Lighting Tutorial - Fortune Teller shoot

This is the first in what will hopefully be a long series of tutorials I’ll be posting on how I’ve achieved the effects I have in some of my shoots.  The subject for today is one of the more creative setups I’ve come up with.  It’s the kind of setup that you run over in your mind and are never sure if it’ll work until you give it a go…First up here are a couple of the shots I took with the setup:

Now there’s not as much photoshop done to these images as you might first think.  Just some local contrast adjustment and colour tweaking, that’s it.  The effect was achieved by the use of 3 strobes.  The first two were standard rim lights set up behind and to each side of the model to provide separation between her and the black background.  The third was the creative one, I actually had it shining up from the bottom through the crystal ball.

The setup was as follows:  I started with a small round glass table & used cloth to mask off around the edges and even most of the table top, just leaving a circle in the middle, the strobe was placed under the table and faced upward so that it would fire through that circle and not spill anywhere else.  I then got a large glass bowl and a drinking glass both of the same height & placed the drinking glass in the bowl and the crystal ball on the glass.  I then filled up the bowl with hot water and dropped some dry ice in the bowl of water for the smoke.  The result being that with the smoke flowing out of the bowl of water and the crystal ball being of the same height of the bowl that the ball appears to be floating on smoke, with light coming from underneath through the table, bowl, glass and finally crystal ball to illuminate the smoke & the models hands and face.

I wasn’t sure it would work before we tried it but couldn’t have been happier with the results.  Often when you try playing around with ideas like this (and even less adventurous) some little thing you never figured on ruins everything and you have to play around a lot to get something decent out of the setup.  This was one of the rare experiments that just WORKED, straight up.

Christchurch to Queenstown 1st & 2nd July 2008

Flew in to Christchurch on the last night of the financial year and because I’m a cheap bastard I decided to spend the night in the airport rather than a hotel as I had a camper van booked the next morning 8am.  Well I didn’t end up getting any sleep in the airport but the night passed quickly enough and before I knew it it was time to start my wander south.

 The first thing that hit me on exiting the terminal was the COLD, and yes it does need to be capitalised, my appetite immediately turned into a fat Italian mumma, saying things to me such as “you need to eat”  “you have to get fat”  “insulation is gooood”.  So after a breakfast of a cottage pie, blueberry muffin and 3 piece feed from KFC I was finally off.

The highlights on the way down being the very windy Mt John, home to the largest telescope in the country and also the fastest recorded wind speed (256kpm until the wind speed sensor broke) and the very very very BLUE Lake Pukaki.

Here are some shots:

 

 

 

 

 

An afternoon with Soph - 15th June 2008

I always grab every oppurtunity I can to work with Soph and so when she was up in Brisbane recently for a few days of work I did just that.  We had some makeup artist issues with a late cancelation but Carla came to the party and all ended well.  After we finished up with the car shots we filled ourselves up with an awesome homecooked meal (thanks Anne!).  The goal for the evening then was just to fit in a bunch of different beauty looks in a fairly short shoot (about 3hrs from makeup start to last shot).

 Model : Soph
Make up : Carla

 

 

 

 

 

Road trippin' across Australia Feb-Mar '08

Yeah ok, I’m a slack bastard.  I promised an update weeks ago and I haven’t given it.  Well I’ve been…lazy.

Ok, got back from Asia a week or so into Jan with the idea of chillin’ for a couple months and then heading back over to the land of plenty.  Was here a couple weeks when my old aerial photography client rang me up and said he had some work for me.  I initially knocked him back as I’d had enough living out of a suitcase just recently and just wanted to watch the cricket.  But then the bastard rang back with an offer to pay me almost 2.5 times my previous salary.

 Well I’m not much of a material kinda guy but this meant I’d be getting paid 4X my normal stock income for the period of work with them so I caved.  A couple days later I found myself speeding the client’s ford Falcon down from Brisbane to Melbourne for some work in Ballarat.  First a word on the car…did the clowns at Ford actually DRIVE the thing when they released that car?  The Ford Falcon is supposed to be an Australia icon but as the guy who used to work on the suspension in my rx7 said “this thing was all over the road like dogshit!”.  I used to be an idiot hoon, I’m now a…swift driver.  But I’d be dammed if I’d take that thing any faster than about 130 - it just didn’t feel safe.

 Sorry you true blue types but I’m going to stick to my Japanese cars who’s manufactures actually know what HANDLING is.

Anyways as Ali G would say “I digest”.  Got SFA personal shots from the air as I’m that knackered from shooting boring farms for the client that I just can’t be assed shooting my own work @ 500ft but I did get a couple shots of the dam above the place I was staying for a couple weeks (Healsville), a few other random aerial snaps, and then a few shots I managed to snag on the way too and from Melb.  Enjoy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More temple shots

As promised here are a couple more temple shots - expect them to keep coming for a bit…