This film is called The Golden Boy and the man calling in the favour is Danny Bishop (operating the camera on the left here), a talented camera operator with whom I worked on Reuniting The Rubins earlier this year. He’s the sort of man who inspires total confidence and trust so it’s a pleasure to work with him, and indeed at least half the crew on this short came from Rubins.

It’s a 3-day shoot, working overnight from dusk till dawn on the streets of London. On day one a lot of people will be seeing new faces, although there’ll also be a lot of people who have worked together in the past. Within each department people will generally know each other already, as that’s how everyone gets work – they’re hired by someone they’ve worked for before who liked them.

The the first thing I try to do is introduce myself to the 1st Assistant Director, the 2nd if they’re around (they’re usually back at the unit base), and any of the 3rds I can find. The 1st is running the set while the director works with the creative aspects, and on occasion I might not be able to get the shot I need due to camera position. In those cases it’s the 1st that will be able to get a scene run again just for me, so it’s essential to have a good relationship with him or her. I’ll say hi and let them know my name, find out if there’s anything I need to know already, shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes if there’s time, and then let them get on with their extremely busy job.

Then I find the camera crew and say hello to them when I get a chance, although the conversation is generally a lot shorter because they’ll be focussing very intently on their own roles tending to the camera, especially on the first day when everyone is making sure that the first shot goes off without a hitch. I’m going to be hovering very close to them a lot of the time and I need them on my side so I make a very good point of remembering names (which I’m pretty awful at these days!) and then finding somewhere safe to hide while they’re running back and forth with lenses and cables and tape measures and actors marks.

Now I get my camera set up, once I’m comfortable that people in my immediate vicinity know to expect a stills camera pointed at the action. Got to start somewhere so I’ll either make an educated guess at the settings and fire a shot off, or I’ll just fire one off with whatever I’ve already got programmed in and go from there. I’ll almost always shoot manual settings on a film because the lighting is set up to remain constant.

Here’s my first shot. It’s shot on aperture priority as that’s what my camera was on when I pulled it out the bag:

ISO 1600, f/5.6, 1/160, Cloudy

Way underexposed! The bright light in the middle is set up down the street pointing back at the actors for both fill and backlight, depending on where the actors are standing. It’s firing straight into my lens, and so aperture priority mode has screwed up his eyes and wailed “Too bright!” and produced a fast shutter. Next shot I switch to Manual mode and slow down the shutter.

ISO 1600, f/5.6 1/50, Cloudy

The shutter is now dragging too long really. At 1/50 I’ll never get frozen motion, and probably lots of camera shake, and it’s still underexposed. I’m going to have to put the ISO up past 1600 – good thing I’ve got a D700, eh? Those boards have been laid down to smooth the track on that the camera will make on the dolly (the wheeled trolley it’s attached to). Usually dolly tracks will be used, which the grooved wheels ride on, but it’s possible there wasn’t enough budget for them on this short.

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/25, Sunny

Much more light getting in now. Why did I make the shutter even slower? I’m not sure. Bit daft, really. By the way, the stand on the right is supporting the main light for this location. I’m not great with the names of lights. Let’s just say it’s a big one, and it’s got a huge softbox over it, probably about 5 feet square.

I can see that the white balance is going to have to change, probably to Tungsten, and I can now afford to pull the shutter back to something much more reasonable. Shutter first:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/60, Sunny

That’s better. Way too warm, and still a bit bright really. 1/60 is about as slow as I’ll go on a film if a scene is relatively static and I absolutely need the light, but is still useless for freezing motion enough for my needs.

Time to switch the white balance:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Incandescent (Tungsten)

Now we’re pretty much there. Good shutter speed, good white balance. Feels a little cold – even though I’m shooting RAW so I can tweak it all later if I have to, I’d rather get it as close as dammit right now so I don’t have to faff around later. I know that’s the luxury of RAW, but I think you can get bogged down in that and I’ll cheerfully argue the point with those that criticise not taking advantage of the post-processing freedom RAW gives you. Get it right in the camera and I can spend more time on the couch at home.

Next shot I try what I perhaps should have done in the first place – I try Auto White Balance:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Auto WB

See, the camera thought tungsten all along. But just that tiny bit warmer, and you know I agree. However, I’m not given to trusting living in Auto settings for film stills because they can change from shot to shot given what’s in the frame, and I need consistency over a long period, so I go back to Tungsten and warm it up in-camera.

