2013 365-13

This week brought some strange and interesting offers and opportunities in terms of photography, sadly none of which I can talk about just now as I need to see how they will progress over the next few weeks. Plenty of shooting this week, and plenty of roller derby.

25/03/13

Promo shoot for Belfast Roller Derby yesterday afternoon, on the theme of Bloctopussy (Octopussy) where we were trying to recreate the origianl movie poster. It all worked out well, although it did take a fair bit of pre-planning and practice to get the four separate shots needed in order to merge them in photoshop. I wrote up a write up of how I did this - check it out here:

Bloctopussy Shoot

26/03/13

Was up and around early this morning and tried this panorama across Strangford Lough to Scrabo Tower. Not 100% happy with the shot of the processing of it, but its the best shot I took today.

 27/03/13

This is John McCullough, taken outside the Duke of York bar in Belfast. John is finally retiring and we met up for one last pint in the Duke. John was my first supervisor when I was a trainee psychologist (25 years ago) and he has had to live with the shame of this ever since. A genuinely nice guy and I hope he enjoys his retirement.

28/03/13

Fishing boat in Portavogie Harbour this morning. It's HDR processing, it's a wee bit over the top but it does bring out the sky really well. Might try this again, only without the big building on the right.

29/03/13

Flag protestor in tragic yet slightly ironic accident. I started playing about with a tube of toothpaste and various different sets of wee men. One thing lead to another and before long the red, white and blue toothpaste got me thinking about flags and this shot just appeared.

30/03/13

Robert suspected he was on a promise. Toothpaste wasn't the only thing I bought in the chemists. I had thought of doing something using a box of condoms and my wee nuns but this ended up being the best shot of the day.

31/03/13

Staying on the theme of wee men in the bathroom, I noticed how the oval shape of the sink would lend itself to some tiny skaters. My bathroom is pretty small and getting a camera on a tripod, two speedlights and a cardboard box of wee men wasn't easy and involved me falling in the bath at least once.

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.