Here in Vancouver, the weather has changed, the temperature has dropped and the mountains have their white caps again. With the changing of the leaves and the first snow of the season, I need to work out what my plans are for my final winter in Canada.
This seasons checklist is as follows:
I am sure the list will expand as time goes on.
It has been such a long time since I did anything remotely artistic with the camera. I have many excuses, but none are really good enough.
Around two months ago the wife and I went to New York for a holiday. I call it a holiday, but it was more like, how much stuff can we do in 7 days…
I managed to take this photo while people watching in Times Square.
I put the call out a few weeks ago to do some TFP work for anyone that wanted it. I got an email soon after from a guitarist from a metal band who wanted some portraits of herself and some of her band.
The band shoot may happen in the future, but here are some of the results from the portrait session taken in the graffiti ally as mentioned in a few previous posts. It was as simple off camera flash setup with a mini softbox triggered using Cactus wireless transceivers.
So I finally got around to taking some self portrait action shots. The amount of gear I lugged up the hill really took it out of me. I had an extra 6 kilos of gear on my back and it took a little longer to ride the fire trail to the top of the mountain.
In my head, I already had my location picked out. It was a section of trail with 4 different lines and 2 north shore ladded drops onto dirt. I planned to use fill lighting from the side and a Nero Trigger and laser pointer to capture the images I wanted.
This was my first test of laser triggering in the field. In the past I have just used a bowl of liquid and an eye dropper to break the laser beam.
I got to the location and started to set up my gear. I aligned the lasers and started taking photos. I increased the delay to get the photo of me in mid-air, but for some reason the Nero Trigger wasn’t working as I expected. I checked my setup, made a few changes and it started to work as desired.
I hit the gap but the flash didn’t trigger. This confused me. I checked the setup and found that the batteries in the laser pointer had died. I swapped to the backup laser pointer and hit the trail feature a few more times.
I continued to dial in the setup when a whole bunch of riders hit all the available lines triggering photos. I changed the flash location and continued to test.
I hadn’t quite dialled in the delay when a man and his came down the trail. The man hit the lower drop while his son watched. He hit the laser and the photo was taken. I really like this photo because the boy is looking down at his dad while taking a drink. Because the photo was triggered by breaking the beam, I didn’t even realise the boy was watching while I was on location.
After some coaxing, his son went over the drop and I took the photo manually. I gave the dad details on how to contact me so he can get a copy of them. (To the dad, email me and I will send you the full sized images.)
Soon after the second laser pointer died and I didn’t have spare batteries for them. All the testing and playing around at home took it out of them. I will change them soon and buy some extras for when I am on location.
Here is the end result of me on the drop when the flash fired and the delay was wrong.
Changes for the next attempt:
For a while now I have wanted to do some long exposure HDR’s, and I took the opportunity recently to test it out on the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver.
I like the graininess of this photo and I am quite happy with the results on my first attempt. I took 6 photos which ranged between 5 seconds and 5 minutes (using Magic Lantern) in RAW mode and used Photoshop to merge them to HDR.
During 2 of the exposures, a tug boat pulled a barge under the bridge, but after combining the photos, it didn’t quite look right and it was removed.
My next idea for the night time HDR’s is to photograph an old run down house and convert it to black and white. Hopefully it turns out like I have in my mind.
