All posts filed under: Photography

Step by Step

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It has probably become obvious that I’ve been doing a series of portraits that all have the same basic ingredients: model against a grey background, lit with a beauty dish and a fill light. For most shoots I did a simple, natural portrait followed by a second look in which the makeup artist, Kim Clay, could flex her creative muscle. The beauty shots are a great way for me to concentrate on the fundamentals. By not showing any jewelry or clothing, you simplify the image. I take the majority of portraits close up and I usually like the model looking directly at the camera. It was during my exhibition that I realized that I work in the studio in a very similar style to when I’m traveling .  The majority of prints I had put on display were also head and shoulder crops of people looking directly at the camera. As a photographer I think I am trying to capture a moment of connection between the subject and the viewer. Step by step, I can now add …

AutoStitch for iPhone

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A couple of weeks ago I put up the panoramic photo taken by Pete Leong of my exhibition. Pete took the photo with his iPhone using an app called AutoStitch. You simply take a series of overlapping photographs with your phone, then open the app, select the images and the app will stitch them all together into one seamless image. AutoStitch is only a couple of dollars so it seemed like a fun thing to try out. You probably will have slightly ragged edges to the image when it is stitched together, but the phone can automatically crop out the black space for you. If you have an iPhone and feel like broadening your photographic horizons then it’s well worth playing around with.

Studio Shoot – Bianca – Variations

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I had a few misconceptions about using digital in the studio. One of them is how useful it would be to check the exposure using the camera histogram or the LCD screen.  If you are using a light meter  then you should be getting the reading correct anyway. The extra checks you can do with digital are reassuring, but not really necessary. One huge advantage, however, is with regards to film costs or the lack of them. When shooting with the Pentax 67, it works out at about a dollar fifty each time I press the shutter. If I shoot a  street portrait, I will usually have a chat with the person then take two or three images.  I am pretty sure that one of those images should be a keeper. It’s costs a few dollars, but it’s manageable. When shooting portraits in the studio you tend to shoot  a lot more. Although professional models may be able to flash the perfect smile at a moments notice, for most people the first dozen (or several dozen) shots …

Hasselblad XPan

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My friend Nathan dropped by recently to show me his newly purchased Hasselblad XPan camera. The camera is a technological marvel, a truly beautiful piece of engineering. Hasselblad managed to design a compact camera that was light yet strong due to the titanium body. It had excellent optics, and amazingly it could shoot both regular sized frames of 35mm film and also double length frames. This gave 35mm shooters the ability to get image quality on a level with medium format in a tiny 35mm rangefinder body. (The XPan negative is roughly the same width as a 6×7 negative, just half the height.) The Hasselblad XPan is fantastic, but I am not the only person aware of this. At a time when the resale value of analog cameras has plummeted only a few rare and collectable cameras have maintained their value. The XPan is one of them. Used cameras range in price from around US$1500 to US$8000. Of course there’s always the possibility you’ll see one of these “obsolete film cameras” going for a few …

Studio Shoot – Cece – Desaturation

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Another studio shoot, this time with Cece. Makeup artist Kim Clay first put on some natural makeup, and I shot a simple beauty shot using a beauty dish as the mainlight and an octobox softbox for fill. For a second shot, Kim darkened the makeup and gave Cece a jacket. I shot with the same lighting setup. I liked the shot but it didn’t feel quite right. However simply desaturating the image a fraction produced a much more interesting cinematic look. In the future I would like to take this further and “process” the same image in a variety of different ways. Anyone who has watched the various C.S.I. programs will be aware of the differences in color palette used to give the different shows their own look (Compare the saturated colors and oranges of C.S.I. Miami to the desaturated blues and grays of C.S.I. New York.). As a travel photographer the only things I regularly do in Photoshop are dust removal and minor color or exposure corrections. The levels of color saturation were chosen …

Studio Shoot – Manda – Transformation

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This was an interesting shoot with Manda, one of the Marines based on Okinawa. Lighting remained constant through the shoot. Makeup artist Kim Clay added a natural makeup look between shots 2 and 3, and then an evening makeup look between 3 and 4. Another key difference is that the first two shots were taken with the 645 55mm lens (approx 40 mm on a 35 full frame camera) and the last two shots were taken with the 67 105mm lens (approx 85mm on a 35mm full frame camera). The longer lens gives more pleasing proportions to the face, which is why lenses around 85mm are often described as portrait lenses.

Website Updates

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There have been a few changes over at the TRAVEL 67 website, that I thought I’d mention. The image on the homepage has switched from a girl in maiko costume to an Ainu man. In the top right there are also new buttons taking you straight to my Flickr account, Chris Willson Photography on Facebook and the RSS feed. There is also a new shipping details page when people are ordering prints. Several years ago the webmaster and I thought it was unnecessary  and possibly annoying for us to require customers to type in their shipping details on the website when they will be automatically included at payment with Paypal. What we hadn’t considered was that this could, and did, lead to people being asked to make payment with Paypal before they had given us any customer details. It could appear impolite, or dubious, to ask for money without first asking for a name and shipping address.  So we’ve learned from our incorrect assumptions and hopefully people prefer the new version. A big thanks as …

Studio Shoot – Niki J. Disco Inferno

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A couple of weeks ago Eboh Ajeroh invited fellow photographer David Washington and I to a shoot with model Niki J.  Eboh set up the lights using a beauty dish and a hair light for the first shot, and then for the second image, orange and blue gels were used to create the disco / neon effect. Ursula Ajeroh did a fantastic job with makeup and sculpting the hair.

Thank You!

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A big thank you to all the people who came by the exhibition or offered their encouragement from afar. It was a fun and hectic six days.  This was my  fifth exhibition, and the largest so far with 23 landscapes and 24 portraits on show. It was great to meet so many people and listen to their comments. The snow monkey images “Relaxation” and “Monkey Hug” along with “Fireworks at Itsukushima” were very popular, however, the clear favorite was the “Into the Mist” shot of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge. I also learned a lot more about marketing, image selection, sales, and digital displays, but I’ll leave comments on them for another post. Right now I have to make sure that people who ordered prints get them before Christmas, and that the images from recent studio shoots are edited and sent to the models. Busy, busy busy.