Wee Men

Wee Nun Tries Dating (single shot)

I have neglected my blog for way too long and as a way back into it again, I thought I'd try to put together a post about how (and maybe why) I shoot "wee men." In Irish and Scots slang, "wee" simply means little or small. I got into the Wee Men through the fantastic work of Slinkachu; if you haven't checked out his work, you should really do so.

Gear
I shoot with my Nikon D800. I like the resolution on this beast and it seems to do pretty well with macro photography. That said, any DSLR that you can stick a macro lens on will do the job for you.
I use a Nikkor 60mm f2.8 lens, mainly because it is the only macro lens I own - macro means it will have a much closer minimum focusing distance that most lenses which lets you get in close to small subjects.
A tripod
A remote or cable release ( nothing fancy needed - my third party cable release cost £10 from amazon)
Some wee men - you can buy these from Amazon (search for model railway figures) or from sites like Priesar or Gaugemaster in the UK. I find HO gauge works best but there are other sizes/gauges available.
Agave syrup. This is invaluable for getting little figures to stand upright and washes right off afterwards. I tend to dip my wee men's feet in it when needed.

Setting Up
I do some table-top shots and some outside in various locations such as streets, parks, the garden etc.
The key to really good wee men shots is to have a narrative in the shot - a story; something that says something or means something. Not having a narrative will still produce decent shots but they will lack either the impact or interest of shots that tell a story.

How To Shoot Flag Protests (single shot)

My advice would be to have an idea for the narrative before you start to shoot.

Forensic Investigation (single shot)

Shooting
Set up your scene, focus on the central figure(s) and away you go. With macro lenses you get very shallow depth of field so take account of this, or shoot for focus stacking later in post processing.

Focus stacking is what I prefer. This means using one single focus point and taking a number of shots with the focus point set on different parts of the scene.

Choppers (6 shots, focus stacked)

Post Processing

For single shots, there's very little that I do other than cropping and boosting the colour saturation and perhaps adding a slight vignette, all done in Lightroom 5

For focus stacked shots, the process looks like this:

1. Import RAW files into LR5 and crop, adjust etc one shot as needed then sync across all shots
2. Export files as either tiff or jpeg
3. Open Photoshop (CS5, CS6 or CC)
4. Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack
5. Use the browse window that pops up to select all of your stacked tiff/jpegs and open them
6. Once all the files have loaded, select them all by control/clicking each one in turn
7. Go to Edit > Auto Align Layers and select "auto"
8. Wait for photoshop to align the layers then Edit > Auto Blend Layers and choose "stack images"

Vatican Makes Surprise U-Turn (12 shots, focus stacked)

Once this has finished, flatten your image
I would make any final adjustments at this stage then sharpen the image by adding a new layer, selecting the high pass filter and setting it to a value of around 10-11 and then using "overlay" as the blend mode.
Flatten the image again, and Bob is (as they say) your uncle.

2013 365-29

Way late this week partly due to being very busy, very tired (I blame the heat) and having too much bloody photography to do. I never get backlogs of photo stuff - until this past few days. It's been an interesting week on the old photography front, not just because I was forced to spend part of it with no camera.

15/07/13

Thanks to good old King Billy defeating King James at the Battle of the Boyne, today was a public holiday and being a public servant, I got the day off. I decided to make another attempt to get to Cloughan Point and photograph the jetty there. I got there and got some shots, but I had foolishly attempted to clean my camera sensor myself before heading out. I made a complete mess of it and ended up with hundreds of streaks across the sensor and managed to convince myself that I had fatally ruined the damn thing. Anyway, Cloughan Point is an amazing spot for photos and today was just the right day - plenty of nice clouds. This was a quickly processed pano of the jetty from the railway tracks and as you'll notice, the streaks are running vertically because its made up of shots taken in portrait mode.

16/07/13

First job for this morning was to book the D800 into my local Calumet store in the hope that it could be cleaned and wasn't, in fact a total write-off. That done, I spent some time this evening working on this shot from yesterday. It's basically an HDR shot with three bracketed shots at +/- 1 EV and then converted into black and white. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop dodging and burning parts of the image and even more time cloning out streaks and spots on the sensor. It's Ok at this resolution but any bigger and it's still a mess. particularly the sky. However, having found how to get there, I intend returning some evening and doing some more long exposure shots.

