Tagged: lighting

MUSCLE UP !!!

I’ve had a few emails asking whether I’m still alive or not… Yes. I’m just massively involved in an exciting photographic project at the moment, which has taken alot of time away! But here’s a cool shot I took for ‘fitness industry promotion’ purposes of late. Steely determination, muscular definition, iconic stance, menacingly engaging eye-contact… simple yet effective! Thanks to Jay Revell, a consummate pro in front of the camera – follow him at his twitter here!

Shot on a Canon EOS 5D mk3, 24-105mm lens at 88mm, f 7.1, ISO 160, 1/60 sec.

LIGHT IT UP !!!

During a recent corporate video shoot, I got a chance to play around with some of the awesome lighting kit on hand, and trial it out for portrait purposes. I think that by far my favourite were the fluorescent products from Kino Flo – yes, their Diva-Lite 401 product. For this shot, I positioned one diva kit above the gentleman’s right shoulder (left of the screen as you look at the image), attached a Flozier diffuser & a silver Louver to both focus and scatter the beam, and then used a Sunbounce reflector disc to fill in the shadows on his dark side. The barn-doors are so accurate, they totally clip the light into a very useable corridor (though i eventually covered them with the diffuser), and whilst it’s not a strobe sync product, i find the intensity of the beam so good that I can push down to lower ISOs without fatally compromising on shutter speed! There is very little need for post processing – pretty much everything is done in-camera!

Set against the backdrop of the City of London, I think the result is an imposing and important portrait that keeps the attention focussed on the piercing eyes!

Shot on a Canon EOS 5D mk3, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, f 5.0, ISO 100, 1/160 sec.

‘THE BIG PALACE’…

… or more properly, le Grand Palais, just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris, France. I was there  roughly 6 months ago, in uncomfortably hot conditions during the day, and surprisingly chilly extremes during the evening. As I wandered along, completely unprepared (other than happening to have a camera strapped to my back), I stumbled upon this outrageously majestic, fabulously backlit piece of Gallic masonry, with a cold frost in the air to illuminate the vapours of darkness.

It. Needed. Photographing!

I wanted to go in tight for this shot, to capture the truly imposing nature of the architecture, but that would have needed an inhumanly steady hand. With no handy tripod, there was only one option; whack up the ISO, zoom to max, shoot at f4, & hope for the best from my shutter speed! By so doing, I’d accepted that there’d be inescapable noise, especially since this was my inferior EOS 5D mk 2, which doesn’t handle the dark so well. The result is an image which excites the romantic within me for its lighting 🙂, yet disappoints the perfectionist within me for its grain 😦  The ideal here would be f20 –> ISO 100 –> tripod –> deploy. But ‘sacrifices must be made’. N.b. the two specks of white in the sky are in fact prominent stars, not sensor catastrophes, and I’m actually quite fond of them, after much deliberation!

Shot on a Canon EOS 5D mk 2, 24-105mm lens at 105mm, f 4.0, ISO 3200, 1/13 sec.