Archive for April, 2010
Adriana
Posted by Ryan in On Location, Pretty Girls on April 25, 2010
On Easter weekend, I drove up to Ottawa to see Adriana, a model I’ve been trying to shoot with seemingly forever. We’ve had quite a few failed attempts, starting a year ago, in May 2009. At the time, Adriana was visiting Toronto to shoot with a bunch of different photographers and although I was supposed to be one of them, we got our signals crossed and our schedules didn’t match up. I’d met Adriana on Facebook a few months previous, and we’d yet to talk on the phone or meet in person. The first day she was in Toronto, I texted her to see how things we’re going and discovered in short order that she was staying in my neighbourhood, only a five minute drive away. Oddly, we both had the evening free, despite not being able to coordinate our schedules before. Rather than shooting, we met for the first time by going out for dinner at the Green Eggplant (highly recommended), in Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood. Despite all the stellar cuisine in this city, Adriana still resists eating anywhere else when she visits Toronto, which is pretty amusing.
Fast forward to July. I’m driving back from Nova Scotia and had planned a one day detour to Ottawa so I could shoot with Adriana. There’s no easy way to get to Ottawa without going through Montreal first. Montreal driving being what it is, combined with summer travellers and construction meant a three hour delay getting to Ottawa, which meant I had to cancel our shoot.
Fast forward to December. Adriana planned a one day there-and-back trip to Toronto just to shoot with me. One of the very few snow storms we had all season decided to put the brakes on that plan and made travelling too treacherous.
Fast forward to March. Adriana planned another weekend Toronto trip to shoot with a bunch of people and made sure I was first in line, given our previous failures. It just wasn’t meant to be, however, as I was booked solid doing a trade show for the entire time she was here. We somehow managed to squeeze in a dinner at the Green Eggplant, though.
Being fed up at this point, I immediately booked a hotel in Ottawa for Easter weekend because I was determined to shoot Adriana. And this time we were successful!
We couldn’t have asked for better weather, as it was sunny and mid-20s all weekend long. On Saturday we headed out on an adventure to find a good beach, because swimwear photoshoots in early April (in Canada no less) are rare indeed. We ended up here:
How we ended up there is more of a story than I have the patience to type, but involved a lot of driving and this was the fourth place we scouted before giving up because it was getting too late in the day. Unfortunately by the time we had arrived here, the weather had cooled slightly and the sky had taken on a hazy, overcast look. All that beautiful sunshine was hidden behind some rather dull cloud cover. We pressed on and got some great shots:
Above: natural light.
Above: Alien Bees monolight in a small umbrella.
One thing you’ll notice about this location is a lack of the thing that usually goes hand in hand with swimwear — sand. The shore that the Ottawa River was lapping against was basically concrete or slate or something; flat and hard with some jagged edges. There were, however, these giant rocks that we used as much as we could.
Because the light was so flat and lifeless, these two photos were shot with the addition of my Nikon SB-900 and Gary Fong Lightsphere Collapsible. I also had the Amberdome accessory attached to it to warm up the light. Despite being plagued with exposure issues when I use the Lightsphere indoors, it was perfect outside, and I’m very pleased with the results.
Coming soon: photos from the rest of our shoot, at my hotel in Ottawa.
Les Coquettes Academy
Posted by Ryan in On Location, Pretty Girls on April 12, 2010
As part of my ongoing work with Les Coquettes, I was recently assigned to shoot some images for Les Coquettes Academy. The Academy is burlesque university, essentially — a six-week course on performing, creating characters, and costume design. I shot four girls in forty minutes with three lights, which was a challenge. We were pressed for time, and the four students weren’t exactly professional models. Lilli Bubalotovich, their instructor, helped out tremendously by suggesting poses unique to their characters, while I quickly snapped away.
These and many others were all shot on white seamless paper, which gave me the flexibility to change the background colour in post production, since there wasn’t enough time during the shoot to switch up coloured gels. Zack Arias, photographer extraordinaire, has a great video tutorial on this technique.
