Fuji X100 and why I love it.

This is my youngest boy, he'll be 5 next week, here he is squeezed into the Little Tikes car belonging to our neighbour's child, who is 18 months old, he looks quite guilty, and he should be, he is sat in a stolen vehicle. The police weren't called, the vehicle was handed back, but I quickly got a picture with the Fuji X100 that was hanging over my shoulder, before he managed to get out. That is why I love the X100, it is always there. It has got a place in my camera bag with all the Canon bodies and lenses, but it never seems to be there. It's always in the pocket of the coat I'm wearing, or in the laptop bag when I go and visit clients or off out on a location recon. I seem to pick it up without thinking, it's there with my phone, keys, and wallet. Another essential.

A homage to William Eggleston's Big Wheels

The kids often fall under the watchful gaze of the ever present X100

Big cat hunting...

Wood... one natural, one laminated

A rare selfie... Hey what's that doing there!

Funny kind of Sunday

I seem to have spent my Sunday thinking about work, though all I've really done is clean up and sort out the garage and take a ton of junk to the tip.

Whilst I was at the tip I found an iPhone in a wallet, it had credit cards and a drivers licence in it. The phone had no password protection so I opened up Maps.app and put the address from the drivers licence into it, a short ride with Siri giving me directions, and I was handing the phone over to its owner, who was a little shell shocked. His wife just kept saying "but people aren't that honest anymore", well some of us are, and I know that I'd like to think if I lost my phone/wallet someone would seek me out and return it.

So on that note, and with karma firmly on my side I'm off to do some editing.

New iMac... So now I'm up and running again

My MacPro died, 4 years old, it was a true workhorse, but life goes on and thanks too Jigsaw24 and Photolease, I now have a lovely new 27" iMac. It's now loaded up with all the software I need to get back to work, and I have a stack of work to get done... 

Wait, so why am I blogging?

Got to go!

Around the country with 18 pharmacies...

Over the last few weeks I've been running around the country shooting pharmacies, North, South, East and West, all points of the compass. It's meant a good deal of driving, about 1600 miles, by the way I hate you M25, sampling the delights of various Travelodge hotels, some recently refurbished and some not. Living out of a suitcase and spending much of my spare time recharging camera and Bowens travelpak batteries, and reading books to while away the time between shoots. I'm not going to tell you how many books I got through, I'm just thankful my wife bought me a Kindle at Christmas as I had enough gear to hump around with me without half a ton of paperbacks.

Equipment wise I had my trusty Canon 5D MkIII and 1Ds MkII, with the 17-40mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm, lighting was provided by 2-3 Bowens 500w Gemini heads, most running off plugs sockets though I had travelpaks with me, as the pharmacies tend to be devoid of plug sockets in their reception areas, a pair of 60x80 Bowens softboxes and 7" and 9" reflectors acted as light modifiers. Tripod, stands, extension leads and gaffer tape also took up valuable space in the boot of the car.

I've learned a lot about life in a pharmacy, it seems that at least half the population over 75 is on warfarin, that the pharmacy never has a quiet time, and that having your photograph taken at the counter as you are serving can take awhile as the person playing the customer keeps pulling funny faces.

Or over doing it a bit, all I asked was if she could look happy picking the packet of tablets off the shelf, this was method acting gone to extremes.

But when it goes right it can turn out well. Okay this took a few shots to get right, too much laughing going on.

"Now just look at the products and smile, just a little one..." I know it must be hard smiling at a box of tablets, but the brief said happy smiling faces.

"No you can't have the usual 3 bottles of red wine a night and take this" was what I kept saying to get the smiles I wanted, you have to tease the smiles out of people sometimes, it doesn't always work though

On the whole, apart from some of the nasty traffic congestion, it was a good series of trips, the staff at the pharmacies were friendly and most were up for having their photographs taken, not all of course but that's to be expected.

We're back again...

I haven't been in blogging mode for a while, in truth for months. Sometimes life sends you down a different path, it can take a while before life gets back to some kind of normality again, though I defy anyone to explain what normal actual is.

A few things turned me away from keeping up with the blog, mostly personal stuff, though there was one business related issue which made me contemplate packing in altogether, purely money related though, it seemed to sap all my energy. Sometimes the self employed life gets very frustrating.

Now though I'm back, a spring in my step and, unfortunately, a cold in my head. That's not going to stop me though. I'm in the process of building a new, more dynamic, website. I have some new marketing ideas, and I've just picked up a couple of new clients without even trying. Autumn 2013 is looking good.

Recycling cameras: 5X4 Digital Adaptor Test with a Canon 1DsMkII

I cut my teeth in photography shooting furniture on 5x4 cameras for Sotheby's catalogues, I was young and frankly the 5x4 camera scared the life out of me at first, but you soon realise it is just about as simple as a camera can be. Simple in the fact you have to do everything for it, focusing, closing the shutter, cocking the shutter, setting the aperture, loading the sheet film, one sheet at a time, remembering to put the dark-slide back in the film holder before removing said holder from the camera. It was a nightmare, until you become methodical, then it was a breeze.

