Strobist lighting in a shed...

Having recently returned home as a graduate of Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of York I've had to adjust to life back in Gloucestershire and reassess the photographic opportunities available in the local area. With a fresh photographers outlook several otherwise forgotten or passed by locations immediately jumped out as possibilities for a spot of Stobist/Joey L style dramatic off-camera lighting, the best of which involved my shed!

I managed to employ my brothers and their slightly disorientated friends as the talent and whisked them off into the recently emptied shed studio to try out some shots. The “studio” had a very distressed feel about it with moldy slightly crumbling brickwork making for a nice grungy backdrop, with nesting swallows providing extra 'grittiness' by covering the place in droppings... a perfect backdrop for some moody off-camera lighting.

The portraits where lit using a large 39” soft box umbrella high slightly left above the camera, an additional bare strobe providing a rim light far camera left at about 45° facing back towards the models. I originally planned to have two rim lights but my 3^rd strobe failed on me and I had to make do. To counter this imbalance I placed the shorter of the two models a half-step in front of the larger so that the rim light from the left would hit both models left sides. The difference in height of the models counterbalances the models distances from the camera and by shooting 2/3 body shots the effect is complete.

The strobes used are my trusty £15 Sunpak auto 30DX strobes fitted with Ebay PT-04 radio triggers. These are early 1980's work horses that have full manual controls and can still be found on Ebay far more cheaply that the much lauded Vivitar 285HV's or the early Nikon SB flash guns.

All the images shot at 1/250 of a second at f8 to make sure that I caught the fast movements of the models jumping about and to make sure the depth of field was large enough to pick put the details of the grungy brickwork. All processing happened in Adobe Lightroom 2 using settings that I've made into a preset which can be downloaded HERE. The main tweaks involve heavy vignettes, a soft brown highlight tweak (using the split tone function of Lightroom ) and increased fill light and black levels to further increase the grungy quality of the moldy walls.

The shoot was a lot of fun and has really opened my eyes to the array of photographic possibilities that are right under my nose. More experiments to come shortly methinks. You can view a gallery of the more successful images from the shoot HERE, let me know what you think!

Its been a while....

Its be a too long since my last post, I've been so busy! Recently I've been working as an equine and events photographer with Sally Blair of Blairshots photography whose based in the Gloucestershire area, UK. Its been great fun travelling all around the Cotswold's to attend events. Favourites being a wonderful wedding deep in the Hereford countryside on the 19^th of July and the British Eventing Championships at Gatcombe Park, on the 7^th of August.

Working with Sally this summer has been a fantastic learning experience for me and I am indebted to her for generosity and kindness she shown in allowing me to shoot along side her. The world of equine photography is not quite so incomprehensible as it once was.

I've been working hard over the summer to build my online portfolio website www.tgrphoto.co.uk,The site had been completely redesigned using Lightrooms Web Gallery templates from The Turning Gate with a new lighter cleaner look, as well as a fresh batch of my portraiture images. Feel free to check out the galleries HERE.

Recently I've also made myself available as a photoshop and lightroom tutor in my local area. This has been a fantastic experience and I really feel that teaching core digital editing skills has really improved my own knowledge and learning.

That's all for now many more updates to come in the next few days as I fill you in on the rest of the summers goings on. I leave you with a list of some of my most visited sites and useful links:

• The F-Stop- a wonderful online photographic magazine dedicated to interviews with working pros.

• TED – the you tube of great ideas, this site provides fantastic video seminars presented bythe leading minds and a wide variety of creativeand scientific fields. David Grifiths (head of National Geographic magazine) and Franz Lantings Seminars are of particular photographic interest.

• Adobe Lightroom 2 - In my opinion the best piece of imaging software package this side of Photoshop.

P.S Congratulations Tom Hole for your wonderful mini planet equitorial panorama tutorial that was featured on Lifehacker, 229,000 hits in a weekend not bad!