Friday, February 20, 2009 at 11:36PM Well I’m back over in Asia again for more touring around and exploration. Flew into KL, Malaysia Tuesday and immediately got out of the big (and dirty) smoke to head north to Penang. Not too much to report so far so I’ll just throw up a couple shots from sunset & early evening yesterday. Both are shot from the top of the Komtar shopping complex, which lies at the base of the Komtar tower.
Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 10:45PM 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.
Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 12:36AM When Beck contacted me a few weeks back to tell me she was going to be in NZ for a week and was keen to shoot I was dubious to say the least. Thing is I’ve had a couple bad experiences with Beck pulling out on shoots we had organised previously, however she seemed very sincere in her desire to shoot & it’s always good to give people 2nd chances when you can. Well she exceeded all expectations, it was a cold morning with temps hovering around -5 to -10c and I can hardly recall a single complaint out of her. Last shot of this set isn’t how I like to depict women. It’s a bit objectifying and I like to shoot naked girls without trying to demean them in any way, but it was just shot as a pisstake and I think it’s good for a laugh, I had to really work Mikey to get that exaggerated Macho look out of him :)
Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 10:02PM 
Friday, August 1, 2008 at 12:42PM Well it had only been 2 days since I’d hurt myself boarding at Coronet so when we went up to Cardrona I didn’t even take the board off the car. Just spent the day hiking around taking photos. I did manage to get a free day pass out of them by flashing a few shots though so that made it easier to get up to the kickers and rails to shoot the boys. There was also a big air comp on that day which I managed to get a few shot of some riders warming up on. Unfortunately I managed to loose my spare battery that day so by the time the actual competition started I’d run out of juice.
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