Wednesday 25 November 2009

Somewhere In Time




Some simple experimentations with Hollywood glamour from a bygone era. The lighting for these images primarily consisted of monoblocs with snoots, grids and barndoors attached. The last image was part of an experiment that still needs some work. I used an old slide projector to cast the shadow of the cat figurine on the grey seamless background; this wasn't ideal as the light from the projector wasn't very powerful. I tried the same with flash but it didn't produce such defined shapes, even with a snoot - probably the light bounced around to much off the shiny gobo. This meant relying on a slower shutter speed than I normally use for portrait sittings - again, not ideal since I prefer to avoid the tripod for such shoots. The lighting on the model had to be carefully arranged so as not to fall on the background or cast a sadow of the model on the background.
The model is the delightful Clara Sinclair. The background was going to be the shadow of some dried roses that I had kept intact for well over a year, but I tripped over them, and now they're potpourri. Ho hum.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Shrooms




As autumn shivers towards winter, a brief jaunt to Wivenhoe Woods resulting in these shots of fungi. I'm not usually one for sentimentality, but these euagaric clusters looked quite snug and cosy nestled together around trees and stumps, so those were the elements I chose to concentrate on.