The Coffee Shot - In the Bag!

We've nailed the coffee shot!

Tim turned up at the Red Roaster roastery in Kemptown, Brighton and with the help of my wife, Lauren, and good friend Joe (he's one of the best jugglers I've ever seen, by the way) we moved 70kg coffee sacks, erected a backdrop and got my lights into position.

I followed a very rigid lighting structure:

1. got my key light dialled in first - I wanted the sacks to look well defined but not too bright. The brolly worked fine as I put it in there quite close. Set it to 1/32 power on wide beam
2. I then placed Tim in the frame to make sure he was also exposed fine. He was (I asked him to wear a white shirt because I knew I'd be using a black backdrop)
3. I then placed two more flashes either side of him - these were going to pick out the beans hitting his hands. I used our homemade grid snoots. I had them aimed a little in front of his hands so that the lighting of the beans would be subtle

I then got on the floor with a fairly wide angle lens (somewhere between 24mm and 20mm) as I wanted to give the sense of Tim knowing his stuff, looking down into the camera.

Joe and Lauren then filled several jugs of stale roasted coffee beans and poured away from out of shot. We did about 10 tries and we managed to get the bean flow just right. As you can see in the picture, the beans were caught by the flashes beautifully.

We then did a close up of Tim examining a bean - I wanted a second picture just in case.

All in all it was an awesome little shoot - delivered in less than an hour from turning up to sweeping away LOTS of stray beans.

If you have confidence in the look you're after, and really want your shot to work, just take control of the shoot and stay calm. I'd had this picture in my mind for a few months, and when I saw it on my LCD I knew I'd got it. Happy boy!

Until the next one..

Andy

Death to Dell

Death to Dell
Originally uploaded by Andy XR

With the very willing help of Louis, I destroyed my ageing Dell laptop at the weekend.
I setup my Canon on a tripod, on rapid fire mode. Louis dropped the Dell from a first floor bedroom window. It took two attempts to do any real damage; this was the second attempt.

I now want a camera with a higher framerate!!!

The Coffee Guy

We're embarking on a new journey - photojournalism.

It's something I've wanted to do for a good 12 months now. Why? I want to stretch our photography, push our creative skills and, hopefully one day, get published. It's not for the money, but for kudos and experience and respect.

The project is about talking to Brighton-based businesses and establishments to find out how they're doing in the current economic downturn. Three interviews have taken place so far, but as this is to be a photo-story, I really need to get some interesting shots done.

Well, my patience has paid off. Shoot numero uno takes place next week! The subject is Tim Hume, owner a well-known coffee house called The Red Roaster in the Kemptown district of Brighton.

The Red Roaster is a cool coffee house. Tim ensures that his employees are well trained and they all seem to really enjoy working there.

They roast their own beans in a roastery not far from the coffee house. It's there that we're doingt the shoot. It has a wicked red roasting oven (what other colour could it be?) and the floor is loaded with coffee bean sacks from all over the planet - each with distinctive stencilling. I'm going to have Tim sat on the sacks and my two assistants will be pouring coffee beans into his hands from out-of-shot.

That's the theory, anyway.

It's a tight spot, so I may be resorting to wide-angle. Now, I love my wide angle (a Sigma 12-24mm aspherical - it's insanely wide) but you run the risk of introducing some serious distortion. I need to use it with caution. However, if I can squeeze a little more space out of the place, I'll use my 30mm prime (F1.4).

I'm going to use two Canon Speedlites with snoots to pick out the beans hitting his hands, and a third Speedlite in a brolly to light Tim.

Pics when I'm done....

Ta ta!

I Shot the Heads

I finally did the Crunch headshots. I went for a blown out white background as this makes it easier for the web designers to cut out the pictures for web use.
The setup was straightforward:
2 x Canon 550EX speedlites set to about 1/16 aimed at a white wall
Canon 430EX through a brolly to camera left, high up to light each subject

The shots were of the three main honchos that run Crunch and the partner companies. One guy particularly didn't like having his picture taken, but I guess that's always gonna happen. He was co-operative tho, so that's good.
In hindsight, I realised I made a tiny mistake. You should normally get the background blown out first by setting the power on the strobes and the exposure on the camera and then only tweak the key light power to get the right exposure on the subject. What did I go and do? I got the background blown out OK, but then adjusted the aperture on camera to get the subject lit OK. Doh! This resulted in the background not being so blown out so I had to tweak that in post.
Ho hum, lesson learned.
The dapper chap in question is Darren Fell, founder of Crunch and nice guy to boot.

