2013 365 - 32

Things are picking up a little after the past few weeks and a little (very little) mojo seems to be returning. A couple of kicks in the teeth this week; couldn't take up an offer to go to a music festival (sick child) and another roller derby promo shoot was cancelled at late notice. However, I plugged away and the wee men were out this week as well as a lot more shooting with the fisheye.

5/08/13

Absolutely loved this shot from last night's wrestling in Antrim. All the elements I've been trying to catch came together at the right time. For the first time I was able to use a three light set-up for the wrestling thanks to the balcony' two speedlights on the balcony to cross-light the ring and one on the camera for fill. That's one going off behind Eamon as he launches himself off the corner post.

6/08/13

I'd promised myself that the wee men would get an airing this week and took them out to the garden and greenhouse. Here they are harvesting the shallots.

7/08/13

This is such a simple shot. It's a weed growing in the middle of the back garden. 60mm macro lens and the whole backdrop blurs into green.

8/08/13

The wee men again. It is sad to note that it is now Augusts and my tomatoes are still green. A couple are threatening to ripen but it's pretty much wall-to-wall green tomatoes in the greenhouse.

9/08/13

Donaghadee lighthouse, shot with the 8mm fisheye and given some faux-hdr processing to bring up the sky.

10/08/13

A bit of fun with the fisheye as well. Can you tell that I'm loving this lens? Depth of field is amazing and the distortion can work very well as a creative tool.

11/08/13

Yep, more fisheye fun, this time at the top of Victoria Square in Belfast. Went there to try some shots of the roof of the viewing gallery and then accidentally put my hand in a shot (not hard to do with a lens with a 180 degree angle of view) and had an idea to try this.

Pro Wrestling Ulster Shoot

Sunday night meant the chance to shoot with the amazing local talent that is the Pro Wrestling Ulster Crew. As father Ted would have said, they're a great bunch of lads. This was the "Proving Grounds" even which was a chance for newcomers from the organisation's training academy to experience their first public bouts in front of a paying audience. It was great to see new characters, and there was obviously a lot of work had gone into the preparation.

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Apart from the action stuff, there is always plenty of scope for other type of shot, particularly when it comes to grappling and submission holds. Which does tend to lend itself to a spot of black and white.

 JDP (the one in the air) is a big guy but very athletic. As in, I couldnt-do-that-in-a-million-years athletic.

The belly slap and ripple effect - this was the second time I caught this in a bout and it doesn't half look really weird. 

 The last event was a royal rumble-style free-for-all with all the wrestlers getting into the ring and the last one standing being the winner. This was a nightmare to shoot and I have no idea how to approach this if it comes up again in the future.

2013 365 30

Week 30 and my motivation for keeping going with this 365 thing has waned considerably, hence the fact that I'm two days late in posting this. Motivation for photography is pretty high though and I have a big weekend of roller derby and wrestling ahead along with some further playing about with my new fisheye lens.

22/07/13

A wee wander round Belfast with the new 8mm fisheye. Had an idea that I was looking for this sort of "X" shape and walked around until I found the buildings at one junction that made an almost perfect shape for the shot.

23/07/13

Was mightily cheered up today when the postie brought me a little envelope containing two rather fine F2.8 patches all the way from the USA. I cannot decide where to put them but they look nice.

24/07/13

Sarah: Daddy, what does that new lens do?
Me: It does stuff like this
Sarah: That's just weird

25/07/13

Loved this grab shot from roller derby. It's all wrong technically but the lens flare from my flash gun is eye-catching and the skull and crossbones on the glasses is perfectly sharp.

26/07/13

I picked this shot out not because it's the best from the weekend's bout but because it's a good example of where I am right now with my attempts to master derby photography. Three off-camera flashguns placed at turns 3 and 4 with two as key lights (set at 1/4 power) and one as a fill light (set at 1/8 power). The big difference was that I've now started to set a custom white balance based on the combination of overhead fluorescents and flash guns and it seems to have worked wonders in terms of providing accurate colour rendition. I'm a happy bunny, particularly given that I was able to set this up in somewhere completely different and it worked.

27/07/13

Wrestling and more wrestling. God but this is fun to shoot. This was an evening of debuts for new wrestlers so there quite a few characters on display. Things were a wee bit rougher round the edges than usual but it was still great craic.

28/07/13

Wrestling in Black and White

I got to shoot my second bout of pro wrestling last Sunday night. You can see the whole shooting match (so to speak) on my Flickr stream here:

Pro Wrestling Ulster on Flickr

While working through these I took a wee bit of a shine to the monochrome shots I'd processed. As always, it seemed to be the high contrast shots with a wee bit of drama that worked best in black and white. Here's the selection.

2013 365-17

I haven't been well this week, and the medical opinion is divided, to say the least. It's either a real nasty infection or some weird muscle problem. The result is few photos, but here they are anyway. Shorter descriptions than usual (every cloud has a silver lining) due to a splitting headache.

