Waiting for the RSL to open Rob sits with a coffee in one hand and half a cigarette in the other.  Raising an eyebrow and a rye smile to a sarcastic comment I make we are treated to see a hint of the joker within.  (Click image for full view).

Finishing his cigarette he discards the butt into the gutter, “The fish can finish it” he says.  “You’re not greenies are ya?” he asks, escorting me into the café he spotting his wife “Hey Ma! Look at me” he motions to the camera.  (Click image for full view).

Comfortable in his own skin, David makes no attempt to adjust his stance after agreeing to have his photo taken, only briefly adjusting his gaze toward the camera.  He also plays us a song from his recorder and despite being homeless he asks for nothing in return.  This was by far the most moving encounter of the morning and has left me with allot to think about. (Click image for full view)

This was my first work with the new soft-box and I am really happy with it.  I am hoping to develop this style a bit and get better at shooting it so any tips/encouragment is much appreciated.

-Dan

Gotye’s not really a band… It’s one GUY!!  A eccentric fellow by the name of Wouter De Backer who hails from Victoria, Australia.  He’s one of these one man bands where he does everything from the odd-subtle percussion to sequencing a wide array of samples.  To put it consicely and briefly, this guy embodies everything that is classy but edgey and new at the SAME EXACT TIME!  (Which is very hard to do these days) Give him a listen and I guarantee you that you will not be disappointed.

The first time I heard one of his songs was at a billiard in a swanky part of Brisbane where the abstract video of his song ,Heart’s a mess (below), was on a small TV throwing me into a trance because what this video was showing was soooo different from the drunk tools barking at each other over a missed ball.  I was fixated…

Now if your like me and must have the whole CD then you might be hard pressed to get ahold of his albums.  His most well know album is “Like Drawing Blood” which you can get from Amazon but trying to buy any of his other albums almost seems impossible to me.  What makes it even worse is that the songs from those elusive albums are on Pandora teasing me everyday when I listen at work!!!!

The main thing I want you to notice in the images (click for full view as the thumbnails below don’t show the full picture!) is the angles and perspective in the photos.  It would be quite easy to stand 5meters back from the wall and take a photo of someone in the middle of the frame stuck on a flat looking wall.  Coming into the wall and varying your perspective/composition can lead to far more interesting shots that use the contours of the wall and the precarious position of your climber to make a far more interesting shot.  Try it on your friends

-Dan

11 days after the shoot I am finally finished the edit, relief!!!!

Time Taken:  Prep - 20mins

Shoot: Approx 2 hours

Edit: Approx 20+ hours over a couple of weeks

Really glad with how they all came out and I hope you enjoy them.  Feedback/critique is appreciated and I try and learn from it.

I used pretty much the same colour theme across all the images and I think it worked pretty well.

The shoot didn’t go great on my part, I was using a new flashgun and still learning the ropes with it which didn’t help.

I think there are two things I have taken away from the shoot:

1:  Know your kit and how it will respond to the changes you make to settings etc.  If you are ontop of this and it comes naturally you can focus your energy on composing your shots and arranging the models etc.

2: Keep the energy up and keep chatting with your models, they will feed off your energy to if you are having a shit day (or in my case preoccupied with your new flash you can’t quite use yet) it can make the models uncomfortable and will show in the images.  Luckily for me Glen and Megan are really god friends and allot of fun, as such the quality of these pics is far more a credit to them than it is to me.

The regular breakdown-

The good - God I’m awesome

• Don’t know if there is much to go in here, I wasn’t the happiest at the shoot as I was really preoccupied with my kit
• Composition was pretty good and I managed to keep on top of it

The Bad - Things I could have managed better

• Depth of field, I used it well in some shots but too well if you know what I mean?  Some things I wanted just out of focus ended up waaaay out of focus on account of too small an f stop (aka too wide an aperture)
• Did an ok job of listening to Megan and Glen but could have done better.  Many shots they organised themselves in coz I was to busy screwing with my gear :(  Thanks guys

The Ugly - Where I completely dropped the ball

• I should have been more on top of my new flash and perhaps shouldn’t have taken it given that I wasn’t fully across it.  But it was so shiny I had to try it out!!!!
• Talking with the models - I should have been keeping the energy up to make it easier for them but I didn’t do a great job.  Credit to them that the final pics look so good.

Below are the photos from the shoot.  Please click to full view them in all their sexy glory.

