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

Shooting the Shooter

I saw a great photo at the National Portrait Gallery in London a few weeks ago; it showed a woman posing, but she wasn't posing for the camera. Instead she seemed to be posing for someone else, off the side of the picture. It got me thinking..

I came up with a simple idea. I wanted to show the shooter taking a picture of a model. But I wanted it to look like it was properly happening, and not too staged.

Now, Lauren and I work together lots. But we don't have the luxury of having a 3rd shooter who can take pictures of us. It was self-portrait time. And throw into the mix the fact that I wanted to show the shooter's flash going off (illuminating the model) as well as throw some light onto the shooter.. gulp.

I started off by creating a lighting diagram courtesy of Fred Miranda. I'm really enjoying working this way. I sketch out my idea first - so I can picture it properly and give Lauren an idea of what I'm thinking. Then I formalise it in a lighting diagram.





I use Canon's wireless trigger system based around their STE2 transmitter. This was mounted on the main camera (the one that took the shot). I think put a 550EX above camera right shooting into a snoot to put some isolation into the shooter's face. The shooter (me) obviously has to be seen to be holding a camera. So I borrowed Lauren's 350D (time for an upgrade me thinks) and put a 430EX in slave mode on it.

I hooked up my Canon 30D to Lightroom via the Canon EOS Utility software's remote control feature and set it up to take 5 shots every 10 seconds.

Lauren threw some poses, I threw in some corny "c'mon on love, that's right, gorgeous" comments as I pretended to snap away, while the 430EX on my dummy camera popped in time with the 550EX illuminating me.





Sorted!

Waiting For Rain

Gideon and Caren came to our exhibition in May and proposed that we shoot their wedding in August. So, we did!
It was a Jewish wedding, full of ceremony and tradition, and the bride and groom added their own touch by building a beautiful multi-coloured labyrinth in the grounds of a walled garden. It looked amazing.

It was a weekend of torrential rain and thunderstorms. Even on the Sunday (Jewish weddings take place on Sundays) morning, the heavens had opened and it looked like a washout. But, an hour before the guests arrived, the rain stopped, lighting improved and it warmed up nicely.

It was Lauren's idea to get out a fun brolly. However, with the weather not doing what we'd expected it to do, we had to simulate the rain on the umbrella. Gideon and Caren were happy to join in our fun and obliged us with this shot. Thank-you both!

Andy

Multibride vs Multigroom

We shot a wedding in October for our friends Ben and Grainne. We were lucky enough to have full access to the Royal Pavilion's grand Music Room. It's a stunning setting, with a ceiling of gold (real) and red and ornate decoration.

The shoot was made more interesting by the fact that Joe Public were also in there, but Ben and Grainne are willing models and put aside any thoughts of being watched and performed floorlessly!

Available light, however, was poor, and I had to use a high ISO with no flash for this setup. Anyway, I think the results were pretty good.. and fun to boot!

Andy