17/07/13

I admit to owning three cameras. With my D800 in to be rescued I had foolishly lent out my other two cameras to other people and was left camera-less. How to take pictures with no camera - there was the challenge. Of course I still had my iphone, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became with the idea of using my flatbed scanner to try some shots. This is the first of the baby courgettes to be harvested from my greenhouse this evening before they got cooked for dinner. Courgette went on scanner, black cloth went over the top and there you have it. Nice enough detail and an interesting depth of field.

18/07/13

This is a pretty dreadful shot of my hand pressed onto the scanner. I think I was either getting desperate or very quickly ran out of ideas.

19/07/13

Good news all round. Camera cleaned with no permanent damage and I found a second hand Samyang fisheye lens for sale. Its an 8mm and is totally manual but with a bit of research got it working on the D800 with some metering. This was taken while walking up North Street, past Keats and Chapman bookshop. Maybe not the best example of fisheye photography but nice to be able to get a well exposed shot right away. I can assure you, there's more to come.

20/07/13

Saturday night meant one thing and one thing only - roller derby. The first ever international bout on Northern Irish soil as the Belfast Banshees took on the Bad Seeds from Stuttgart. This was a great bout with loads of excitement, lead changing hands several time, hard hits and a few laughs. So much so I might just do my own wee write-up for the blog if I get some time this evening or tomorrow. I picked this shot out of the 120 I ended up with; Ra-Ra Rasputina jamming - I've had the pleasure of watching this skater since her early days with the Banshees and she has blossomed over the past two years. Seeing this shot made me think that her style and technique sits pretty well alongside the many top rank American skaters I get to see shots of.

21/07/13

It wasn't a good idea to drink beer before going to the roller derby bout yesterday and then (after sobering up to take photos) going for a couple of more pints at the after party. Those last two pints were quite tasty. Up early with a muggy head and started processing and posting photos from last night. I eventually decided that I needed some fresh air and took a walk across the road to Civil Service Sports Club to watch a bit of cricket. Armed with my 70-200 I soon realised that this lens was just not long enough, shooting in full frame on the D800. Then I had an idea - bump the D800 into DX crop mode which should (in theory) increase the range of my zoom to something closer to 300mm. This worked, but at the cost of losing some sensor space and pixels - I think in DX crop mode the D800 knocks out around 16 megapixels. It worked out pretty well all things considered, but I think that a 400mm telephoto lens would be the minimum for shooting cricket.

Bloctopussy

I was asked to do a promo shoot for Belfast Roller Derby at the weekend -the aim was to get posters for their next home bout with the theme being Octopussy. First stop was the Original Octopussy film poster and figuring out how to re-create this. It looked like it could be done with four shots layered in Photoshop, using one shot as a base/background and then adding in the extra sets of arms.

I selected the potential arm positions in pairs (four sets) and decided to shoot these in a sequence. The key was going to be to get my male (James Bond) model to stay perfectly still. The setup for the shoot was as follows:

Lighting was provided by 2 Nikon SB-700 flash guns on TTL mode, with shoot-through umbrellas. Canera was set up with 1/160 shutter speed, f 8 and ISO 100 and I was using a Nikon D800 (full manual, RAW files) with a Nikon f1.8 50mm lens. Focus was locked on the models and then switched to manual focus to stop the camera's af changing focus during the sequence of shots and the shutter was triggered with a remote cable release.

We did a total of four run-throughs of the sequence of shots and this sequence was the one which seemed the best:

Some basic adjustments were done in Lightroom (cropping, exposure, saturation) and then synchronised to all four shots before exporting them to Photoshop. Starting with the base photo (above left) I added the next photo as a new layer underneath the background layer and then used the eraser tool to rub through the background, exposing the second set of arms. I then flattened the image and repeated the process with shot three and then shot four. After this, I made some minor adjustments using the dodge and burn tools and also used the dodge tool to make the background completely white. This gave me the final image:

All in all, an enjoyable afternoon's shoot and a reasonably good end product to pass on to the people who are producing the finished posters. I'll try to remember to post an image of the poster once it's available.

