Sextons shoot in “Studio J”

Sextons shoot in “Studio J”

As Zack Arias said in his recent 3 day extravaganza on CreativeLIVE; a studio is any place with a floor and a couple of walls where you can control the ambient light. That includes a barn on an agricultural show ground in Peterborough. Ladies and gents, I welcome you to “Studio J”

I’d shot in one of these barns before so I had a fairly good idea when I got there what I wanted to try. A quick word with Chris, driver of the Skyline and shepherd of the Sextons Grid Girls, and everything was set.

The idea was to cross light the car with slashing hard light coming on from 45 degrees camera left and right but keep the girls lit softly with a more central shoot through umbrella.

Here are the results:

Thanks to the Emmas, Gemma, Jen and Chris (And sorry to the other Gemma! I’ll get you next time!)

Georgia Graham Location Shoot

Georgia Graham Location Shoot

Last weekend, FHM Holiday Honey and car show regular, Georgia Graham made the trip down to Bristol from the North East for a shoot. We’d been planning for a few weeks, so by the time the day arrived I’d compiled a list of locations to go with her styling ideas and although nothing was set in stone, we had a good idea of what we were working to achieve.

For the gear heads; we were travelling light as we had to carry everything with us so all the shots below were lit with speedlights, using everything from Westcott umbrellas to home-made grid spots. Two Manfrotto nano light stands did the bulk of the work while my assistant for the day, Helen, acted as a VAL for the 3 light setups. Camera-wise, I used my 5DMkII with my 24-105MM L F4 and 70-200mm L F4 lenses.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Thanks to Georgia for making the trek down to Bristol and for being such a pleasure to work with. You can find out more on her webiste www.georgia-graham.com or follow her on Twitter.

Italy comes to Bristol

Italy comes to Bristol

Every April, hoards of Italian cars and bikes descend on Bristol’s Old city, centred around Corn Street. You’ll find everything from Fiat to Ferrari and Moto Guzzi to Aprilia.

This year I decided to try something a little different. Instead of using just the available light and adding a wink of fill with an on-camera ETTL flash, I got the light a bit higher. A lot higher in fact – about 10 feet up at the end of a monopod positioned by Helen, my able assistant for the day.

It was too sunny for Canon’s own infra red system and I don’t have a set of radio ETTL triggers like the latest Pocket Wizards or Radio Poppers so I stuck to manual and a simple RF-602 trigger.

Half power on one of my old Nikon SB-28’s was the sweet spot with the camera set at its max sync speed of 1/200th and the aperture ranging between f5.6 and f9 depending on whether the subject was in or out of the shade. The flash was also physically moved closer or further out to match the aperture (closer as the aperture was stopped down) to save adjusting it between shots.

Here are the results:

The Sextons Grid Girls do ISTS

The Sextons Grid Girls do ISTS

Last weekend the International Styling & Tuning Show hit Silverstone. The weather was fantastic (at least on the Saturday) so I had plenty chances to shoot with Emma, Gemma, Jen, Lucy and Michelle – The Sextons Direct Grid Girls.

There’s a mix of available light and flash shots here from Saturday and Sunday so thanks to the girls for putting up with me and my two Voice Activated Light stands, Chris and Darren. See you all at Modified Nationals

Painting With Light

Painting With Light

The word photography comes form the Latin ‘photo’ and ‘graphico’ and translates literally to “writing with light”.  I took that literally this weekend and did some light painting. It was a full moon on a clear, frosty night and I happened to be staying in Wales, just a few miles from a small wind farm so the opportunity was too good to pass up.

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 you’ll need.

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. 

Once I had this dialled in, I shifted my composition, gave things a little tweak in Lightroom  and came up with the result below.

Slow Motion Shutter

Slow Motion Shutter

Interesting little clip of a Canon EOS 5D taking an exposure, filmed at 2000 frames per second. I’d always imagined my camera internals to be a little more solid!