Congratulations to Georgia Graham, one of the car show regulars and Max Power babe, who was crowned MCN Babe of the Year 2010.

That’s enough words, I’ll let the pictures do the talking. You can find more of my MCN photos here

Light painting is a simple idea and it doesn’t take much trial and error before you start getting good results. You will need your camera locked down for this as you are taking long exposure shots – in this case 30 seconds. A tripod is best but a bean bag on a car roof/gate post/sleeping cow would suffice.

Use your camera’s built-in meter and juggle your aperture and shutter speed until you get a good exposure. By “good” I don’t mean zeroed out on the scale in your viewfinder however. We are shooting at night here so obviously the shot is going to be dark and we will be painting in some extra light in the foreground so we need to stop the camera trying to make everything look like a mid grey. Minus 2 stops should be about right, but take full advantage of shooting digital and fire off a few test shots. You can shoot in Aperture Priority mode for this and use the +/- EV control or you can go Manual for more control or if you need an exposure longer than 30 seconds.

Once you are happy with the overall exposure, you can start adding light. This is where the trial and error comes in as this is no exact science and there’s no TTL  – you are simply shining a torch on your subject. Obviously the bigger the subject and the further away it is, the more powerful torch, or longer exposure.

For this example I was about 30m away from the wind turbine using a small, yet powerful and tightly focused LED torch.

About 5 seconds tracing the beam up and down the tower with the remaining 25 seconds spent highlighting the rotating blades seemed to yield the best results. As you can see from the image on the right, there is quite a marked difference when adding the light to the image.

I think I may have a solution: Small (moo.com mincards), colourful cards with cheeky slogans.

Hopefully small enough to slip up the sleeve of a catsuit, bright enough to stand out in the crowd and cheeky enough to be memorable.

Collis Ta’eed at TheNetsetter makes a good point about publicising your goals. The thinking being that if you fail or back out you have some explaining to do.

So with that in mind, this weekend I shall be heading to a wind farm in deepest darkest Wales. The plan is to take some model shots at sunset and some more general stock photos the following sunrise.

What started as a day out at the World Aerobatic Championships at Silverstone has resulted in my getting published in another magazine. This time it’s a double page spread and 6 other images in “Loop“, the magazine for pilots.

I knew I’d got some good images so, inspired by  the advice of Scott Bourne and others, I did a little research, came up with a few aviation photo libraries and magazines and fired off a few emails. Later that day the sale was agreed.

OK, it’s not National Geographic magazine and I’m not able to retire on the proceeds, but it’s another name on the client list and my images and name in print again and under the noses of more potential buyers.

Start small, preferably in a niche market and getting published isn’t as hard as it may first appear.

Shutter priority was the way to go to keep images sharp but retain some blur in the propellers. Depending on what the plane was actually doing, that ranged from 1/160th to 1/400th. I then adjusted my ISO to get an aperture that gave me enough depth of field to hold the whole aircraft in focus given the speed at which the subject to camera distance changed as the planes flew head on towards me.

Spot metering proved a bit tricky, again because of the speed at which the planes were moving, so I manually compensated as the cloud cover changed to make sure the aircraft weren’t just dark spots against a bright sky.

And one last tip: If you plan on spending all day shooting upwards with a 100-400mm lens – Take a monopod!

Thanks, as usual, to every one who posed long enough for my camera to actually take an exposure!

See you all at Trax in September.

This is great for photographers.

There was a time when our images were only seen by the people we knew and saw on a regular basis or, if we were lucky, they’d be printed in a magazine. But now, we can get our work out there to millions of pairs of eyes. People we will never meet can now see and give us feedback on our images, they can follow us or become our friend and before you know it you have an army of fans hanging on your every word. Just look at Chase Jarvis, Joe McNally and Zack Arias to see just what can be achieved

This years weather was perfect too. Only 2 launches disrupted by winds and blue skys all the way through.

Here are a few images from the Thursday nightglow, the Friday morning mass assent and the Red Arrows from Saturday afternoon. As always these are available in a variety of print sizes, canvas wraps and other merchandise.

So ladies and gentlemen, at long last, I present to you Modified Nationals 2009

The guidance goes on to clarify Section 58a of the Terrorism Act 2000, stating:

Clarifying this law is great news for photographers, but only if it makes it to the front line. It’s not much comfort knowing the officer is in the wrong and that you’ll ultimately be released without charge when you are sat in a cell and your camera’s bee seized.

Let’t hope this improve.

Take this recent example:

Back in 2007 I went to my first modified car show. It was all very new to me and I came back with a huge amount of photographs. I picked the best, including some of the promo girls, posted them on Flickr and spent the time finding out the models names and making sure the images were properly tagged.

Fast forward to last Monday when I found myself posting an invoice for an image I never thought I’d sell. Sky TV were looking for an image of Stephanie Holland (a rumoured Big Bother contestant this year) and my image was the first traceable one to appear in Google’s listings. Sky followed that link to Flickr, entered the URL in my watermark and ended up on the “Contact Me” page of this site.

One phone call later, Sky had the image they needed to illustrate the story on their website and I’d made a sale. All becasue I’d taken the time to properly label my photo.

It’s important to get you work seen, but it’s just as important to make it easy for people to find it.

I currently have the Phottix PT-04TM wireless flash triggers, bought from HKSupplies on eBay. These triggers may not be 100% reliable, but I am getting very few non fires and even fewer miss fires. They are no Pocket Wizard, but they only cost pocket money.

The PT-04TMs are intended to mount onto your cold shoe or umbrella bracket or screw onto the standard thread atop a light stand with the flash mounted on top. The trouble is, this makes the whole assembly very tall and unwieldy and I found the flash would flop forwards and finish up illuminating my light stand very nicely!

So I set out to try and find a way of lowering the overall height to reduce the leverage. Here’s what I came up with:

Obviously there’s the flash. Then there’s the PT-04TM, with the plastic foot removed, velcro’d on top (you do have velcro on your flash head don’t you?)

Attached to the hotshoe on the receiver is a cheap hotshoe to PC sync adapter (designed to let you use a PC sync cord with a camera that has a hotshoe but no PC sync port) bought for a few pounds from eBay. If you have the slightly newer receiver that has a PC sync port on the side, you don’t need this.

Moving down to the bottom of the flash we have a Kaiser 1301 Hotshoe Adapter (designed to let you use a flash that has no PC sync port on a camera that has no hotshoe).

So basically, when the receiver triggers, instead of going straight over a hotshoe to flash connection, it travels over 6″ of wire first. There’s nothing clever happening, it just makes everything more convenient.

The Kaiser 1301 Hotshoe Adapter has another benefit: It has a normal foot so you can use it with all your other umbrella mounts, but it also has a standard 1/4″ screw thread on the bottom for mounting onto any standard light stand, tripod, or in my case, a very small, very cheap Hama 5011 ball head.

It may not be the tidiest setup, but it work for me… at least untill I can get my hands on some of those Pocket Wizard Flex/Minis!

We drove a few miles down the road to Hatton Locks, and with just some simple off-camera flash and the setting sun, came up with the following fashion/commercial shots.

Photo: Duane Kerzic

Whilst standing on the public platform in New York’s Penn Station, taking pictures of trains to enter Amtrak’s “Picture Our Trains” photography competition, photographer Duane Kerzic was arrested by Amtrak’s own security guards and charged with trespassing and refusing to delete his images.

Trespassing? In a public place? Really? And why should Duane delete his photographs?  If photography is illegal, why ask him to delete evidence? If it isn’t, what right do they have to insist he formats his card?

US TV show “The Colbert Report” duly takes the mickey