- Dan

Auto-Tone for voices can be the most annoying tool in a musician’s tool-box but can also be very inspiring and creative.  I never thought that until I saw this video with “The Gregory Brothers.”  

Insightful, Satirical, Socio-Politcal, just Plain damn funny.  

WHAT IT BOILS DOWN TO:

Music has always been changing with technology.  In the beginning, there can be many misses with the masses, but in the end, we get used to it and the technology is somehow worked into an intricate mix of old school and creative compositions.  Using the Auto-tune just because you’re a bad singer SUCKKKKSSSS!!  But using the Auto-Tune to sample real world affairs while making it bearable in a song without being too redundant, is pristine.

Give a shout out and let me know what new technology “Grinds your gears”.

Bumpin to Benassi,

Kurt

Critique section:

An angel that fell from heaven to earth
That summoned thousand years of search
An insight for beauty of the heavenly gods
That showed a beauty, which beat all odds

A creation from God to perfection
You’re beauty is your souls reflection
A splendour of a goddess that is given
You’re an angel that fell from heaven

Without you heaven will lack
God will wait for you to come back
Without you someone will die
God will shed tears and will cry

You have wings that spreads wide
A pure soul, is what you have inside
You have hair that is as soft as cotton
A guardian angel is what we have gotten

When everything is dark, you give light
Your eyes are like stars that shine bright
When heaven wanted you back it rained
Your beauty is what human kind gained

**UPDATE** Full shoot now up in the photography - weekly shoots section.

Teaser- Here is the first photo from a series I shot last weekend.  The full shoot and a “Learnings from the Shutter to your face” post will have up on Saturday once I finish editing the other pics in the series.

Please click to view the photo full size in all it’s glory

I am however a fucking awesome photographer.

Nope, I’m not that either (yet) but I do love it.

I love it so much infact that after getting home from work at 9pm I have been editing some shots I took this weekend until 2:30am and am now continuing into the wee hours of the morning to write about it for you.

I will be frequently posting about my shoots and what I learned from them.  With any luck this will help me to learn more about what I did right/wrong during a shoot while helping you to learn through my mistakes.  I’ve been searching for a stupid name for such posts and I think I have it - ‘Learnings from the shutter to your face’.

The first in the series ‘Learnings from the shutter to your face” is a story of love.  The forbidden love triangle of a man, his camera, and the late afternoon sun.  This tumultuous love story sees our hero (me) with limited time to save the one he loves before it disappears forever(12 hours or so).  In this analogy I am the hero, and my love is shooting the late afternoon.  It provides wonderful natural light and makes for great photos if used effectively, but on this particular Sunday afternoon our hero miscalculated the time of the setting sun and we quickly began to run low on sunlight so we had to work a bit faster than I’d have liked.

We decided to head to the park mainly for the sun I just mentioned and the backdrop of foliage which when out of focus should look pretty good.  We were already running late when I insisted we re-iron Dave’s shirt.  After showing off my skills acquired as a house wife in a previous life Dave was looking quite the sexy bitch so we headed to the park.

As I said, with the light failing (you can see the last slivers of it some of the shots)

There are a few things I think I did well and didn’t do well on this shoot, here are the good, the bad, the ugly.

The good - God I’m awesome

• Depth of field(how much of the image is in focus)
• Distance from model to background - This relates to depth of field, increasing the gap makes the background go out of focus, throwing the model into sharper relief
• My shadow - Because the sun was so close to the horizon my shadow was really long and fell on Dave so I had to keep an eye on that
• Composition (the position of the model in the frame)
• Exposure
• Listened to the model - Dave suggested using the sun as a backdrop so we tried it.

The Bad - Things I could have managed better

• Light/How it is interacting with the model  -  I did this okay though in the shots into the sun the flash washed out Dave a little.  I was using onboard flash which didn’t help.  A gold reflector may have been a better choice to reflect the incoming light back onto dave in these shots without washing him out in the way the flash did.
• Focus - This was fine in the park but the head an shoulders shot wasn’t so great.  We were inside for that and I was using manual focus while also trying to position the light source with the other hand.  Turns out that is pretty much impossible and left many of the pics out of focus.

