Category: Photography

More High-Key

For the studio shoot, I also had the chance to work with Celina, who runs the Fables in Fashion blog. I’ve been a big fan of her makeup lookbooks where she does all her own makeup, styling and photography!

For this shoot she did a fantastic mermaid themed lookbook. I had the white setup, which gives a really clean look which I thought really suited the theme. I also wanted a bright high-fashion magazine look to show off the detail of her fabulous makeup work.

Still thinking high fashion we tried the ring flash look! Ring flashes are terribly terribly expensive things. The “poor mans” ringflash is a large lightsource behind the camera. This is one of the reasons why I chose the octabox. I placed the octabox level and stood in front of it.

Its not entirely “Ring Flash” as I’m blocking the bottom section, you can kind of tell because theres not as much fill light coming in from underneath, and you can see me in the catch light.

I also got a chance to shoot Annie in a fabulous Betty Draper inspired outfit! I’m still trying to perfect the white high key setup, but I’m very happy with how the shots turned out.

Film

Because I’m a masochist, I shot a roll of Kodak Portra on an old Minolta X-700 manual focus camera. I really wanted the colour and tones that I still can’t quite reproduce with digital. Unfortunately, the lab at Michael’s Camera and Video turned Annie’s beautiful chocolate coloured dress into an icky grey green.

I took the negatives to the Elizabeth Street Camera Centre which did a better job of scanning, but I think the damage was done when the roll was developed. When I was complaining to them about Michael’s, they said “You’re not the first one…” :/

I ended up colour correcting it to something acceptable, but it defeats the purpose (well, my purpose) to get the “look” and colour of film. I’m still not giving up on film, but given the cost of processing and scanning, I’ll probably use it for special projects, and I’ll choose a different lab 😉

Getting the shot

I’m usually having so much fun doing creative stuff that I don’t realise how exhausted I am during photoshoots. Its a known fact camera gear weighs twice as much at the end of the day.

Siera and I were both tired, but since we were recharged by cake and macarons, we still managed to get some great shots. The theme for Siera’s Hatsune Miku cosplay was based on fan art for the song “The World is Mine“.

These shots weren’t awkward to take at all… Well It was worth it :).

Despite the costs I think it was much better to hire a big space, with proper facilities. I hope we can do more group studio shoots this way. Its a good way to get together with friends, and experiment with lighting, makeup sets and other creative things. I want to organise another one soon!

A few weeks ago I organised a shoot with some of my  cosplay and photography friends. I really like the studio environment, even though cosplay tends to work better on location. A Studio gives us full control over the environment, lighting and more time to chat.

I can’t emphasize enough how lucky and spoilt I’ve been as a photographer to be around such talented, inspiring and creative people. I still have a lot of learning to do, and seeing their work in costumes, makeup and design makes me want to improve my photography more and more.

With the current gear and setup that I have, I’m limited to high-key white background, or low-key black background. For Sefie’s Misato costume, we tried both. The lighting options for the white background are somewhat similar, so for this setup its all about pose, expressions and direction. With my quiet personality I find this more difficult, so working with such experienced models helps so much.

On black, its all about the lighting, and creating the appropriate mood. In this shot, I was just trying to get a bit more separation between the handgun and the pure black background. The lens flare and the highlights are just accidents 😉

I wanted a softer less dramatic look for Annie’s wonderful dress but still on pure black. In the past, I’ve used bare hot-shoe flashes for hair lights but I’ve never been too happy with the spotty specular highlights this creates. I don’t have gridded softboxes for this sort of thing so I just used a brolly and hoped for the best.

Shooting in black is always annoying as its always challenging to keep light from the umbrellas spilling everywhere. I didn’t get a chance to try out my “waffle” as christened by Siera, it was busy on the high-key set. I love the way the black looks though, so I will continue with it till I perfect it.

I’ll talk about the waffle (gridded octabox!) and more high-key work in a future post, and also my attempts with Kodak Portra. I promise I will write that soon! In the meantime you  should look at some of the work by  Neil, Hayden and Sam. Also Sefie’s and Celina’s blogs!

I was given the opportunity to photograph the Australia Academy of Design fashion show which was part of the Stitches and Craft expo. This was the first time I’ve shot such an event,  but strangely I didn’t really feel the anxiety and pressure I usually do. I was probably just tired from walking to and from Minifest with lightstands and stuff 😀

Lighting was quite good, but I’d already choosen to bring my own lighting just in case that it wasn’t. Plus I wanted to make sure my ISO was low enough that to keep the fabric texture visible. I had plannned to use two backlights at 45 degrees with one fill but this plan foiled by a large flat screen TV other presenters had been using at previous shows. This would have cast ugly shadows.

Instead I had one key bounced of the ceiling camera right, one at the back of the hall as fill also bounced. One more far off to the left as a rim light,  all flashes on 1/4. This gave me f5.6-7.1 at ISO 800 with a flash recycle time of about .75-1 sec. This was a bit of a gamble as the distance between the models and the lights varied as they moved from the stage to the runway and back, I figured differences would hopefully be minor.

Nevertheless, this is what it looks like when the flashes don’t keep up. The image on the right is just the rim light firing.

Keeping up with the models was a bit more difficult than I first thought. I was forced to change to AF-C (Canon people call this AF-Servo?) which was much better. The runway was short, with only about 4-5 steps meaning only 4-5 opportunities to get a good shot of the walk.

I was forced to be close to the front, as otherwise I’d have people’s heads in the way, but this gave me a chance to get better 1/2 and 3/4 length shots during the poses at the end of the runway. It was a bit hectic for me, but this is nothing compared to what the models, stylists and designers have to go through backstage changing and restyling for each walk down the runway.

I was blown away by the great designs put on and really impressed with the dramatic changes different accessories makes to the outfits. The  show was very impressive, Annie did an amazing job pulling it all together 🙂

After the show, I had a few minutes for a shoot with Rose wearing one of Annie’s fabulous designs.

I’d being eyeing a spot on of the stair cases in the room, I took a picture with my iPhone which you can see above. There were some round portal type windows letting in the sunlight, you can see what I mean here. I used this as my key light, and used a big shoot through brolly as fill with a Sony HVL-56AM at 1/8th power.

I absolutely loved the contrast between the colours, and it turned out to be an ideal location. Despite the little time we had for the mini-shoot, it was also good working as a creative team with Annie and Rose to produce these images. I hope to work with Annie and Rose again soon.