In this digital, online world it is always great to see your work on paper, be it a fine art print or as a double page spread in a well printed magazine. The world of magazines and newspapers moves further from paper towards pixels each day and I was pleasantly surprised when a real magazine showing one of my pictures arrived in my post box recently.
In September I wrote about the 'See Change' panorama shoot I undertook for Newcastle City Council. The usage agreement allows for the client to get a lot of mileage from this picture so I was very happy to see it used across two pages in OUTthere magazine's 'Windowseat' section.
click on the photograph to purchase your own fine art print
OutThere is the national in-flight magazine for Australia's largest regional airlines, Regional Express (REX), as well as New South Wales' AeroPelican Air. 'Windowseat' highlights a different facet of Australia each month and on this occasion celebrated Newcastle's listing in Lonely Planet's 2011 Worlds Top Ten Cities.
Many thanks to Guy Pendlebury and Edge Custom Media for the high design and reproduction values they insist on for their work. The surfers at sunrise picture looked beautiful!
For those of us who like to hold real paper photographs and/or display them in our homes please visit the new Collectable Photography website. The prints are personally made by me and limited to editions of 25 or less. For stock photography please visit Lightmoods
Recently a client sought to purchase usage rights for one of my stock images to be used as a long narrow banner in an airport. While the picture looked great as part of their bold branding design the filesize itself was too small for the extra wide reproduction.
I suggested that we shoot a new picture in a format more suited to the output size required. To keep costs down I recommended my Commissioned Stock pricing model. While this doesn't suit all assignments it fitted perfectly here.
Essentially, a commissioned stock shoot is one where I make a picture to suit a client's brief but am also able to include it in my online stock library. The fee is negotiated according to the usage required and the production costs involved but is significantly lower than a traditionally commissioned assignment.
Please click on the pictures to see them larger or to purchase a print
I decided to shoot a multi frame panorama with the RAW files to be processed in Lightroom and then stitched in Photoshop CS5. This would give a very wide file with enough pixels for the extra large reproduction.
Once this was sorted we had to get the shoot organised and done quickly. Gemma, the client, sourced two willing surfers, Chris and Simon, to be the models. This may seem obvious but shooting lifestyle or sports requires believable models who know and understand the situation being photographed. Besides, who else but surfers and mad fisherfolk are going to turn up at a beach before sunrise!
Susan Gilmore Beach was selected as the location and we set aside the following Friday for a pre dawn meet up. Of course it was winter and would no doubt be very cold.
I checked the beach the afternoon before to sort out the best way to get around to the rock shelf in what would be darkness. The swell had come up and, although the tide would be low when the sun rose, we would still have to walk across a very rocky and wave swept shoreline to get to the location. In the dark. Surf reports were indicating high surf conditions for the morning with the weather expected to be clear and bright. The thing was, though, we needed to get around to the location before the 'bright and clear' part of the dawn.
On July 4th in 1884 an American clipper celebrated it's last Independence Day. The 'Susan Gilmore' was wrecked on the small beach that would remember it in name. On that day all 14 crew as well as the ships' two dogs, cat and bird survived. Although the Susan Gilmore's demise was met in much stormier conditions, tomorrow would be July 8th, 2011 and the surf was expected to be high and charging in. Lucky for us the timing turned out to be coincidence and not omen.
The next morning I arrived to find Chris sitting on the bonnet of his car peering into the darkness. The noise and barely visible lumping shapes told us that the surf was big. While Chris waited for the others I went down to see if we could get around to the shooting location without drowning the talent, client and equipment. We couldn't. Did I mention the dark? By the time I got back the others had arrived and were in Simon's van watching a surf movie. Oh, the rigours of modern surfing!
Eventually, in murky, predawn light we headed around to the little beach. Gemma and I zigged, zagged and hopped close to the cliff base. Chris and Simon, in wetsuits and carrying their boards, waded through waves sweeping across the rock shelf.
Aside from the more accessible time of day during which they occur I do prefer shooting sunsets to sunrises for one important technical reason. As the sun sets the best light arrives - you can see the colours strengthen and become more vibrant. At sunrise that beautiful light emerges from the dark and leaves very quickly. This sunrise image would require 9 separate frames to be stitched together. Each panorama would take several minutes in quickly leaving light that wouldn't be back for 24 hours and would never be the same.
Timing is everything in photography and even more so with this picture. I would have to time the first shot on the extreme right with the incoming waves as I panned to the left a few degrees at a time. From an elevated position on a large rock I shouted across the noise of the surf to arrange Chris and Simon how I wanted them to stand and to place them at the spot that would be captured in the 7th frame.
After what seemed like a long time for the guys to be standing in the cold water and freezing wind the light on the horizon achieved a pleasing glow. A series of waves began their journey from right to left. I shouted "Shooting", Chris and Simon returned to the planned pose and I panned with the waves, stopping at pre-determined degree markings on the panorama head to make each frame.
We made a few more panos then headed back to the carpark and then down to Merewether Beach for a cuppa at the kiosk. Protected from the wind by the surf club the guys could warm up as we watched the big waves being ridden by those surfers who had made it out the back.
The picture is now hanging at Newcastle Airport which is a very modern regional facility servicing the Hunter Region on Australia's East Coast. The banner features the 'See Change' Newcastle logo - strong vibrant branding being used to attract visitors, business and new residents to Australia's seventh largest city.
I'm quite biased about Newcastle because I grew up there. Although I moved 160 kilometres south to Sydney about 7 years ago some of my family and many friends are still there. It really is a great place to visit, live and do business with.
A successful photograph is the sum of the team that works on it and special thanks go to Gemma, Chris and Simon.
Credits
The Surfers: Christopher Tola, Simon Drinkwater
Client: Newcastle City Council
Client Rep/Producer: Gemma der Kinderen
Agency: PeachAds / Megan Duncan
Equipment: Canon 1Ds Mark 3, Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, Acratech GP Ballhead Software: Lightroom 3 / Photoshop CS5
I made this picture (before I made the bed) with a Canon 24mm Tilt Shift lens. It's a great lens for squaring up buildings or rooms and for getting the near and far of a landscape in focus without having to use a small aperture to increase the depth of field.
So, for this picture, I completely reversed the settings to minimize the field of focus. I've had some interesting results using this lens incorrectly - I even based an exhibition on this method which I will tell you about in another post.
For a number of years the only camera I owned was a Sinar 4x5 (you know - tripod, big box, lenses you could buy a car with and the old black cloth over your head when composing the picture). Well, the Tilt Shift lens replicates some of the movements the large format camera can do (sort of).
It's manual focus and the more you tilt and shift the more the exposure is affected. It probably works best at around f8 - 11 and you always need to check that you haven't bumped the setting while using it. So it's a bit fiddly, but well worth the effort.
You can also shift the lens from left to right (or R to L) and stitch the two frames to make panoramas like this.
I have also found this method handy for shooting in tight spaces like this bathroom. You can get most of the room in without resorting to a distorted ultra wide view. One thing to be careful of though. If you find yourself set up in the shower cubicle (as I was here) take care not to bump the cold water tap as you position the tripod and camera.