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

Tungsten A5 refers to the D700′s warmer/cooler tweaks for white balance. Cooler is B1-5. It looks good to my eye and if it’s not right later, I can still always tweak. I think it’s good. So I grab a wider shot to check once more:

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

It’s perhaps a bit bright – films are almost always underexposed compared to what a stills camera says is a good exposure, but I’ll wait till the actors are in the shot to see how the light plays on them. One last shot, decently framed at last!

ISO 2500, f/2.8, 1/125, Tungsten A5

And now I’m ready to go! Over the course of the next two hours my settings rarely changed, except I did go up to ISO 3200 and had to move my shutter speed around from 1/80 to 1/160 depending on where the actors were. They moved around the corner of the wall and it was a lot darker on the other side, plus I felt some my shots were a bit bright overall so will bring them down around half a stop in Capture NX2 today.

Hope this was interesting reading to someone – you’ve got to start somewhere and sometimes it’s to shoot full auto and tweak those settings if they’re pretty good, other times I just work it one setting at a time, putting the ISO up only when I’m dipping into slow shutter territory.

I’ll post a few shots from the shoot once I’ve finished on it – I’m back there on Sunday night. Thanks for reading!

Related reading:

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I walked over to Wandsworth Park and found a tiny patch of daisies – I was looking for something I could light with my new softbox (the LumiQuest Softbox III I posted about a while back). At first I just took photos of the daisies in natural light, playing with the wide angle lens I’d taken with me, the Sigma 10-20mm. I don’t often use it as it’s pretty stylised and only useful for particular things as opposed to general use so I don’t often walk around with it unless I’m specifically out on a ‘photo walk’ like this. It’s great fun every so often though, and worth remembering if you need a quick change of style.

In the rest of this post I’ll talk through the shots I took, including a few mistakes and learning points for myself.

Here’s a couple of the first shots I took while I was setting up. The difference in colour is interesting and I didn’t notice it till I got back (it was impossible to really look at the photos outside – the sun was too bright to judge the LCD properly even in the shade under the hood of my top). They were taken around 4 minutes apart, both on the Sunny white balance. In the first shot the sun had just gone behind the clouds. Both f/4 at ISO 400, the first shot is 1/400th and the second 1/2000th shutter speeds.

The sunlit one is nice but I wanted to try lighting them against the clouds so I changed my angle and set the flash up. Actually, the first thing I did was take another few shots for angles, and also I took a bunch of bracketed shots to try and make a nice HDR later. Haven’t done that yet.

This is the scene in natural light – I actually like the washed out tones and the direct sunlight, but the plan was to overpower the sun with a fast shutter. It would have been better to close the aperture too to get more focus on the foreground and also darken the ambient further but it affected the flash too much.

The shutter was already so fast that the flash was right on the edge of registering, and everything got a bit dark. Mostly I tried to keep the flash on 1/2 power maximum or else the recycle time got too long as I’d not changed the batteries since the last job I used it on.

I wanted to play with gels and white balance as well, so I could get the basics in my head. I’ve seen it used to great effect and plan to nick the idea for future use! In the first shot below, I’d switched to Tungsten white balance and put the equivalent of 3/4 CTO on. Don’t ask why I didn’t use full, it was just the first to hand! On the right you can see the localised effect of the flash on a patch of grass. Finally, there’s a shot with the flash zoomed out wider, held over the lens just as I get a helpful passer-by to give the shot some background interest.

So it’s pretty stylised, that’s for sure – but I don’t like the effect. The sky is too blown for the look I want in that last shot, it’s too blue and the foreground is too yellow. The light is also too hard and falls off at the edges too quickly (ie – the edge of the circle of light that the flash is illuminating is too obvious).

First problem easily solved – the hardness of the light; put some sort of diffuser between the subject and the light. As it so happened I’d got the Lumiquest Softbox in my bag. It’s flat, it can go everywhere. It’s very cool like that. I also switched to Fluorescent white balance and popped a green Fluorescent gel on the flash.

The first shots weren’t what I expected, as the background was nice but the flash light was much colder. Here’s a couple of test shots – technically total crap, the overall exposure too bright, no effort to hide the light and it’s evidently too powerful – but you get an idea of the temperature of the light.

On the Nikons (and I’m sure on the Canons too) you can make gradual tweaks within each WB setting. By setting Fluorescent and ‘warming up’ the setting using a -3 adjustment, the colour of the light fell much more in line with the pictures in my head.

Here’s the first decent result I got, followed by a pair that nicely show the effect of softbox out and softbox in.

