Sunday, 27th January 2008
The New York Times has reported that three suitcases containing Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War negatives, once thought lost, have finally been recovered from a Mexico City film-maker after seven decades.
Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
A slide show of a select few images from the 3,500 negatives can be viewed on The New York Times site.
The negatives, taken by Robert Capa during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, might finally reveal the mystery of whether his famous photograph, “The Falling Soldier” (see image below), was staged or not.
Photo by Robert Capa/I.C.P. Collection
Thursday, 24th January 2008
Lucas Oleniuk, a photographer based in Toronto, Canada, took 20,000 photographs in 20 days to create a striking video made entirely from still images about the Global Warming issue. The video has a brilliant, atmospheric sound track that fits the stunning images really well and helps convey the important message.
“Airsick” by Lucas Oleniuk is available to watch on TheStar.com website.
Sunday, 13th January 2008
So here’s my first shoot write-up! Although I have spent time getting to grips with my new studio lighting equipment by taking test shots, this was my first half-descent prepared shoot. The motivation for this shoot was to get a shot of our one year old yellow Lab, Jodie, wearing festive antlers (as you do) for my wife, Lynsey, to post on her blog.
I decided to keep the set-up relatively simple, especially as a dog has a tendency to move around a lot. I used the 80×60cm softbox as the main light camera-right at around 45 degrees. I positioned it around 3 feet from the ground pointing down towards the subject. A ’sunfire’ reflector camera-left filled the shadows with a warm light. Below is a diagram (created using an excellent lighting set-up Photoshop file by Kevin Kertz) showing the set-up:
I selected the white paper background (from my wide selection of two backgrounds), which I attempted to light with the second light. I don’t yet own a short lighting stand or a background reflector so I had to make do with the wide angle reflector and the light positioned to the left and pointing towards the background. As you’ll see in some of the photographs, it didn’t exactly provide even lighting coverage of the background (which meant more time spent Photoshopping), which I think could have been better achieved with either a short stand (hide the light behind the subject) or perhaps a boom to raise the light above the background – both ensuring the light is centred to the background.
Here are the photos taken with my Canon 350D and Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L @ f/11 (first one at f/10), 1/200, ISO 100:
Poor Jodie was suffering from a “cold water tail” at the time (if you’re intrigued, read about it on Lynsey’s blog), so she had a few moments of chasing her tail manically.
The goal of the shoot:
Then Lynsey had a go with the camera and I tried to pose Jodie. Between us we managed to get some great shots, below.
Sunday, 6th January 2008
As an amateur photographer, I’ve decided to start this blog so that I can share my photography experiences and hopefully make a small contribution to the already huge and amazing online photography community.
As I continue to develop and improve my photography, I hope to share resources that I’ve found helpful, write-ups of my shooting experiences (along with my setup and resulting photos), and details of my post-processing work flow.
Comments and questions from readers are very welcome here, as are tips, suggestions and any other advice you would like to share.
I have recently purchased some interesting additions to my photography gear (my current equipment list can be found in my ‘about me‘ page) including the following:
Although I intend to focus my efforts on learning studio lighting and portraiture, I’m also interested in many other genres of photography, which I will also write about. I have lots to learn and lots to talk about as I venture into the world of studio photography (without a studio!)… so I’d better get on with it!
