Highway Drama

This week I met up with Tatyana once more for a shoot. This time round the location is the newly constructed dual carriage way in Limerick. I've always wanted to do a shoot of some sort on a highway as I've always been fascinated by highways and roads. Finding one where you can do a shoot safely is kinda hard in Ireland. But these ones are not open yet so no traffic passing through. I thought I might as well do a shoot now while I still can.

I wanted a film noir feel to this shoot. I also wanted to incorporate a section of the road with the flyover. I love the way the strong lines of the flyover intersects with the roads. I wanted dark shadows. I always wanted some drama. Decided on 2 ways of lighting.  1. Using ambient light, nicely diffused through thick Irish rain clouds with a flash working as hair light.  2. Cross lighting, hard edge lighting and lots of shadows. Then I wanted lots of movement. Hence why the shoot with Tatyana again. It's not often you get model who can jump in her high heels.

We were there for a total of 30 minutes before the security guys showed up. Managed to talk them into letting us shoot for 30 minutes more. So we eventually shoot for a total of 2 hours. It was also starting to rain so by the time we had packed up and moved on, it was starting to rain heavy.

Here are the images. Hope you like them.

( cross lighting. Flash to camera left shooting thru Lumodi beauty dish and flash to camera right fired bare)

(same lighting as above)

(natural light directly above. Bare flash camera right)

(bare flash camera left)

Zack Arias' short film Transform.

I'm posting this video by Zack Arias because it's exactly the way I feel about my photography at the moment. It's not a new vid, it's been on the web since February 09. But for those of you who've not seen this before, it's well worth checking out.

Terry Richardson shoots Pirelli Calender 2010

Cool video of Terry Richardson shooting the 2010 Pirelli Calender. He uses on camera flash for his work. It's kinda strange to see that as the images from that sort of lighting always turn out pretty flat. But then, just as he claims, the images look raw. Consequently it's the contain that takes the center stage, in this case the models. Having said that, the girls are just gorgeous, you can shoot them in any light, they'd still look good.

NSFW though. Contains nudity


The Making of the 2010 Pirelli Calendar from Rafael Rubira on Vimeo.

And here's his official website: http://www.terryrichardson.com//

Street moves

One of the thing I enjoy about photography is acquiring unexpected images. The original shoot location for this image was unsuitable so we had to move and then improvise. Tatyana, who agred to model for me on a short notice,  is enthusiastic and fun to work. She can jump better than most models I've shot with and her ability to do so makes for interesting images.

Light info: Flash to right and left of model, bare. Grid flash to camera left pointing at background. Grid flash in front of model for some fill.

 

Links to other strobist clubs around Ireland.

If you're an Ireland based photographer, you might be interested in checking out these 2 strobists clubs. I'm quite active in both of them and usually have great fun hanging out with the people from both clubs.

These two clubs organise their event via Flickr. Dublin strobist is a lot bigger than Limerick but the small size of the Limerick club means you get more shooting time at the events.

Check out the links:

Dublin Strobist

Limerick Strobist

Limerick Strobist Meet in Cratloe Woods.

It was a nice afternoon for meeting fellow strobists from Limerick. This time the venue is Cratloe woods.  Cratloe woods, while beautiful, can be quite hard to use as the a setting. Not sure if it's because there's so many options or somehow all those vertical lines just scream for some kind of symmetry and compositional harmony.  Most of us started the day working with flash, but as the sun began to set, we had a lovely stream of yellow light filtering through the trees. It seem logical to abandon the flash guns and embrace the natural light then. Well done to Triona, Tatyana, Gemma and Laura for doing a great job braving the cold. It's a shame the snow's gone at this stage.

(2 bare flash on both sides of model, one bare flash behind model, one bare flash in front of model)

(crosslighting. One grid flash camera left and one bare flash camera right and behind model)

( one flash with grid, high and above model)

Winter Wonderland in Ireland

Once in every 20 years cycle, Ireland gets a cold snap which results in considerable snow fall all across the country. I've been in this country for 14 years, I've never seen this much snow before . Not just snow, but snow that remained long enough to coat everything in the open, transforming the countryside into a wondrous winter wonderland. So on Sunday, which was suppose to be the day with the heaviest snow fall, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful country side and arrange a shoot. I didn't fancy the cold but I told myself, if I didn't do it, I'd regret it. But I decided too late but somehow manage to get a model 12 hours prior to the shoot. It almost didn't happen as things kept popping up and we almost cancelled twice.

Anyways, hope you like the photos. This was shot in natural light as I didn't have time to set up lights. It was too cold and we had to move fast. I was too concern that Jacqui the model was going to get frost bite. At one stage, her poors fingers and toes had gone numb. But she was one tough model and fairplay to her for enduring the cold.

Guess what, the snow thawed the next day and just like that, the beautiful landscape disappeared. So glad I did this shoot now. We might not see this in Ireland for another 20 years.