The January that never was.....

Too many things happened.... so no photography that month.

Back on track. The good news is that Maranna McCloskey's album is due out this month. Northern Ireland newspaper, "Local Women", ran a small bit on Maranna. The shots of her from October 2007 (it was a cold afternoon shoot) still run and still get comments.

Ah well, here's another one from the shoot.

Carrying the Lee Filter sample packs around.

The wonders of Strobist hail that the Roscoe Gel Packs and the Lee Filters Designer pack are oft required in the wonders of doing things with a flashgun.

The Lee Filter Designer pack comes a block of gels with a pin through them to keep them all together. Strobists have devised ways to keep them in some logical order. Last night, I figured out mine.

Enter stage left, the Asda business card holder. All £1.24 of it. There's 25 pages in them which hold four business cards per page. So you can hold three filters per business card pocket and fit the whole gel pack in.

Here's mine:

The onstage/offstage rule.

Following on from what I was talking about in my last post. The onstage/offstage rule is really deemed to anyone who operates on stage... so actors, musicians, poets, writers and all that lot.

When Rock The Valley were doing gigs in Limavady the Halloween Ball was always a good night for images. The Kiss tribute band, Hotter Than Hell, did the whole nine yards in terms of make up, platforms and the attitube, but remember it's an act. In fact they were nicest bunch of blokes you could ever meet.

I waited a long while for them to do the photo, and I wasn't leaving until I had it, their manager/press person came over to me and said, "they are ready for you now". When I walked in it was all nice accents, shakes of hands, how you doing, you're not from Limavady are you (I have an English accent in Northern Ireland, it's the first question I get). "Right lads, can you give me Kiss attitude?", no sooner I said it they were in character. Ten frames later and I had what I needed. The funny thing was that someones mobile went off and he answered it, "yes darling, I'm just in the middle of having my photo taken for the paper.... okay... yes.... love you, no you first... no...... okay....byeeeeee". As soon as he put his phone in his pocket he stuck his tongue out and gave me Gene Simmons.

Mirenda Rosenberg

One of the best shoots of 2008, I'm glad it happened on many levels. Mainly that it re-affirmed that it's photography that I love doing. Economic downturns and the rest can be put to one side and I can shoot some pictures.

Mirenda and her band scoured the social networks and looked through about 30 portfolios of photographers... they liked the way I worked and the questions I asked. Within a week were doing the shoot.

One of the most important things to note with singers and musicians in general. They are different characters offstage compared to onstage. The first set of images just didn't work mainly due to the amount of light that I had available. The second set, at the bar, just clicked straight away as Mirenda and I started talking about music. "Do you have a completely different, act/character, on stage as opposed to offstage? You do, can you the onstage character now?". The shoot changed 100% and the list of moves and poses just got bigger and bigger.

Nothing's final in the music game but the mock up of the CD cover I did looks promising. One diffused SB-800 at waist level hence the "Scooby Doo" shadow in the background. The hand gestures were very important, having the hands doing something improves any photo no end.

Office move and Platon audio.

I decided to move the office a few weeks ago but just haven't really had the time to do it. So I've been doing it bit by bit. The photo was taken once I got the office how I wanted it, not pictured is the bomb site of the old office where there's ten tonnes of paperwork I need to go through.

As it stands, it won't look like in a weeks time.

To celebrate actually getting stuff moved I listened to Platon's talk which is on Vincent Laforet's blog. It's excellent, very very very good. You can listen to it too by clicking here (you'll need Quicktime installed).

The most high pressured scariest gig of all my time as a photog....

And it was an absolute hooooooot to do.

Yup, you guessed it. Photographing my daughters nativity play rehearsal for the local school.

This gig is made all the more scary when you daughter's mates are pointing and saying to my little one, "isn't that your daddy?". The cheshire cat's grin was smaller.

So, the best part of 80 kids: shepheards, three kings, snowflakes, sheep, cows, angels, percussionists, Rangifer tarandus :) ,one clumsy angel and a baby Jesus.

I don't think I've laughed so much in ages.

Take 18 Firemen....

Limavady Fire Brigade, they do a brilliant job, end of story. Getting all 18 of them in the same room at the same time takes some organisation.

Only one day in October could we get all of them to sync for a ten minute time frame for a photo. I had a bunch of ideas but with drills and the rest of it, it just never happened.

Watching them stop the traffic in Limavady just to turn two tenders around for a photo, well that was fun.

Lighting wise it wasn't easy, there was a dozen misses and only a few hits. The strip lights causing most of my nightmares (you can see their reflections in the windscreens of the tenders, I would have needed to hang some serious amount of black cloth to kick those out*). If anything more light, much more light, would have done the trick. But we have what we have, and what we do with it is what counts.


So, Fuji S5 with an SB800 running bare.

*Note to self: get thirty foot by ten foot of black cloth.