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.

2013 365-8

Week eight begins with a big smile on my face. Hoping this smiling thing is long term rather than temporary since it feels pretty damn good. And no, I'm not telling you about it. Tough.

18/02/13

Found myself in the HMV closing down sale in Lisburn's Bow Street Mall this lunchtime. filled a bag of cd's and also found two mugs celebrating two of my favourite albums of all time -  this rather splendid one may just become my new office mug for my morning coffee. The other was the Stones' Exile on Main Street, which i have owned copies of since I first heard it. I've owned Exile on vinyl (twice), tape (once) and CD (four times).

19/02/13

I'd picked up a box of little skaters as while back but haven't really got round to doing anything with them. It was a nice bright afternoon today, so I went out into the back yard to see what I could get. I got this shot on the top of the blue recycling bin - Belfast for a bit of context? Now I need someone to paint my skaters in the colours of Belfast Roller Derby (and a couple of zerbras/refs as well).

20/02/13

Half term, so I got to collect the younger two girls early. This then involved a trip to the shops, and as an afterthought we took a wander into the local charity shop where we found this rather excellent Dalek helmet. Fully working, with batteries, one-size-fits-all and for the ridiculous price of £3.49. This is the result of three separate shots layered in Photoshop. I just love it. Another. dafter, shot later in the week.

21/02/03

I read an article on line about using multiple shots to produce large panoramas. This was trial shot number 2 with the ever willing Muffin. Almost 60 shots, with the camera set a 1/125 and f2.8. The first shot was set up on Muffin, then I locked down exposure and focus and took the rest in increasing circles around the start point. Autopano Giga was the software I used to stitch all the shots together, which it seems to do effortlessly and cleanly.

22/02/03

Another Dalek helmet shot. I have absolutely no idea why I decided that this would be a good idea.

23/02/13

My first foray back into concert photography came last night, courtesy of the Warzone Centre and Epic Tour in Belfast. I was asked to go along and cover this (as opposed to my usual blagging and bluffing) and it would be fair to say I was nervous about this. The Warzone is dark - as dark as a dark thing wrapped in a blanket, placed in a light-safe box and buried underground. I had to use flash, but since it was a very small venue I was able to get away with very low power (about 1/32 power) and this also allowed me to use lower shutter speeds to capture the action. This is Kevin, lead singer with French band The Decline! and they were supported by three local punk bands. I enjoyed this; the shots came out well, I got to meet loads of new people and make new contacts and I got to practice a bit of french. The shot above just leapt out at me on the first pass through the shots and seemed to really cry out out for black and white.

24/02/13

The crowd last night was small but energetic. My personal favourite Belfast punk is Barzo (above) who was more than a little tired and emotional last night, courtesy of good old Buckfast. Lovely guy who would never walk past without saying hello and having a chat. The back of his head appears in more than one photo, due to excessive jumping around. I had to take some shots of the crowd and ended up with a dozen of Barzo. This is my own favourite.

2013 365-6

Week six it is then.

04/02/13

A pack of little skaters and skateboarders arrived today in the post. This was quick try at getting something with one of them, using a bit of black string and a fruit bowl. With the aperture set at 3.5  the background came out black and covered up the string from which the wee man was suspended. Lost detail in the oranges though.

05/02/13

Still cracking on with single light flash portraits. This is my daughter Ellen taken using an SB-700 flash unit fitted with a small softbox and was fired on high speed sync (auto FP on Nikon) with a shutter speed of 1/2000. Nice shot of Ellen - even she liked it and she's a hard audience to please. She was delighted that a lot of her friends saw it on Facebook and complimented her on it. Result all round.

06/02/13

I returned to Belmont Park this evening to try out one very long exposure shot of the wooden statues there. I was aiming for 20-30 minutes in order to get some star trails, but sadly there was too much cloud cover to pick these out . I did capture one star trail in the top right-hand corner but it really just looks out of place. The statues themselves came out pretty well on a 30 minute exposure although I noted some "hot pixels" when zoomed in. Probably why it's recommended to take a large number of shorter shots (i.e. 200-250 30" exposures) and combine them in the appropriate software in post production. We live and learn.

07/02/13

A long time ago, I ordered some business cards in an attempt to promote my photography. People always ask me if I have a card, website, etc. The cards were, frankly, rubbish and I never actually handed any of them out because I was a little embarrassed by them. This week I finally bit the bullet and sat down to do it properly and that meant researching print firms and thinking about the design of the cards. Moo Print seemed to come out on tops in terms of quality and service, so I went for them. I used one of their existing designs, modified it to suit me and uploaded five high quality jpegs. The cards arrived today (five day turnaround) beautifully packaged and presented. They look (and feel) really high quality, complete with a funky case than fans out to display your cards in all their glory. I love these and definitely won't be embarrassed to hand them out.

08/02/13

Half price Haribo sweets? I'll be having some of these. The fantasy mix seemed to be the most promising in photographic terms - big and colourful. This is my packet of sweets set on a sheet of perspex, suspended between two chairs in the kitchen with a flashgun placed directly underneath.  Colourful enough, almost in a stained-glass window way.

09/02/13

More single flash portrait practice this week. This time using a honeycomb grid to modify the flash and make the light more directional. No backdrop used here - the highly directional light wiped the background out (my cluttered living room) and there was very little post-processing needed with any of these shots.

10/02/13

Fresh meat session (i.e. newbies) with Belfast Roller Derby this afternoon. Always fun to see new people on skates and there was a big crowd turned up today. I was shuttling between the fresh meat session and the intermediates/advanced training. I think I'm now about 95% sorted in terms of using lights with roller derby. This rear view belongs to the fantastic Rosa "Sigourney Cleaver" Hughes.