I should point out that this whole set-up is far from consistent, with varying shutter speeds and f-stops, a wildly ranging distance of the flash, shooting one handed. As for notes, I’ve got the EXIF but haven’t really noted it for this post. Practically, it was opportunity to test how things work, and find something that does work. That way I’ll have done it once already should the moment arise where I need to do it on the spot somewhere, and I’ll know at least one thing that works.

These first few shots have already taught me that this white balance combination (bright sunlight, Fluorescent white balance on the camera and gel) makes for a sky colour I like, and a nicely toned ambient background. If I’m remembering the Photoshop Colour Balance tool correctly, adjusting for green introduces more magenta. Make a note in the mental crib-sheet.

The next thing I did was try to regulate the distance of the flash, and also solve the blasted CLS-in-sunlight problem. Strong direct sunlight hitting the sensor on the SB-800 can interfere with its ability to see the commander flash coming from the D200′s pop-up. I had an absolute nightmare with this issue on a portrait shoot the other day, where I was trying to put some fill on some faces but there was nowhere on that side of them to put the flash where it wasn’t in direct sunlight, hence lots of failed pops. Anyway, that’s another day, when I get permission to use the images in a post (they’re for a documentary that hasn’t aired yet).

I perched the flash and softbox on the side of my bag in such a way that the sensor was shaded and the flash was directed at my willing models. Here’s another few in a portrait orientation. Even though the flash is pretty much fixed now you can still see a variation in exposure as I kept adjusting shutter speeds and aperture trying to get the clouds the way I wanted them. I really need to sort out captions for my images so I can put the EXIF in there.

L: 1/1250 sec, f/5.6
M: 1/1250 sec, f/4
R: 1/1600 sec, f/5.6

If nothing else, this demonstrates how changing the aperture changes the ambient and the flash (shutter speed generally only affecting the ambient, non-Strobists amongst you). The final shot is much darker because both the shutter speed and the aperture got cranked up. It’s also interesting how the colour of the last shot appears to change.

I’ve just worked out while writing that paragraph that it’s because the ambient (magenta-ish) light has been far more effectively cut out of the frame, meaning the lit area is more ‘regular’ because of the correctly gelled flash. Looking at them now I prefer the first one for the subtle tint, but possibly a bit brighter. Och, details, I’m sure I’m the only one that even noticed it.

I grabbed a whole bunch more but they really aren’t all that interesting to view, being mostly variations in framing. In the end I came up with a couple that I really liked, both of them pretty similar but one off to a slant. The straight one is in fact the first image in this post, back at the top. My fave, though, is this next one, because I like how the slant pulls the Y-shaped daisy formation into the corner and gives it a bit of energy, and I like how the trees tail off in a curve at the top. And I like the light!

And finally, there’s a shot of me holding the flash in frame so you can see how it’s set up. Really complicated high budget stuff.

Lessons learned:

1) As if I didn’t already know, waiting for a change in the light will change the whole tone of a photo.

2) In sunlight a change to Fluorescent WB with a green gel on the flash can give a subtle surreal warm tone to ambient light and backgrounds. Could be useful for giving an outdoor portrait a little something extra, in-camera.

3) The green fluorescent gel needs warming up a little in the white balance settings.

4) Working out some sort of stable and ideally adjustable stand or support for the flash and softbox would be really useful, allowing for an extra level of control I very much lacked this time out.

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

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Basically, versatility and portability!

For a long time I’ve wanted to have the confidence to walk up to strangers and ask permission to shoot a portrait of them, totally for free, just because I think they look very photogenic. Missed lots of potential opportunities that way, so I decided to take the Softbox out for a walk along Putney Embankment last week. It was a sunny afternoon and I told myself the worst that could happen was people I asked said “No.” and that’s fine because there’s loads of other people to ask.

As it happens, everybody I asked said “Yes.”, but I was pretty selective, and I didn’t ask that many people in the end – the thing is I seemed to have chosen the time of day that a lot of mothers were out taking their babies and children for walks, and I didn’t want to bother them! And there were a lot of joggers out too and I thought leaping into their path with a huge camera and flash might put them off their pace.

I’d done some test shots first (since deleted, should have kept them to give you a laugh). I kept the SB-800 on 1/4 power, triggered via CLS from the D200, which was in manual at ISO 100, around f/4 on average (to give my auto-focus a bit of a chance), and whatever shutter speed got the background roughly one stop underexposed.

Getting started

The first target in my sights was a gentleman by Putney Bridge recording some footage for a film he’s making. We got chatting about what he was filming, then about cameras after I told him about the softbox. The first shot I took was to meter for the ambient light, getting the sky I wanted. I just framed up and shot, didn’t bother focussing. Then I brought the softbox up to camera left, pretty much arms length.

