Flower Pot Family Composite

As I move more into composite images, it’s now very clear that a thorough understanding of light is essential not only behind the camera, but in front of the monitor. Without a good grounding of how light works in a composite image, you are left with the option of creating grungy dark messy composites to hide your mistakes and to make the image look semi believable. The most difficult part is getting the shadows to behave. Once that’s mastered, the rest tends to fall into place.

Shooting Video on the Nikon D3s

Critical focus on any DSLR when shooting video is problematic. I’v come up with a fix to make the system work better and be able to lock focus in a system that doesn’t think video at its core.

By attaching a handle out from the focus ring gives better control over focus control as the further you move from the centre of the focus system the larger the movements required to move through the focus range. I’ll be testing out the system tonight at the Lantern Festival. The system looks promising.

Shooting a German Shepherd

Kaly - click to enlargeA while back I was asked to shoot a German Shepherd. Kaly was a dream to work with. Obedience in the highest order. I haven’t come across such a well behaved dog. Almost like working with a human. Dark fur requires specularity to light the detail of the dog properly. And as such I used large specular sources. Job Done.

2011 Winner of Canon online

Human Garden - click to enlargeReally stoked to win the Canon Online competition for 2011, thats 2 under my belt! Was a close call this time with a joint first place requiring redjuging of the winning images. 

Shooting the Jucy Hotel

Jucy Lounge - click to enlarge 

We were recently commissioned by the Jucy Group to do more of a run and gun style shoot at the Jucy Hotel. Instead of taking the big lights into the hotel we used a number of speedlights to get the job done quickly. It meant using the high ISO capability of the Nikon D3s and my assistant behind a small softbox as we moved from scene to scene. Most of the time we used two or three speedlights mixed with ambient light to get what we needed.