing.

I was quite happy with the days work I did yesterday, not happy with the all nighter I pulled to get them done, I don’t like this whole sleep during the day and work in the night buzz I’m on at the moment.

All the photos from that shoot I have added into the web sites
beta photo section, I have no idea how large I can make
it but I’m also quite lazy in order to go through all my old
photos of the past six/seven years and figure out which to
display.

I’ll get it done by the next blog post I swear!!!

(Never gonna happen)




On non photo based news, the new Scott Pilgram trailer came out and I can’t stop myself from watching it at least once every two hours or so. Now that is the sign of a damn good trailer. Not to sound like a giddy school girl “I sooo can’t wait for this movie and the final book”



Hopefully the next post will be in two days.

Currently Listening to: Prince Ali -Robbin Williams (Aladdin Soundtrack)