Onwards and upwards!

Attempt # 2

Whoo! I'm finally going to get the corporate headshots done, this coming Friday. About bloody time too.

Headshots Postponed...so it's an Office Instead

Aww, my little corporate headshots project was postponed at the last minute. It'll happen soon and when it does, I'll put up the results.
I did, however, execute the other part of the assignment which was to get a picture of the accountants' offices in Brighton: Blenheim House. I wanted it to be lit evenly; I knew it faced east, so I got up early and as expected, the front of the office was lit up nicely by the morning sun.
I used my trusty Sigma 12-24mm aspherical wide angle for this in order to give the building a bit of distortion, which kinda makes it look bigger than it really is.

The guy walking in front of it was purely intentional.....

Headshots for Crunch

I started work recently for a company called Crunch Accounting, based in Hove. It's a funky little company and I'm finally back into Java programming again after a 10 month break (not self-imposed, may I add).

Anyway, they caught wind of the fact that I'm a photographer and they want me to do some headshots of the three main honchos. It'll be for their website. I've also gotta shoot the outside of one of their buildings in Brighton, as well a small pic of the highly reflective, mirror-like name plaque outside their Hove office (in a rather nice old Dubarry Perfumery building). Err...that's gonna be interesting as I'll need to have it reflect something other than the rather unsightly railings! I'm thinking of holding up a white sheet or card, and bouncing a gelled flash at it. Remember, always light something that the reflective surface will reflect.

The headshot shoot is tomorrow, Friday and guess what? It's an 8am start!! Which means I have to get there for 7.30 to setup. It'll be a simple affair: two Speedlites aimed at a white wall to blow it out, and third Speedlite in a shoot-thru brolly up high and to the side to act as key. Bish bosh off we go.

I'll post the results.

Ta ta.

It's Over!

It's been a while, but the Open House finished up with about the same number of visitors as last year, 1200, and we sold more too. Phew. Enough already.

Was a good experience tho. We got a little work from it, a small modelling shoot for a fashion student, Lilly. Quick and easy and she liked the results..

Onwards and upwards...

Penultimate Weekend

The weekend just past was our 3rd and penultimate one. We've clocked over 800 visitors and we sold two more pieces (Alfriston Freeze and A River Runs Through It)! Whoo!
I finally got round to updating our website and have put our latest Open House work on there. Go check it out.
We're now working on a proper site that gives details of what we do, how much it costs etc etc. It'll take a few weeks for sure, but hopefully it'll do the job.

2 Weekends Done

The Open House is going great! We've been open two weekends now and have had over 530 visitors, so we're well on our way to matching last year's attendance of 1,200 visitors. Brilliant!

Feedback on the pictures has been great and it's obvious which ones are getting people's attention. It's quite a buzz hearing people talk about your work. Humbling, no less.

We've sold a few pieces too. Eight, to be exact. And we've sold 13 of our little greeting cards. Every penny will go into our photography fund, to be spent on goodies, I hope!

We're also showing last year's work at Idyea in the North Laine of Brighton. If you're local, go check it out. Map right here. Thanks to Jason Lupi for getting us that gig and helping us put the pictures up. His pictures on Flickr are well worth checking out.

Check back for more Open House news as it breaks!

One Week To Go

OK, getting a bit nerous now. Why? Well, Lauren and I are hosting our second Artists Open House in Brighton.

For those of you not in the know, AOH is an opportunity for Brighton artists to let the public see and buy their work not through a gallery or shop, but in their very own homes. Each may approximately 200 houses in and around Brighton are turned into galleries hosting everything from oil paintings to Tuscan earthen ware to performance art. It's a truly democratic way of getting your work in front of the viewing and buying public. People come from near and far to walk the dozen or so trails, visiting each house in turn.

Admittedly, a lot of people just like snooping around other peoples' homes. But many come year in and year out to see their favourite artist/s. And it's not all amateurs. There are many seasoned professionals who use AOH to launch new work.