The Junction Nightclub
Posted by Ryan in Events & Performances on April 11, 2010
A few months back, DJ Storm of Oshawa club Junction emailed me to ask if I could come out that way to take some pictures on their Sexxy Saturday club nights. Shooting in a club presents a huge assortment of challenges, the most difficult of which is the low light levels. Creating light where there’s none is not the easiest thing in the world.
The DJ booth is a good place to stake out the joint and figure out where my best vantage points will be throughout the night. It also affords some cool photo ops:
Even though the disco ball, LEDs, and other lights provide for some nifty effects, their levels are all very low. The above picture was shot with the camera set to ISO 3200, an aperture of f/2.8 and a shutter speed that is barely hand-holdable at 1/25th. If you click through to view the image on Flickr, you can see the full EXIF header by selecting “More properties” in the lower right.
The Nikon D300S that I shoot with is pretty effing good in low-light situations, giving very useable results even when it’s jacked up to ISO 3200.
The shot above adds some flash to light up the DJ booth in the form of a Nikon SB-800 with a LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer attached. I’ve slowed down the shutter speed even further, to 1/6th. This allows more of the ambient light into the photo, but the short duration of the flash still keeps the main subjects relatively sharp.
The two shots above are much the same as the DJ booth shot, with some added flash and slower shutter speeds of 1/8th and 1/10th, respectively.
The shot above is by far my favourite of the last few months, for a few reasons. One, the bearded dude looks angry and therefore funny. Two, he’s the most prominent thing in the photo, staring right at the camera, isolated from the sea of people around him. You’ll notice the orange glow this whole photo has, despite using flash. This was taken much closer to the disco ball than the previous photos were, meaning the light was more intense and the slow shutter (1/8th) picked it up a little more than before.
Dragging the shutter on the above photo helped to convey a sense of movement, but the flash still kept much of the important parts sharp. Looks like he’s in the middle of a pelvic thrust.
I love these last two for being totally impromptu club pictures. The first dude held the finger pose for only a split second as he danced around, but I snagged it. The group in the lower photo had no idea I was even there, as I just held my camera up high over my head to capture their ridiculous faces.
Turns out DJ Storm also needed some photos of himself for some promotional posters, so we went into the studio a few weeks ago and banged these out:
I used a High Pass filter technique in Photoshop to give them a slightly more dimensional look. You can read more about the technique on Dustin Snipes’ blog.
Faces Magazine
Posted by Ryan in Pretty Girls, Published Work on April 10, 2010
Kristen (seen here previously) emailed me a few weeks ago to tell me she was going to apply for Faces Magazine’s calendar girl contest by submitting one of my photos. Faces is a local Halifax glossy monthly, although I’ve actually never seen it in all my trips there.
Well guess what? Our photo won!
You can download desktop wallpapers at the Faces site.
And yes, this picture was taken at the same shoot where I damn near broke my ankle.
Ottawa By Night
Posted by Ryan in On Location, Time Lapse Videos on April 9, 2010
[RSS users, please click through to the blog so you can view the video.]
As regular readers of the blog are aware, I’ve toyed around many times with time-lapse videos made with my DSLR cameras. This past weekend in Ottawa, I decided to be a bit more ambitious and make a video with a little variety instead of the static scenes I usually shoot.
The majority of this video was shot in about three hours on the grounds and surroundings of Parliament Hill. Over 4,000 frames garnered me about 90 seconds of footage, which I edited down to 1m25s including intro and outro titles, music, and a few seconds of regular non-time-lapse HD video.
The big swath of fire in the video is known as the Centennial Flame.
Everything was shot on a Nikon D300S with battery grip, set on a Manfrotto tripod. As good as the tripod is, the wind kicked up some fierce gusts that night, which resulted in some video jitter on the longer (200mm) shots.
After tweaking the photos in Lightroom and cropping to 16:9, I pulled each batch of JPEGs into QuickTime Player 7 Pro, which output my working movie files. I used iMovie to glue the whole mess together with movies and titles. I’d never used iMovie for anything more complicated than adding a soundtrack to existing video, but I found the whole process incredibly easy.
Now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the editing process, I have a strong inclination to make one of these vids featuring Toronto… We’ll see.
Music: “Yeah (Pretentious Version)” by LCD Soundsystem