Major thanks to to my models Katie and Fintan and to Sarah and Barbie from Belfast Roller Derby who looked after the organisation and managed the shoot on the day.

One Light portraits

I've started working on using my off-camera flashes to take portraits - this is, I have to admit, very much a learning process for me but I do feel like I'm getting somewhere with it. This week, I tried out two different set ups and techniques which give very different results. Shots 1,2 and 3 were taken on a Nikon D800 with a Nikkor 60mm f2.8 lens

The first set-up was using a basic clam-shell approach to lighting.

1

Self Portrait

This used a black backdrop. The lighting was one Nikon SB-700 flash above the camera and pointed down onto the face at roughly a 45 degree angle. An Interfit Strobies softbox was used to modify the flash. Underneath was a gold reflector also angled at 45 degrees towards the face. This was shot with the flash on TTL mode and camera settings were 1/160, f8 and ISO 100. Plus points about this approach are the even lighting, lack of shadows, catchlights in the eyes and making the subject "pop" from the background. This is very easy to do and produces very pleasing results.

The second approach I wanted to try was using high-speed flash sync (or auto fp on Nikon cameras) to take some more contrasty black and white shots.

2

 Ellen

This shot used the flash as in the first shot - up above the camera pointing down onto the face (but with no reflector underneath). The flash was set slightly further back to "feather" the light falling on Ellen's face. As I understand it, feathering reduces the light as you're only getting the reduced light from the edge of the flash burst. Interestingly, this was taken in my rather cluttered and untidy living room, with no backdrop used. The very short burst of flash was enough to light Ellen's face but the light fell off very sharply, leaving the background under-exposed. The camera was set to 1/2000 f8 and ISO 100.

3

Sarah

The same camera settings, with the light placed up high to the left and again pointing down. As above, the face is lit really well, but the background is pretty much pure black.

The plus points with this approach are more dramatic shots, greater contrast between light/dark areas, no softness (due to high shutter speed) and it means you might not actually need to use a backdrop.

The next evening, I broke out a nifty little honeycomb grid for my flashgun. I've never used one of these before and wasn't sure what to expect. Just to add to the "let's see what we get" approach, I also stuck my 70-200mm f2.8 lens on the camera. The shots below were all taken with the flash and honeycomb slightly above Sarah and off the the left of the camera. Settings were 1/250, f5.6 and ISO 100 with the flash on TTL mode. Again, I wasn't using any backdrop here - the highly directional nature of the honeycomb seemed to light the subject (Sarah's face) with no spill over onto the background, probably because of the angle of the flash.

4

5

6

7

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!

As anyone who has checked out my blog before will know, I shoot for the Belfast Roller Derby team. Thus far I've been relying on shooting using ambient light during bouts, but have also been jealously eyeing up other derby photographers' work (mainly from the USA) and particularly those who shoot using a variety of off-camera lighting set-ups. I recently took the plunge and invested in a couple of Nikon SB-700 speedlights to compliment my existing two older and cheaper flash units and decided it was time to try out these in the derby setting.

I was thankful for the advice I have been given by a number of other more experienced shooters, which set me on roughly the right track. Last night was my first attempt.

The last shot is probably my pick of the bunch since it is the shot where it all came together. I had two slave flashguns shooting at roughly 45 degrees to the track, both of which were being triggered by another flash on the camera in master mode. The off-camera flashes were set to 1/2 power with the on-camera flash set to 1/8 power to provide some fill light. Shutter speed was set to 1/250 at f 4 and ISO sat comfortably at 400. The shots were generally pretty sharp and I was starting to get shots where the skaters are starting to "pop" from the background.