At this point I had a 1/4 CTO gel on the flash and was shooting Sunny. I decided he was just a bit too warm, and took it off. I also thought it looked a bit too ‘lit’, what with a lot of the background being in shadow and giving it a bit too much contrast to his face. We turned around to frame the bridge in the background and shot this next one.

Thing is, I think I should have left the gel on! Either that or switched to Cloudy white balance or warmed the Sunny one up to -2 or -3 on the camera (Nikon terminology, not sure what it’s called on Canon). It’ll make a great B&W and if I did want to warm it, it’s a simple job to apply a filter or curve in Photoshop, but I wanted to post ‘straight out the camera’ shots for this post.

I gave my portraitee a card with my contact details in case he wanted to email me for a copy later, and went for a walk along the river. The next people I approached were a couple coming my way.

I wasn’t actually sure if this shot had worked out at the time because the sunlight was so strong it was tricky to see the LCD properly, but I liked the result once I saw it on screen at home. I think it’s on the verge of being too much in shadow on the right but the detail is there, so I got away with that! I asked his girlfriend if she would like one too, or one of them together, but I’d not thought about how it would work with the comparatively small light source and two people in a portrait situation – would the drop off be too much to light both of them? It turns out by bringing it around towards me a little, closer to the axis, there’s more than enough power to light them.

I’d also had the benefit of a sliver on sunlight coming in from back right getting a bit of his hair and his neck and jawline, which I hadn’t thought of before and only noticed when I got home. In the top photo, the sun is camera left, as is the flash, so while I’m underexposing the ambient light for the background, I’m bringing his already shadowed face even more into shadow.

The next few shots were of a group of people walking together. They were foreign but I never asked from where (shamefully – I was a bit too nervous about not seeming like one of those people selling portraits on the street!), so I explained to them that I just wanted to practice and it was totally for free – I took an unlit shot again, both for checking the background and for reference later.

Again with the cold skin tones! I think I’m still in Sunny at this point. I like it but it’s a bit underlit on his face – I was bringing the light into the shot and then backing it out till just out of frame. I think this is an example of not aiming it properly at his face.

With the girls I tried lowering the position of the light a little, rather than it being just above eye level. The effect is more noticeable in the left hand shot, but for me with these what’s really not working is the lack of a back light or fill, which is because I’d positioned them totally in shadow as you can see from the first shot of the man.

That was because I’d been wanting to make sure the D200 pop-up flash was triggering the infra-red sensor on the SB-800, as opposed to any creative reasons! When I was testing on myself I was in direct sunlight and there were a lot of mis-fires. It works a lot better in shadow. You can see the full extent of what the softbox is throwing at them, but it’s taught me to remember considering the sun as fill when positioning a portrait like this.

My next subjects had absolutely no say whatsoever in whether I shot them:

Clockwise from top left – no flash; flash high camera left (creeping into frame actually); flash further out of frame by a few inches (too far, really); flash closer but coming from under the arm. I like the last shot – obviously it’s too close and too far under the arm, but varying the position of the softbox definitely produces different enough results. With someone else holding it if you don’t have a stand with you, you could definitely make some strikingly different looks with this one light. I might even ask them to hold it themselves and see what I get.

My last willing ‘volunteer’ was a young woman reading in Bishops Park on the other side of Putney Bridge. At this point the wind was blowing enough to whip her hair around her face but we got one good shot that wasn’t too crazy!

I think it’s a little underexposed overall – I should have opened up the aperture if possible, or slowed the shutter and brought the light a little closer, but as before it was impossible to see the LCD at the time. Lifting the levels in Photoshop will work great for it. The fill from the sun on the right of her face works though!

All done!

And that was the end of the day for me – I walked back and didn’t see anyone else that looked like they might be up for it, and the closer I got to home the more the confidence to ask slipped away from me anyway, but I was pleased with what I learnt.

The shots I got varied a fair bit in level of exposure, because the real trick, it turns out, is getting the position of the handheld softbox right – as I was keeping the settings of the camera and flash power pretty much the same, the biggest control over the power of the light against the ambient comes from how close the light is to the subject.

I also noticed I wasn’t getting much variety in composition and frame size as I’m limited to an arm’s length from everyone and only have one hand left for holding the heavy camera and lens – need to build those forearms up! If I had the flash and softbox on a lightweight stand or someone else was holding it I’d have much more flexibility, but that’s for another day.

