When my daughter was younger being in front of the camera was never an issue, she’d pose for shots and I’ve many many wonderful images in my archives. Then as her school life and my work life got more demanding the images tailed off. When she said a few days ago that she wanted to be part of the lighting setup test shoots and do images that “would count” I was delighted!

I wanted to do something with coloured gels. As they were used for 3D films before the polarisation technique took over we agreed to do a cinema themed shoot. I need to locate some stock red chair images for the MARKSE cover edit I’ll do on one of the images.

With a cinema between the car park and studio we had an ideal source for one of the props, a pot of popcorn. Fresh and smelling great it was hard to resist picking a few off.

A few frames in I realised I wasn’t seeing much. We tipped it into a paper bag and put a ball of cinefoil in the bottom (appropriate given the theme!) and poured the popcorn back in. The cinefoil came in handy for it’s normal use too, allowing me to create quick masks to keep the gelled light from reaching the backdrop. A cardboard sheet with rectangular cutout was used to prevent the gel covered lights from causing lens flair.

I use Adobe’s Lightroom a lot but hadn’t made use of the other crop grids until last night when I read about it’s Phi related overlays. Hitting “O” while in the crop mode cycles through them all. Looking at the rule of thirds, rule of Phi and the Golden rule I captured how the crop lines overlay the image. In the Phi grid crop the ladies thy leads the eye up into the image. The gent in the background on the right always felt right, notice how his head is on the curve of the third overlay? I’d expect our brains to be taking all these crops and patterns in at one when analysing an image.
Taking the last overlay from the thee shown I did a landscape crop of the image and like the proportions.

Yet another site along the lines of Model Mayhem, Net-Portfolio, PureStorm, etc., but with a twist. I’m still looking for the catch as there are not the usual limits imposed by the other sites.

So what’s got me excited about this one? Purpleport.com brings true distance searches to finding others to work with; Make-up Artist, Model, Photographer, Photoshop Wizard, Studio, Stylist or Tutor. Using the Google Maps API people give their location when signing up. Looking for a studio or stylist within a number of miles is now super easy!

With the weather so variable in the UK I’ve often wished to be able to build up a team that can come together to do location shoots at the drop of a hat without anyone having to travel for many hours. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on who’s registering around me.

Users of Strobox will be familiar with this sort of tool and be interested for a number of reasons..

  The Sylights user interface is easy to use with a rotate, group select, select and drag circular object picker and has a range of typical studio objects that can be placed around the diagram.

Sylight has a few features that will have Strobox users switching or applying more presure for feature upgrades:

• Diagrams are saved as object data allowing them to be edited again in the future
• Each diagram can be given a title, description and a file name for the image
• Each item can be moved, rotated, resized and have description text added, the later being used in the full email export
• Photographs (hopefully taken with the lighting described) can be linked to the diagram
• Diagrams can be exported to the camera roll or email. When exporting to email a No, Basic or Full detail can be selected, Full detail gives the diagram, associated photographs and full inventory of elements with their descriptions

The one feature it doesn’t have yet that I’ll be asking for is a Clone Diagram so that a simple changes to a lighting setup can be shown.

Strobox has not kept their app fresh with new features despite the many requests on their Uservoice site. “Make saved diagrams editable” was requested in Dec 2009 and has 307 votes, the highest of all requests. If they don’t get their coders working on a new version soon I can see a lot of users migrating to Sylights, which would be a real shame as Strobox has a large established user base with over 13K of those liking the Strobox Facebook page.

It had been a regular day in the city and I was moments from home.  Standing with my camera bag strapped to my back I was gazing out through the windows to the buildings on our side of the road.

A stop before mine I spotted this young mum pushing a pram, her rather different hair catching my eye. I just had to jump off the bus a stop early and ask for a portrait! Not only were her hair tips red but the jacket she wore had a red trim to it adding to the theme.

Back then I only carried the LumiQuest Big Bounce soft box, no shoot through or bounce umbrellas.  The 580EXII on a PocketWizard remote was fired through the soft box, held at arms length to camera left.

It’s one of a half dozen favorite Street Photography images that are alive with colour.  As I keep reminding my daughter “Don’t ask, don’t get” and I’m glad I asked.   I think Scott would add “Don’t get up early, don’t catch the light” to the “Don’t…” list.  Scott also mentioned in tonight’s show that all but one of the images they reviewed were shot on reasonably priced cameras, not the out of reach to the masses pro models.  So “Don’t blame the hardware” should go on the list too.

Loaded up with gear it took me a moment to catch up with the couple. After a bit of conferring in a language I didn’t understand I got a yes.