I still have some issues with this type of set-up. It's too static for my liking and seems to only give a fairly narrow coverage in terms of the track - maybe about 20ft. In the past and using my 70-200 f2.8 lens I could cover the whole of one of the straights on the track and part of two corners. I can't move around as much as I'm used to, although there is the possibility of using my second camera body to take candid/portrait shots in between jams. Being more static and relying on flash also meant I couldn't use continuous shooting mode - timing is more of an issue and I shot fewer frames than I would normally do. My lights were almost wiped out on at least one occasion by a wayward skater flying off the track. Don't think this is covered by my household insurance. I also found that my non-nikon flash was less than reliable and didn't fire in around 25% of shots - this would be a concern for me, although I haven't tried using my wireless triggers with it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with what I got

Creationism

Another bargain buy while shopping with the kids in the post-Xmas sales - a bag of dinosaurs which came complete with some trees and a plastic rock. Seemed like a good excuse for a meditation on the creationist argument.

Father Martin's arguments on creationism just got a wee bit surreal

Last Derby Bout of the Year

Sadly, Saturday was the last roller derby bout of the year here in Belfast. It's been almost exactly one year since I first approached the team and asked to come along to take some shots at a bout, purely out of interest. One year on and I've now covered six bouts, done the photography for a video shoot, taken two sets of head shots, taken special effects shots for bout programmes, got pictures published in the local newspapers, came second in the roller derby pub quiz with my kids and generally had absolute shit-loads of fun.

Roller derby has taught me a lot in terms of photography and given me the chance to swap ideas and pick the brains of similarly inclined photographers from all over the world through Flickr and Facebook groups. I've also had the chance to meet and work with a great bunch of ladies who seem to like what I've done and are always very complimentary and kind, even when I mess things up.

Saturday was notable to a couple of reasons. Five minutes into the bout my 32Gb CF card died on me. Just died with no warning and demanded to be formatted in the camera. Thankfully I had spare cards (as always) and was able to shoot the bout, with a loss of about 40-50 shots out of a total of 450. The second remarkable thing was that the team presented me with a thank you/birthday present at the end of the bout - a lens mug (Canon, but it didn't stop me drinking out of it) a cracker bottle of Green Spot Irish Whiskey from the Middleton distillery and my own BRD t-shirt with 2nd Shooter printed on the back. I've been after one of those for ages and am secretly very pleased to have been given one.

I'm looking forward to next year. More bouts at which to improve my skills at shooting and processing action shots. Some ideas for more arty stuff using slow sync/rear curtain flash and lighting. I also want to pitch some ideas for a calendar for this time next year - roller derby meets boudoir style. Bring it on.

My Bag

Photographers seem a wee bit obsessed with the contents of their camera bags. Being stuck in bed with the 'flu today I thought I'd take a rattle through the contents of my own bag of tricks.

Camera
I've just upgraded from the Nikon D90 to the Nikon D800. I loved my D90 having had both the D40 and D80 before it. It was like an old friend and I knew it inside out. The D800 is a beast of a camera, high resolution and full frame. It is amazing in controlled light situations (still life, portraiture, studio work) but also copes admirable with the other things I like to shoot (street photography, sports, night shots/light painting). Big file sizes but amazing performance when shooting in raw. I'm getting to grips with some of the many built-in features such as an intervaluometer, time lapse, HDR and so on. It's going to take years to get to the same level of comfort as I had with the D90.
My back up camera remains a little old reliable D60. Unfortunately it doesn't autofocus with most of the lenses listed below, but I can live with that.

Lenses
My go-to lens is the Nikon 24-70 f2.8. Sharp as a tack, fast and versatile. If I had only one lens, this would be the one.
For sports and street stuff, I often use the Tamron 70-200 f2.8 which is not quite as sharp or fast as the Nikon equivalent but does a pretty good job.
I use a Tamron 10-24 f3.5 for my wide angle stuff such as landscapes
I use two primes, the Nikon 50mm f1.8 and the Nikon 60mm f2.8. Both are lovely lenses for portraits and the Nikon 60mm is a superb little macro lens.
I also use the Lensbaby composer, and have tele/wide lenses for it as well as a set of macro filters.

Tripod
A Vanguard Alto Pro with a Vanguard ball head. Solid, stable and easy to use.