Lessons learned:

1) Get the warmth of the light right – either a gel or warm up the overall image in the camera

2) Make sure I’m directing the light at their face correctly

3) Bear in mind the position of the sun as a fill or backlight

4) Stay in the daylight to avoid too contrasty a look with heavy shadows on one side

And now I’ve done it once, there shouldn’t be anything stopping me going out and doing it again next time there’s a good weather day for it!

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(and my mum would argue that this still happens)

So, I had a really difficult decision to make recently. In fact, I’ve still not made it. No sweets or comics were involved, but all the same it’s pretty much hamstrung my entire creative flow. I’ve got photos in my camera that I can’t even find the motivation to download simply because Photoshop is still open in the background with two slightly different versions of the exact same shot sitting there waiting to have the Ultimate Verdict delivered, and it’s been like that for over 24 hours. Talk about making a lot of fuss over nothing.

The shot in question isn’t even all that amazing (well, obviously it is really – I’m just being modest). It was taken a few days ago when I was on a wander around my neighbourhood with the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens, looking for little details that caught my eye in an attempt to keep my hand in with casual personal urban photography, something the photoblog was pretty much founded on but which I seem to have strayed away from recently. I was deliberately looking for the really small stuff that still told some kind of story in terms of how it might have got there, and also have something aesthetically pleasing to my eye.

So, which of these two versions is ‘better’?

That’s the ‘first’ version above. It’s uncropped, but processed for colour and contrast and my old standby effect, the vignette. I won’t go into what I like about it just yet. Instead, here’s the second version:

Spot the difference? To get to here from v1.0 I deleted the vignette, cropped to 4:3 and applied a new vignette. I tried 1:1 but it wasn’t getting all the details in so as I prefer to use actual aspect ratios as opposed to just cropping arbitrarily this was the next best thing.

So, obviously the big creative decision here was to lop off that third level of steps on the right, tightening the focus to the 3×3 area of tiles with now just two levels of depth of field – the step on the left with the paint, and the next step down with the cracked tile. Odd numbers are traditionally more appealing (for example I don’t know a professional chef that chooses to place even numbers of any given dish elements on a plate, and I know a lot of chefs, despite my resplendently svelte appearance…), the frame is arguably cleaner and tighter and more effective with less distractions, it’s a neater, easier to ‘get’ nice close up urban detail shot. Resize for web, upload, boom, done.

No – see, I deliberately framed the original the way I did because I liked that little slice of the darker, softer third step on the right. I felt it led the eye across the image from left to right, gave it more sense of depth and also a definite je ne sais pas that was less obvious and ‘one-note’ than the cropped version.

Most people I’ve asked preferred the cropped version given the choice. I on the other hand keep going back to the less cliched and more personal composition.

I want to post one of them on my glass eye but I have no idea which one, which in itself raises an interesting question: am I asking because I want to post the one that people will like the most, as opposed to the one that I personally envisaged? And if so, why am I compromising on what the blog is essentially for, which is to post photos that are first and foremost for me?

I think ultimately I like both for different reasons and just can’t decide which single one I should post, but this not being a sweety shop and me not being 3 years old any more, there’ll be no tantrums, stamping of feet or martyrdom here! One of ‘em is going up. I think it will be the original.

What do you think?

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I managed to miss pretty much all the snow-related chaos in London, though! When the major snowfall happened I was out in Somerset at Shapwick House shooting the publicity and production stills on a feature length movie called Vivid – which you may or may not have seen me Twittering about if you follow my feed.

The film shot in 3 major locations – central London, Shapwick House, and wrapping with 3 days in Black Park out in Slough (near Uxbridge), where the snow gave the scenes there a fantastic look and feel that the director hadn’t anticipated but was very pleased with – my new wellies and Dickies winter jacket came in very useful indeed.

The film was written and directed by Reg Traviss based on a story called ‘Dreamhouse’ by Michael Armstrong, and stars Charisma Carpenter as an American novelist who moves to a country house in Somerset with her new husband, Paul Sculfor. Unfortunately she’s subsequently haunted by horrific visions of a massacre that took place in the house, and of course nobody else believes her…

That’s not Charisma over there on the right, by the way – I’ve agreed not to publish images of Charisma or Paul in their scenes until the production company are ready to start publicising the film themselves. Pictured are Katrina Rochell (on the phone) and Helena Linder, in a scene we shot in The Electric Birdcage in Haymarket, London.