Last year, we opened our house up for the first time. We're photographers, so we created an exhibit of our recent work, and we chose to base the work on a theme, "Up Close & Personal" (see it here). We shifted pretty much every item of furniture out of the lounge, painted the walls white, and hung about 25 pictures on the wall, all mounted the same. It looked impressive. The upstairs spare bedroom, however, looked like a landfill site! And we had to live like that for a month. But, we sold pictures and we even took a booking to shoot a wedding. By the time the last visitor left the house on Sunday of the last weekend, we'd clocked over 1200 people coming through our always-open front door!

So this year, we're back.

We've had to squeeze our budget and therefore we're about to embark on mounting our photographs ourselves. We've got shedloads of black foamboard turning up, and about 40 or so various sized prints. Oh, and lots of Spray Mount, scalpels, Velcro, and tissue paper. Tip : if you want to save money, do it yourself!

We've got a new theme this year, "Killing Time and Other Things...", and despite the fact that we've had nowhere near as much time to produce pictures as we did last year, we're pretty stoked with what we've come up with. It's a radical departure from last year's work (we had quite a few body parts shots and portraits) but I think that's a good thing.

I'm off to pick up the photographs today. All £300 of them..

A Light Rain

The Plan

I had this idea of a model cowering under a shower of glowsticks. During my clubbing photography days at dontstayin.com, I knew for a fact that glowsticks can look wicked on a picture, especially when you drag the shutter to a second or more (no problem in clubbing photography; the more swirling lights, the better). I wanter her kneeling on the floor, looking up and scared - with loads of glowsticks raining down leaving multicoloured trails.

In theory, it was easy. Do a 3 or 4second exposure with the camera on a tripod; get the glowsticks raining down; fire the flash at the end of the exposure to capture my model. Easy.

Err.. not quite..

Ouch!

Before I actually go ahead with a shoot, I like to practice. When a shoot involves someone other than me, I always rehearse it - that way I feel more confident during the actual shoot. So, I nailed our black backdrop onto the outside of my house, put the Canon on a tripod with a wide angle lens, and had a 550EX in slave mode (triggered by the Canon's ST-E2 wireless remote transmitter thingy) pointing at where I was going to kneel.

The first thing that I discovered, before I even cracked one glowstick, was that Canon Speedlites won't switch to second curtain mode when triggered remotely. Shit. I wanted 2nd curtain because I needed the flash to fire at the end of the exposure, meaning the glowstick trails would appear behind the model and Martha wouldn't have to hold the pose for the entire exposure.

The only workaround was to fire the Speedlite by hand. Luckily, I was able to hold the ST-E2 transmitter and push its Pilot button. This fired the 550EX. 

One problem solved, but it meant that we'd have to time the exposure manually. Not good.

With that problem sorted, I cracked a few glowsticks, set my Canon on timer with a 4 second exposure, got into position and threw the sticks up into the air above my head. Let me tell you: glowsticks HURT. After receiving a few painful blows to my bonce, I fired the flash.

The results were good. In fact, they were really good. And with the final shot having loads more glowsticks than I'd used for the rehearsal, we were onto a winner!

The Model

I'd seen pictures of Martha Simms on Louie Banks' photostream on Flickr. (His pictures are incredible by the way.) She has a boyish look to her but models like a pro. Long legs, an amazing 'straight' face and good with makeup. I dropped her a line and after meet over a coffee, she was sold.

Martha brought with her two friends, Elin and Eleni, fellow students who also happen to be kick ass photographers. I felt old! Anyway, after explaining that E & E would be responsible for showering us with plastic from a 1st story room, we got straight down to it and started with some test shots.

Pollution

Unlike the night of my previous test shots, this evening was blighted with a uniform blanket of low cloud and, due to Brighton's pretty intense light pollution, everything was lit orange. This meant I wasn't getting the blacks as dark as I wanted. I decided I'd have to fix that in post-production.

After we'd pretty much got exposures right, the girls let loose with the glowsticks. Lauren would gather them all up in a bucket and send em back upstairs. Hard work. Martha modelled perfectly. I was looking for that sheepish, kinda worried look and she knew exactly how to do it. I was very impressed!

The Result

Well, it turned out pretty good. We tried a few different poses and even shot one of all three under a brolly, with about 30 glowsticks bouncing off 

of it. My favourite (crouching) is going up on our wall during our upcoming Open House in May. I'm quite chuffed. 

This was one of those ideas I'd had in mind for a few months. I sat on my hands, umming and ahhing about it. But once I'd gathered the courage to approach a stranger to model, the experience was awesome. I've now about 6 other shots I want to create and nothing's going to stop me.

Andy