My old Toyo View Camera was mothballed years ago. Clients weren't interested in paying for 5x4 film and processing when they could have digital images from a DSLR on their Mac or PC and off to print faster than it took to drive to Manchester and wait for the film to be dunked through half a dozen chemicals. After considering putting it on ebay, I decided I'd keep the camera, locked it in its box and really forgot all about it.

Until I saw an adaptor back on ebay recently, it simply went on the back of the view camera where the old ground glass screen used to sit, I say simply, the ground glass screen had to be removed from its plate and this adaptor secured by the locking plates to the same plate. I was worried I'd smash the glass, but luckily I didn't.

Obviously I opted for the Canon adaptor, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus and even Mamiya adaptors are available, for the purpose of this test I put on my trusty old Canon 1DsMkII, I used a 5D3 to take the incidental images.

Image above of the adaptor, the camera can be attached and the barrel sticking out of the back plate will rotate, this has a locking feature, the back plate can also be moved to help create panoramic images, which have to be joined together in photoshop, this plate also has a lock.

I set up a couple of narrow strip-boxes either side of a shoe, another light with a 7 inch reflector, with a 20° grid, lit the background. The 5x4 camera had a 150 mm lens set in a 40 mm recessed lens board, usually a 150 mm 5x4 lens would be on a flat plate if you were shooting 5x4 film, but with the DSLR mounted a long distance from the lens the recess plate keeps the lens closer to the DSLR, with the flat plate distance shots are almost impossible, close up work only. As the Canon has its own shutter I left the lens shutter open, just using the aperture stopped down to shoot the images.

The shoe, I'd ordered some Vans shoes for my kids to use when they go skateboarding, so I grabbed these for the test shots. This shot has shallow depth of field, shot at f 5.6 with the lights power output turned way down.

This shot I used the movements of the 5x4 camera to get the shoe sharp front to back at f 16

Shallow focus again about f 8, but with camera movements to increase the out of focus areas

A studio clamp mounted on a lighting stand held the shoes in position, it was removed in photoshop, the last shot I took each time was just of the background with no shoe in the foreground.

I can see this set up getting a fair bit of use from now on, it feels good to recycle the 5x4 camera, giving it a new lease of life and it gives me another tool at my disposal.

Oh and I shot this in my living room, don't tell anyone will you.

Lighting lighting...

Lighting lighting, for packaging shots, these LED PIR Security Lights are very bright they certainly do the job...

So these were shot in the studio, on an exterior wall and at night to show the kind of coverage these babies put out. For the night shot I had a boom arm setup on a tall lighting stand to get the height I needed, this has been removed in Photoshop. The stand was hiding in the shadows at the side of the house, it was heavily weighed down with sandbags as the wind wasn't playing nice that night. I've had to remove the existing exterior lights that this house had, they run just above the downstair window and down the side of the house, connected by white plastic trunking, obviously it had to go!

You can't always stick a light where you want it... So cheat in Photoshop.

There are times you'd like to place a flash-head to light an area, but there's no way you can. My recent "No Rest For Old Skateboarders" post actually bears this out, I really wanted to light the graffiti on the back wall behind the skaters, but that would have meant placing a light in the middle of a very busy skatepark, the chance of the flash-head getting knocked over was very high. There is a way around this using Photoshop.

I saw this technique a year or so ago, Glyn Dewis had posted a how too video on YouTube, the video is at the foot of this post, in Photoshop simply using a soft paint brush tool on an additional layer and then changing the designation of the layer to 'overlay' and fiddling about with the opacity percentage to get the your desired effect.

Okay I went a little OTT here on the hair eyes and beard, but honestly it works, though I'm expecting a knock on the door from the Photoshop police at any moment.

Once you've set the layer to overlay it all calms down a lot and give the areas painted over  a much lighter effect. A bit too much in this case, so I played with the opacity slider and dropped it to about 50%, that worked for me, enough lightening to make it look like I'd placed a light actually on the ramp behind the skater. 

Sorted!

Above: Before shot, three flash-heads...

Three flash-heads and a drop of paint in Photoshop...

All images ©2013 Alistair Kerr Photography

No Rest For Old Skateboarders

On the first Saturday of any given month it's Middle Age Shred session at Deeside Evolution Extreme Skatepark. Your older skaters are in attendance, practicing new tricks, trying to get tricks back which they've lost over the years, meeting up with friends, recapturing their youth, but above all having fun, because that's what skateboarding is about.

So in-between grinding the coping, flipping onto a rail, or picking themselves up after a wipeout, they came and posed for the camera. These people could work with you, or you might see them walking to work in a suit, they might be building your extension on your house, god help you if they are your pilot for your next trip abroad. Now you know that in their spare time they take their boards and shred.

 

Oh yeah, you know the saying, "There's always one" well in this case there's two!

This is Dean Sanders, he skates hard, constantly looking for new lines in a bowl to pull off a trick, to make that trick just that little bit more ridiculously hard to do. These shots show the attempt at flying up off a hip in a bowl and landing, and sliding a smith grind up on the vertical extension, he was so close to making it, next time.