Shooting stills for a film is very different from other forms of photography – for one thing, you have to keep reminding yourself that hierarchically speaking you’re at the bottom of the ladder, the least important camera in the room. Obviously the production publicist holds your work in high regard because without crisp images of the action they have nothing with which to publicise the film, decorate the DVD box and so on, but if you’re getting in the way of the camera team or putting off the actors, you’re off the set. In fact, often you might be asked to leave the set regardless of your professionalism, simply because an actor would prefer to do an emotionally demanding scene with as few extraneous eyes on him or her as possible, which is both understandable and extremely frustrating, but you just have to accept it and chalk up some downtime to go through your other shots from the day.

Therefore, while you might think the best shots are going to be had from as close to the camera as possible, the framing of a ‘movie’ shot isn’t necessarily what works best in a still. Obviously a lot of the time the very best angle has indeed been nabbed by the peskily talented eye of the director, or the Director of Photography (DP), and in those cases I try to get as close as I can without disturbing any of the essential camera crew – and they are numerous!

For example, in the image to the left we have the bare minimum you can expect to find by the camera – the focus puller (in the background, Steven Gardner, using a remote focus control), the DP, Brian Loftus, and Reg, the director (who was meticulously turned out each and every day of the shoot, his perfectly set quiff becoming a motif for the entire production).

In addition to these people you might also find a camera operator (if the DP isn’t taking those reins himself) and a clapper loader – who contrary to the implication of his name isn’t a chap that marches around a set loading claps, but rather operates the clapper board at the start of a take (for sound sync and to identify the scene and take numbers when it comes to editing the film) as well as the loading and unloading of the actual negative film into the cassettes that attach to the back of the camera. So technically it should be ‘clapper/loader’ but I suppose the slash got lost over the years!

The next two shots are good examples of when I both was and wasn’t able to get close to the camera. For the scene depicted on the right the movie camera was about 2 feet above my head, mounted on a tripod on the landing at the top of a flight of stairs, looking down the corridor a few feet to a bathroom where a victim of ‘The Maniac’ was being mercilessly slayed in a bath (easier to wash the blood away, right?). On one side of the camera were the stairs, on the other were the DP, focus puller, members of the art department ready to rush in and adjust the blood on the knife, members of the lighting department ready to dash in and adjust the lights tucked out of vision behind the bathroom door, and of course the DP and director.

Not much room for (not so) little old me, then! Or… was there?

As this was pretty much the best position to see the action (putting aside for the moment the fact that it was the only position!) I got down and arranged myself oh so carefully so I was lying on the stairs themselves, my head at ground level where the tripod was, my lens peeking through the tripod legs with just enough room that I could get my eye to the viewfinder. Nobody said anything during rehearsals so I risked cramps, held my position and squeezed off a bunch of shots during the takes – which brings me to another point about the framing of stills shots – they don’t need to match the angle the camera is filming at.

This sort of angle is often called ‘Dutching the camera’ and you’ll see it in lots of films, usually when something dramatic is happening, but throughout Vivid the camera is pretty much locked level. On the other hand, I found the Dutched angle gave the still shots an energy and mood that matched the action perfectly, much more so than a level shot would have done. I’ve found that tilting my camera down on the side that the actor is looking or moving works best, giving a directional energy that is otherwise lost in a still.

On the other hand, here’s an example of when being by the camera was going to suck. The position of the camera was tight in the corner with lamps all around. The actress was sitting at a table in front of a window, with the film camera a few feet to her right. The 1st AD didn’t want anyone in the actress’ eyeline and as she was to turn around and look straight past the film camera, she would have been looking directly at me – so I took up a different position directly behind her (if I were to pan this shot to the left, you’d see her).

I metered off her face in rehearsals so that I wasn’t going to get a fantastic shot of the fields outside and black sillhouette of her profile, and when the time came got a great shot of her turning over her shoulder to look in fear into the space between my lens and Brian’s. It was perfectly framed with the window in the background, the wooden bars between the panes of glass nicely defocussed, and her fear-stricken face sharply in focus as she twisted over her shoulder. If I could show you, I would! (Perhaps I’ll update the post once the film has been released…)

Well that’s enough for today, I think! I have a few more images I’d like to share, including some shots of the great location we were at and some more behind-the-scenes shots, but tonight we’ve got the wrap party (celebratory “We Didn’t Freeze To Death” drinks, in other words!) and I haven’t done much of the housework I promised myself I’d get on with… ;)

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When it comes to packing for a trip or a holiday I’m a big fan of lists, and lots of ‘em! So, I knew what I’d have to take for the shoot but for one reason or another I only got round to actually putting it all in bags last night. I thought someone might be interested in what I’m taking and how I’ve packed it, so I’ve put together a ‘short’ essay on the topic…

Most of my photography bags are Crumplers. I’ve not got much experience of the Lowe photography bags which seem standard to many photographers but I love Crumpler for the comfortable sturdy designs and the fact that for the most part it doesn’t look like a camerabag. I tend to use public transport a lot when travelling to a job so that’s a handy factor although when I accessorise them with a silver flight case to carry my blimp it sort of gives the game away! Also, it’s worth noting that with Crumpler at least you should either make an effort to see a bag in person first, or if buying online always go one size bigger than you think you’ll need based on their measurements and description, because the padding does take up a lot of space!

