Monday, July 26, 2010

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!!!!!

Friday, July 2, 2010

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!!!