Even before I’d got ready her partner was commenting on the harsh shadows on her eyes with the sun in front. I agreed and said I’d put the sun behind her and took a couple of test shots. The metering at a distance resulted in her face being somewhat underexposed. Breaking out the big silver reflector I’d used earlier in the studio the angle was found to get some fill, the lady’s partner then took over reflector duties.

Getting real close I metered on her face in Av mode, then copied the aperture and shutter speed into manual. Getting further back I could then compose the shot knowing the exposure would be spot on. Love the results, not a strobe light in sight.

I’d seen a couple of lads trying to do a portrait shoot with a gold reflector the day before in the high street. The one holding it was moving it around at speed not really understanding what if anything it would do for the shot. If you start to use one slow down and watch the results, the angle needed might be quite fine. Move it too fast and you’ll miss it.

Thanks to the top I how have some printing on my To Do list. Not on clothes but the zip bag that the reflector packs away in, left hanging from the top handle of my camera bag.

“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium”

There are, I hope, no wars being started over this young lady, but her wonderful hair has launched the planning for a photoshoot. The work of two brilliant make-up artists at Pro Beauty 2012 had inspired a makeup design and to get an old “Mother Natures Daughter” image out of my head and into pixels. The two ideas being shared with a makeup artist has been joined by a third, with the hair playing a big part. Head shots taken this weekend, back to the sketching and planning!

My backup solution deals with the server and laptop separately. Rather than move images from the server folder back to the laptop drive I copied the folder onto a USB stick. Windows 7 mounts the stick as F: and wouldn’t let me change it, DOS subst commands worked in the DOS shell but didn’t show in Explorer. Visual-Subst came to the rescue allowing F:\ to be easily mapped to P:.  On starting Lightroom it found the images on P: where it expected them and let me do the edits. When I’m done I can just trash the P: files as I know the masters are still on the server.

They all got me thinking about which category each of us camera carriers fall into.

John is not a fan of the slang Tog, he hates it. Some commenters on his status joked that a Tog was a measurement of warmth for duvets, some that a tog was a “Guy with camera” (GWC) who just used it as a means to chat up women or get them into a state of undress. I’d not want to be associated with that group, I’m a married family man with a passion for fashion looking to create some great images, not relationships. Professional relationships of course, but not personal – I’m not going to be inviting and of my photography subjects over for dinner unless they were already friends before a shoot, sorry!

I’ve met a few GWC in my early film days when I’d been introduced to a camera club. Lighting was an afterthought for these guys and I was unsatisfied with the images. Thankfully through them I got introduced to a studio that ran professional lighting classes. Before I could do many they relocated to the country in order to get more space.

Role forward a few years after the sale of the T90 and M645 and the first Canon EOS purchase.. The ability to review images immediately in the studio was brilliant. Thankfully the former manager of my local lab listened to comments about the basement going to waste, had the floor lowered a few feet and turned it into a studio. After plenty street photography and shooting with just softboxes in the studio I knew that fashion and portraits was my thing and that I also wanted to try other lighting techniques.

I’ve been handing my cards out to both men and women of various ages for my lighting test shoots, probably in a 1:2 ratio. To date only the younger ladies have responded. Quite what that says about who likes to be in front of the lens I’ll leave to the reader to decide. If you’re male and have been handed one of my cards then hopefully you’ll be the one to break the pattern!

What puts people into the other categories; Photographer and Happy Snapper?

A snapper will have the focus point set to the middle of the screen and will probably have the camera in full auto. Once focused a shot will not be recomposed, so when photographing a person the face it will be slap bang in the middle of the shot.

A photographer will think about a number of issues before pressing the shutter button:

Depth of field – Do I want the background blurred to make the foreground subject stand out or is there some background detail that’s relevant to the image?

Shutter Speed – Am I trying to freeze time or do I want to deliberately get some motion blur, for example when tracking a moving object.

Composition – Where is the best place to put the primary subject in the frame? What’s the best view point, would getting higher or lower help the image? Would being further back with a longer focal length be better than up close with a wide angle lens?

Lighting – Where is the light relative to the subject and is it soft or harsh? What colour is the light? If harsh can I put the light behind the subject and meter so that the subject is properly exposed?

If you think of any of the above but don’t consider yourself a photographer then I’ve got news for you, you are one! Admit it, enjoy it, keep clicking and try and do the other things listed.

I’m specifically looking for couples who would be happy for one or two of their images to go online.

Rather than put the images here with my beauty and fashion work I’m going to put future wedding, bump to baby and family photography on my second site.