By the way, I usually would never take a flash and umbrella kit to a unit stills shoot as the whole point is to use the existing lights, but I figure we are there for so long it might be nice to be able
to shoot some nicely lit portraits in a quiet moment, assuming there are any…

So, here’s what’s in each bag:

Crumpler, Four Ninety Daily (L)

A great shoulder bag with removeable dividers and lots of padding that can take my D200 with a short zoom or prime attached, the 70-200mm unattached, another small lens or flash, a laptop and loads of miscellaneous cables, batteries, related gibbons. As such it’s my most used bag as I can fit my mainstay body, lenses and a flash in there (with lighting stands etc in a Manfrotto tripod bag if required) and have access to the camera or kit easily without taking it off. The main internal padded compartment can actually be removed, turning it into a sizeable ‘man bag’ to hold more day to day items, if necessary. Love it to pieces!

In the main bag section:

- D200 with grip and 17-55mm attached
- 70-200mm f/2.8
- 50mm f/1.8
- Edge magazine in the laptop pocket (got to keep up with all the latest gaming news!)
- cardboard flash mask – a made up name for a square piece of cardboard covered in black gaffer tape with a hole in the centre the same diameter as my pro lenses. I pull it over the lens when I’m shooting flash-lit portraits up close because I use the Nikon CLS system to trigger my remote flashes from the popup flash on the D200. If I’m up close to the subject the popup flash can contaminate the light hitting them so I use the mask to block the trigger light hitting them but still allow it to get to the remote flash. Got me?
- notebook – good for making more lists!

In the front pocket:

- lens cloth
- some bungie cords which i’ve never had cause to use but they’re so small I keep some in every bag at all times, just in case!
- two sets of four rechargeable AA batteries
- a chinagraph pencil (never used it since I acquired it, but I needed one once previously and didn’t have one)
- box of CF cards (1x4GB, 2x2GB, 1x1GB, with another 4GB already in the camera, all SanDisk Extreme IIIs)
- 4GB SanDisk Titanium Cruzer USB drive, for no other reason than because I’ve got one and “you never know”
- spare D200 battery
- box of business cards

This is less than I’d usually fit in here if it was the main or only bag I was taking to a shoot, and there’s plenty room to fit a Nikon battery charger and other cables in there. However, I have the luxury of taking several bags with me so all the cables are in my other bag…

Crumpler Farmers Double

This is a backpack style camera bag. The well padded back (with contours to accomodate your spine, helpfully) zips open around top and sides to reveal first a laptop pocket inside the back, and also the main compartment, a removeable padded shell protected with a zipped mesh to stop any kit falling out every time you open the back to get the laptop out (for example). The compartment has fully removeable and adjustable dividers as usual, and I can usually fit the D200 with grip and 70-200mm attached, the 17-55mm, two more small lenses, a flash (or two if I remove them from their own padded bags) and numerous cables, all into this compartment alone. The front compartments can take more cabling, plugs, etc.

Here’s what I packed in:

- SB800 flash
- Nikon D70 body
- two Nikon battery chargers
- iPhone charger
- 15″ Powerbook G4, which fits inside a special sleeve that comes with the bag, which itself is secured by velcro inside the laptop pocket inside the back panel of the bag
- Powerbook power supply
- mouse – I bought a hideous, basic but functional Microsoft mouse because spending £50 on a spare Apple Mighty Mouse just for the laptop was out of the question because their scrollballs are awful – the one for my iMac hasn’t scrolled up in months, despite many variations on the cleaning guides online. Bad, Apple, bad!
- CF card reader and cable
- AA battery charger
- Lacie 160GB external drive, power supply and FireWire cable, as backup for the images (the Porsche desktop design, which i’ve had for a few years – I’d considered getting a USB powered rugged portable drive but as this will remain in situ once I arrive decided it would do)
- Giotto Rocket Blower for cleaning the sensor if necessary
- homemade cardboard snoots for the flash
- a White balance card that came with Scott Kelby’s Photoshop For Digital Photographers but which I’ve never really used