22/04/13

It was great to see how well the new lighting set up worked. The two shots (above and below) show what I like about it. Nice exposures at really low ISO and good depth of field.

23/04/13

24/04/13

I was outside trying to play kerbsie with Sarah with one of those really cheap plastic balls when I noticed how well it glowed when the sun was behind it. Quick dash into the house for the camera and there you have it.

25/04/13

This is Lola the house rabbit, belongs to my eldest daughter Siobhan.

26/04/13

..and this is Siobhan with her lastest stuffed animal purchase from the auction rooms. I had to drive her home with an antelope head in the front seat and a stuffed fox in the back. I'm not making it up.

27/04/13

Second chance this weekend to shoot wrestling in Belfast. As much fun as the last time and my timing was a little better than before.

28/04/13

2013 365-7

Week 7 is upon us, or at least upon me. Another week sadly lacking in inspiration for photography, but I'm coming to realise that I go through peaks and troughs in terms of my own creativity and productiveness. It may be something to do with the three photoshoots I tried to cover on Sunday just past - three very different events, three very different sets of demands and problems, three very different atmospheres. Maybe I just got burned out?

11/02/13

One from last night's wrestling action, processed today. Like the way this turned out, and was one of the few times when my timing was actually right. Definitely great fun, and I'd definitely go back if I got the invite.

12/02/13

You have to admire Warhol, if not as an artist then as a shameless self-promoter. The MAC in Belfast has an exhibition on at the moment and it is, being quite honest, very good indeed. A couple of galleries of prints and some video stuff would let you put in a couple of hours. This is the wall of the main staircase, between the two main galleries.

13/02/13

My eldest daughter Siobhan, who was kind enough to come round and get her little sister started on some knitting this afternoon. Stitches were dropped on more than a couple of occasions but I did press Siobhan into posing in front of the speedlights. She hates it - I'm amazed that she still agrees to do it, although it does involve some complaining and then some post-shoot criticism of my photos and processing. I like this one and there was no complaints or criticism. Is that a good sign?

14/02/13

Pictures of my favourite skaters' butts is not something I'm going to take on as a full-time project, but they do wear pants that make me laugh. I was abut to say sometimes, but lately its been pretty much every week. This comes in the same week that a campaign by derby photographers in the USA led to the shutting down of a Tumblr site dedicated to just that topic, due to the amounts of photos posted on it that broke copyright laws. Whoever started the site must have been tired of reading takedown notices.

15/02/13

I have to take more landscapes! It annoys me that I just don't get landscape photography so I've decided to make more of an effort with it. I had read an article on panoramas, got my hands on some nice software and took a swing past Scrabo to test it out. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, although the more I look at it, the tower seems to be leaning ever-so-slightly to the right. Am I imagining this?

16/02/13

A while back, I started to get interested in roadside memorials. I'd recently started driving more in work, and visiting places I hadn't been before with the result that I was passing more of these memorials. I started carrying a spare camera in the car in case I saw one and started pulling over and taking a picture of each. This is the first of two "ghost bikes" in Belfast to commemorate the death of Michael Caulfield. Mr Caulfield was a 56 year-old cyclist and father of four killed after a collision with a lorry on Friday the 15^th April near this spot on the Ormeau Bridge. The bike was placed by an unknown woman. In June 2012, the original ghost bike was stolen but was replaced at the end of June. It has remained there since.

17/02/13

I'm not even going to start to explain why this shot is here. It just had to be here.

Pro Wrestling Ulster

I had my first chance to shoot some local wrestling bouts on Sunday night, courtesy of Pro Wrestling Ulster. The event was in the ballroom of the Balmoral Hotel, Belfast and there was reasonable crowd turned up. The crew at the event were really helpful, with lots of tips and suggestions for what/where to shoot. Technically, this was a difficult one due to the poor lighting in the venue, and my original idea of shooting using only ambient light went out the window very quickly. Using on-camera flash was also awkward, since I didn't want to blind someone while they were leaping off the top rope. The solution seemed to be to use bounce flash with the very low and white ceiling as the target. I ended up shooting at 1/500sec, somewhere between f3.5 and f5 and with the ISO set to auto (it seemed to range between 4000 and 6400.

As always with wrestling (or at least what I've seen on TV) there's a lot of theatricality and that definitely makes for good shots.

Catching the various wrestlers when they're not actually throwing each other around the ring was also pretty easy and yielded some nice shots.

But, of course, it all comes down to the action. Guys in mid-air, guys hitting each other, guys hitting the floor of the ring hard. As with any new sport, I had issues with my timing and angles. This meant I was spending a lot of time on the move trying to figure where and what to shoot. I ended up with a reasonable collection of shots by the end of the night, but also a fair number of "duds" for the trash basket. Some more experience might make this a bit less "hit and miss" if I get asked back.