Other Stuff
Two cheap and nasty flashguns, a Nikon SB-28 which is older than me and a Nissin 644i. Both can be set on manual which is why I got them.
YungNuo wireless flash triggers. One of the cheapest wireless trigger sets around but they are simple to use and reliable 99.9% of the time with only the odd mis-fire.
Microfibre towel for wiping camera/lenses in the damp
Lenspen and wet/dry cleaning wipes
Torch for night shooting and light painting
Cards. I have had to invest in bigger and faster cards since getting the D800. Mostly 32Gb/16Gb cards in both CF and SD formats for the dual slots in the D800. Depending on what I'm shooting I have my camera set to use the second card as overflow or as a JPG backup to the RAW files on the primary card slot.
Spare battery. Never leave home without making sure I have a fully charged battery in my bag just in case.

367-50 Week 37

Another week, another week closer to the end of this project and I'm already starting to think about what to do next. The NEST2012 exhibition at T13 made me start thinking about found objects and photos of these. We'll see. I have the Belfast Banshees roller derby bout to look forward to on Saturday night as well. The rest of the week is, always, a mystery.

23/07/12

So here's the story. Around the coast of Britain between the 19th and 22nd of July these installations were being put up. A collection of illuminated tents with accompanying soundscapes of poetry called Peace Camp. We had two here in Northern Ireland and I opted to book tickets to the one at White Park Bay. My daughter Katie and myself set out before 9pm for a 90-minute drive. We arrived at White Park Bay at 10 o'clock to be told that the event was cancelled because of freak winds and freak high tides. I noted that there wasn't actually a breath of wind and the waves were being very well behaved and were in fact, quite far away. In the face of this, Katie and I had a cup of tea and decided to walk down to the beach anyway. All the tents had been taken down (except this one) and no poetry was to be had. Not to be put off without a fight, I tried a few ideas to get some sort of shot before we hit on the idea of getting Katie to go into the tent and wave a torch around it. This was the result on a 30" exposure at f-16, which shows up the tent but keeps a bit of detail in the sky and the foreground. At 10:31, I received an e-mail and a text from the organisers to inform me that the event was cancelled. Go figure.

24/07/12

Just saw this shot in the morning. The light was nice, the colour of the flowers stood out against each other and I thought that a shallow depth of field would work quite well with this.

25/07/12

A wee bit of spare time today and while doing some housework I was struck by the number of dead moths on one of the windowsills. A mystery - time to call in the CSI guys to investigate. I'm really liking the quality and the detail that the Nikon 60mm f2.8 gives. This was taken with the lens nearly pressed up against the subjects, but it came out pretty well. Razor sharp depth of field again.

26/07/12

This was my project for the day. I'd picked up a little Polaroid pocket printer and set about taking a series of headshots of myself. I roughly cropped these shots down in-camera and ended up with about 24 pictures (20 mins roughly, allowing for coffee). I then printed each shot off on the Polaroid printer and assembled the shots (about 30 mins). Took photo of finished piece and voila! I'm looking more like Eric Cantona as I get older and don't shave. A man can dream.

27/07/12

This was taken yesterday during a scouting trip for potential photoshoot locations. The Abbey at Greyabbey has masses of potential, with lots of possible set-ups that don't involve visitor information boards and bright green railings. It is handicapped by very photographer-unfriendly opening hours - 10am - 4.30 pm thus managing to avoid both early morning and evening when the light would be at its best.

28/07/12

Off to shoot Roller Derby this evening, with Belfast Banshees taking on Parma Violents from Scotland. As always, it was a great night and great fun to shoot. I've said it on this blog many times, but the Belfast Roller Derby crew are the best bunch of people to work with. Managed to fill a massive amount of storage space with shots and it is going to take most of tomorrow to process the photos, but it'l be worth it. I'm posting this pic simply because I like it. The framing, the light and the expression - no post-processing; this was how it came out of the camera.

29/07/12

Yep, it's now something like 6.30pm and I'm still sorting through shots from last night to get them posted to Facebook and to Flickr. I'm impressed with how the D800 coped with high ISO and was able to shoot on manual at 1/500 and f4 for most of the night with the D800 on auto ISO. It ranged up to ISO 6400 and these shots haven't been put through any noise reduction software. That will be a job for another day should anyone want them printed or published I suppose. And it was a real boost to see my headshots for the team in the bout programme. They looked really well. Better than the other teams, anyway. The full set from last night's bout can be seen at:

Belfast Banshees vs Parma Violents on Flickr