Then I’ve got my dead giveaway bag, a silver ‘flight case’. It’s just not as sturdy as a proper metal flight case, bit does the job brilliantly. I got a couple of these in a Maplins sale a while back. They come with customizeable foam inserts and I use the other one for storing lenses etc that aren’t regularly in use. This case has the foam removed to accomodate:

- Jacobson sound blimp
- lens tubes for the 17-55mm and the 70-200mm lenses

And finally a huuuge Animal brand soft suitcase bag, which is packed with more than enough clothes for 9 days (famous last words!), my wellies, dressing gown, Lastolite shoot through/ reflective umbrella and a Manfrotto lightweight lighting stand. Oh, and a SuperDuper! cloned bootable backup of my iMac on a 750GB Lacie Quadra drive just in case something unimaginable happens back home – I don’t have an off-site backup location so easier to take it with me and leave it wrapped in a thick woolly jumper in the bag for the duration.

Oh, and a book and a couple of DVDs courtesy of my mate Duncan for my
birthday which was last Friday – did you send me a card, hmmm?

And that’s yer lot!

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I did give it a little lift in Photoshop though, as I often do. I just like my images with a bit more pop or a push one way or the other. As it was a really simple few layers I used, I thought it would make for an easy explanation!

First of all, here’s the original photo straight off the card, untouched by any editing software beyond the JPG settings on board the camera:

I don’t always know what I’m going to do to a photo when I first open it in Photoshop. There’s a few things I always tend to do first to see what happens, such as duplicating the background layer and setting it to Overlay or Soft Light blending. These pump the image with contrast and usually need the opacity lowered.

Another one I often use is creating a B&W version of the background and setting that to the same blending modes. It has a similar contrasty effect but can also add pleasingly desaturated richness. This was the first step I ended up taking with this as it instantly appealed.

I use CS3 which has a new Adjustment Layer called Black & White, introduced to make it even easier to create your own tone of B&W. If you have an earlier version you can use the Channel Mixer set to Mono to create the same thing – it’s just a bit more complicated a tool.

So, on the left are the final B&W settings I used.

When you adjust the settings on the panel you see your photo’s black and white tones changing in the background (unless you uncheck Preview). In this instance I set these not necessarily looking for a pleasing B&W image as I would normally, but more in anticipation of what would likely happen to the colours when I changed the blending mode afterwards. Typically, dark tones result in deep dark colours, and lighter tones result in brighter colours. Once I changed the blending to Soft Light I went back and tweaked the sliders to fix the resultant colours.

Below left is the effect of the above settings on the image when the Black and White adjustment layer is set to Normal blending. On the right is the effect of switching the blending of that layer to Soft Light.

I like the contrast this provides – the richness of the varnished wood, the popping colours of the cover. But I don’t like that I’ve lost a lot of the table detail in the shadows. So, I decide to lift the shadows a little bit by using a Curve adjustment layer.

I’m going to assume you know basically how the Curves tool works – if you don’t then you can still play with this anyway. It’s the best way to learn anyway!

As you can see I’ve lifted the brightness of the shadow areas with the first anchor point along. This was lifting up the highlights as well, losing the detail in the foam and blowing the white Guide letters out.

So, I added a second anchor and placed it so that the ‘highlight’ tail of the curve comes back down to where it was. In fact, I pulled it a bit under because I noticed it put some tone back in the white letters.

At this point I decided that I preferred the contrasty colours in the magazine and the glass before I lightened the wood. The best way to get the effect of that B&W layer back is to paint a mask on the curve layer above it, allowing everything beneath it to show through again.

The last thing I add is a bit of vignette, something you’ll probably notice me adding to a lot of my photos. I have a bit of a thing for how it draws your eye in, creates this atmosphere around the subject.

There are many ways of creating a vignette. I like mine around the corners, heavily feathered so they creep up on you rather than bashing you around the head, and adjustable. So, it’s a Curve adjustment layer again! I create a layer mask on the Curve layer and then use a pre-recorded action to load the mask in. I then either go into the layer and drag a portion down into the shadows, or sometimes I just leave the settings exactly where they are and instead set the blending to Multiply. And as with every Adjustment Layer there’s always Opacity to adjust for quick fine tuning if it’s too much.

On the right here is my Layers palette at this point. You can see the mask for the glass and magazine on the Lighten Curve, as well as the soft corners in the mask for the Vignette Curve.

And we’re done!

Below are the four main stages again, moving clockwise from top left.

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