Bristol Comedy garden kicked off in great style on Wednesday night and once again I was lucky enough to be working for the team as their photographer. Here are a few images of the amazing line up.
Night 1: Host Dan Atkinson, Alun Cochrane, Pete Firman and headline act Russell Howard.
Night 2: Host Craig Campbell, Stewart Francis, Angelos Epithemiou and headliner Ed Byrne
Night 3: Host, Mark Olver introduces Isy Suttie, headliner Stephen K Amos and a last minute stand-in for Sean Hughes
And finally, Night 4: Host Josh Widdicombe, Shappi Khorsandi, Milton Jones and headliner Ardal O’Hanlon.
Last weekend saw 100’s of beautiful cars descend on The Downs School just outside Bristol to raise money for the neighbouring Children’s Hospice. Find out more about the charity and the cars here and check out my photos below.
I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I get a bit caught up in planning. I like to pre-visualise the shot, plan a location and run though some lighting set ups in my mind. Yesterday reminded me to be ready to take advantage when a shot just happens in front of you.
When I left the car it was surrounded by other vehicles but I came back from lunch to find this scene. Luckily I had my camera over my shoulder and 30 seconds later I had this in the can.
If I’d have planned to shoot there, the car park would have been packed all day, security would have moved me on or I’d have spent hours trying to fix specular highlights in Photoshop.
Sometimes all you ducks get themselves in a row – be ready when they do.
Is it just me, or is everyone a photographer these days?
I don’t mean everyone has a camera or that photography is a popular hobby, I mean I’m seeing more and more people proclaiming to be a bone fide, card carrying professional photographer.
They have a large black camera, the kit lens and maybe a flash, a web site and business cards but seemingly no idea about the craft of photography. Perhaps you don’t need to know an f-stop from a bus stop when you’ve got a shiny new DSLR? Surely a £1000 camera takes care of all that. But when it inevitably doesn’t, they still post online galleries full of unimaginative, poorly composed and technically inept images next to the words “portrait sessions just £399”.
Then there are the ones who are “now booking shoots in December” when it’s only March. Really? Your out of focus images of your cat have got you enough bookings with aspiring models, brides and families to make it through the year already? Or maybe that portfolio comprised of images from a single group shoot is really working for you and going through the agonizing process of whittling it down to 20 stunning images and ego crushing portfolio reviews just isn’t necessary.
Now don’t get me wrong, group shoots (where a studio will hire a model for a day then sell time slots to aspiring photographers) are a great way to learn. All the details are taken care of and the studio owner is there to assist with lighting and camera settings. The whole day is designed so you learn a few new ideas and come away with some good shots. So when you download your images that night and find some nicely lit, tack sharp shots of a good looking model bear that in mind. Look at them critically, analyse what worked and what didn’t, learn from them. Don’t simply pat yourself on the back, decide you have learnt all there is to learn and start trying to charge potential clients.
Buying a camera doesn’t make you a photographer any more than buying a pen or a sports car makes you an author or a racing driver. It gives you one of the items you need in your tool kit. Now you need to collect the ones you can’t buy, so know your foundations (the exposure triangle and reciprocals) get out and practice (a lot) and look at (really analyse what you like and don’t like about) as many photographs as you can.
That’s when you can start calling yourself a photographer.
It’s advice you’ll see over and over again, not just from photographers but from people in all walks of life: If you want to stand out from the crowd, do something different.
Now while I am not lauding this as the great photograph ever taken, but I like to think it’s a good example of “different”.
The “Paparazzi” Image
Michelle, owner of this particular drift project S14, was proud to have her car on a stand at Modified Nationals and asked me to take a photo. Unfortunately the car was indoors with no chance of moving it so I had to work with what I had.
The scene as it was – Photo courtesy of Steven ‘Jonesy’ Jones
At some point during the weekend, an image taken by David Hobby during the shoot out at last years Gulf Photo Plus popped into my head. The idea being to make the car look like a celebrity by surrounding it with ‘paparazzi’. Normally I work with manual flash and simple radio triggers but only having two with me meant I chose to use my 580EXII as an ETTL commander to trigger any available Canon flashes… of which I had only one! So the first challenge was to approach as many Canon toting photographers as possible, explain the idea, and get them in position. (Something I wouldn’t have done a year ago, but thanks to photography I’ve been gradually making my comfort zone larger.) There are even a few Nikonian friends in the final shot with flares from Canon flashes cloned over their non-firing strobes in post.
On the technical side, I had my 580EXII on camera running the show and providing fill flash at minus 1 stop. All the slave flashes we’re set as ETTL slaves in the same group and set to +1 flash exposure compensation to give a nice bright rim effect to separate the black car from the black curtain behind and to light the roof and bonnet.
What could I have done better? Looking back on the image now I can see I should have had more light on the nose and the door and a smaller aperture would have made better star bursts from the flashes and highlights. But all in all, as it was a spur of the moment shot, I’m pretty pleased, and I have learnt what to look out for if I ever do it again.
Last weekend saw Modified Nationals at Peterborough Showground roll around again and with it, a chance to see how far my photography had progressed since last year. It was a similar situation to last time – a case of shoot when you can where you can, make the best of the gale-force wind and hopefully come away with something that stands out.
This is time our glamourous location was the back of the Exec building with its sandy coloured walls bouncing the intermittent sunshine around making the scene pretty even and flat.
Just out of the frame in that image is a sky full of bright cloud that I wanted to keep some detail in for wider compositions and that meant that at my sync speed of 1/200th I had to stop down to around f/11. Too much for my speedlights to act as main lights so out came the Elinchrom Quadras – one lighting the front of the car, the other hitting it broadside. The speedlights were cranked up to full power, zoomed to 70mm and pressed into action as rim lights to stop the black and blue car blending into the blue and black background and to add a little sculpting to the girls.
A few test shots later (and a little post production for this image) I had the lights dialed in and giving results like this:
Time to bring on the girls… and “camera shy” Chris the owner. For these shots the flash that was lighting the front of the car is now being fired through a shoot through umbrella.
And a wider composition to show the position of the rim lights.
By this time then Quadras were flagging and had put themselves into slow recycle mode to preserve what little battery life they had left so for the next set up I scaled down and went ETTL for the first time! Shooting a bike this time meant I didn’t need to light such a large area and my on camera 580EXII, and working in ETTL meant I could keep my aperture down to f/4 and bump my shutter speed up to 1/640th. I had my 580 dialed down to -1 2/3 stop of flash exposure compensation acting as on axis full while two 430EXII’s set at +1 stop provided rim light again.
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