PR Folio Environmental

I had big plans for the environmental but they didn't quite play out. I was planning to take photos of my brother in law with some heavy machinery on his earthworks work site. I wanted to shoot either early in the morning or late in the evening to have a pretty moody dark sky, then light the machinery with the monoblocks and the subject with my flash and softbox. Unfortunately the generator they had on site was not compatible with the monoblocks so I had to come up with another strategy.

I ended up shooting earlier in the afternoon so I had a bit more light to work with and took along a small set of flood lights. The flood lights didn't appear to do much but there was a slight improvement in light. We also ended up shining the car headlights onto the digger to try and brighten it up further. Again not sure it did a lot.

I shot the subject standing a fair way from the digger so I could get him filling a more of the frame. I positioned a softbox to my right and set the camera on a timer so I could run around to the left and hold a reflector to bounce some light onto the subjects right hand side. I shot at ISO400 and a shutter speed of 1/10sec just to capture enough light in the environment.

The shot came out ok but not quite what I wanted. With some photoshopping it was acceptable. With no time to reshoot it would have to do :)

Amity Affliction @ UC 2nd October

So after uming and ahing for a day or so I finally decided to take Michael Masters up on his offer to shoot the Amity Affliction at Uni of Canberra in his absence. It was a fun night and I definitely learnt a heap. Shooting with no flash, lots of movement and random stage lighting was definitely a major challenge. As a first attempt I think it went ok. Below is a few of the non blurry shots :0P

PR Folio Head Shot & More Creative - 1st shoot

Heres a couple of pictures from my 1st shoot to capture the standard PR head shot and also the more creative PR mid shot. The shots were taking with a single speedlight and softbox. The images are ok but I found that once I had them in light room there was a fair amount of light drop-off at the bottom of the images. I have played with this a little in LR. If I get to reshoot the images I will lower the softbox a little more and have it pointing more towards the subject. It might even be necessary to use a reflector to fill in the lower parts of the image and dark suit.

Setup for PR Head Shot

Setup for more creative shot

Wk7 Task - Venturing Off Campus with the Monoblocks

The purpose of this task was to get us used to borrowing the monoblocks from friendly old dave to take off campus. I intended to do a few outdoor shots with them but the day was super windy so I decided to stay inside to avoid breaking the lights on my first loan.

Pretty much all of my shots were underexposed and required a boost in Lightroom. I really should have paid a bit more attention to the histogram instead of going off the image on the back of the camera. Rookie mistake number 6001. 

Overall it was good fun but definitely need more lighting practice as it took me so long to get the lighting half decent for each shot. Thanks must also go out to Tash for putting up with my experiments for 2 hours. 

Location Workshop Task 2 - 2 Outta 4 Shots

a) Create a portrait using one monobloc as the main light source.

For this one we tried to be a little creative and use one of the lifts on campus. After discovering that the powerpoint in the lift was busted we resorted to sandbagging the doors open and running an extension lead in (shssssh don't tell anyone).

f9 @200 ISO100

f9 @200 ISO100

f9 @200 ISO100

b) Create a portrait using two monoblocks. One as the main source and one as the fill.

For this portrait we moved into a tight balcony above the squash courts on campus. It looked good when shooting but didn't really get the shot I was looking for. We only got a few shots off before having to pack up. Think with a bit more time and experimentation it could turn out ok.

f13 @200 ISO100

f11 @200 ISO100