The Ugly - Where I completely dropped the ball

• Models stance/position -  It would have been worth looking at some different poses in photos by other photographers and taken them as reference shots to the shoot.  I didn’t do this and pretty much ended up with a heap of shots of the same stance.
• Relationship with model -  What I mean by this is ensuring they are relaxed and comfortable.  I’ve been a model in shoots before and it is harder than it looks.  If you don’t believe me try and put on a convincing smile right now.  Wasn’t so easy was it?  Ensuring the model is relaxed through small talk and encouraging them by saying the pics are coming out really well (even if you are still trying to get the exposure right!) will help them feel more comfortable and less self conscious.

Any Problems? - What went wrong/was a bit tricky

• Shooting with the sun at Dave’s back caused problems.  It is bright and makes it hard to capture him as it make a silhouette.  I used the on board flash to ‘fill in’ the image and light Dave, but it washed him out a little.

So that’s the shoot (good, bad and ugly).  I learned allot from it so with some work, hopefully I won’t make the same mistakes again.

Here’s how they turned out in the end.  Click for a full view.

I could go on all day about the two amazing bands I mentioned above (and most likely will in a later post), but I wanted to stress how much we rely on music as a form of focus and therapy.  I wanted to introduce you to some bands that have given me a chill atmosphere at my new apartment and even (should I dare say… do my work?).  I am not going to subject you to the monotonous ocean waves by the window sounds.  No… The music that I will be suggesting has intriguing dynamics and a creative mix of synths and samples (some may be considered coffee house music… maybe a techie coffee shop).

First up, a very popular Norweigian Duo called Royksopp.  Known for their innovative music video “Remind Me” and for famous tracks such as “Poor Leno” and “Sparks”.  Some songs can stretch to be Electronica dance to Trip-Hop but the ones I like, create an atmosphere and an ambiance.  You know, the kind of atmosphere where you can holistically look at your life as a good path all because you are doing actual work while feeling good (mainly due to the music).  It’s kinda like hitting a runner’s prime.  After listening to chill music for 10 minutes, you feel like you could finish a whole project.  My personal favorite song and the song I would listen to first if you were going to give the band a chance, would be Remind Me.

The second Chill band for this post is the critically acclaimed English Duo “Everything But The Girl“.  The multitude of classifications include the various: Bossa-Nova, Sophisti-Pop, Jazz, adult-orientated contemporary music, House, Trip-Hop.  I could probably make up some more phrases to describe this group but that’s not due to my ‘limited’ creativity, but mainly due to the versatility this band can show.  Whereas Royksopp has a bit peppier underlying tone, Everything but the Girl has a laid-back, soulful undertone that gives the music a “Sophisticated” feel.  The front running song I would download or buy if you are remotely interested in the description of this band is called “Good Cop Bad Cop” from the album “Walking Wounded”.  One word to the wise though, you do not want to listen to this if you are going through heartbreaks.  The music opens up your mind, but the lyrics could make you rethink your whole life in the relationship areas.  Hypnotic to say the least.

The third band may not be as chilled for some people as it is for me, but see I grew up in the Gameboy age of technology and as so, I find the warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches very conducive to ‘relaxed-working’.   In fact, I would say “Crystal Castles” is more electronica than chilled, but what the hey!  Again, it seems that the best electronica bands come in Duos.  This ‘Girl - Boy’ Duo hail from Canada (outside of the US is also a reoccurring theme) and are supposedly known for out of control live performances.  I will let you know when I see one of their shows (if they ever come to Cleveland).  I most definitely recommend the song “Magic Spells” off their Self-Titled album.

Listen to some of these bands listed above and let me know what you think.

-yours truthfully,

Kurt

Where to look? - To change the blend mode and opacity which are mentioned in this article look at the bottom right of screen (default location for the layers palette).  The circled box contains the blending options and the box to it’s right the opacity.  The settings relate to the selected layer, in this case ‘Layer 2′ which we can see is selected by the blue highlighting.

Below is an example of each blending mode.  I have taken an image of mine and put a textured layer below it to demonstrate the way they affect each other.

Top image - The layer we will adjust the blending mode of

Underlying texture (the layer underneath the above image) which will show through the above image in different ways as we adjust the blending modes.

Normal - This is the default bl;ending mode and does not allow any of the lower layers to show through at 100% opacity.  However as the opacity is lowered (to 50%) in the below photo the underlying layer(s) shows through evenly, relative to the opacity setting.

Dissolve - Blends the two layers through a random pattern of pixels.  There is no effect at 100% opacity (top layer opacity), but as we lower the opacity we start to see the effect.  The below image is with the blend (top) layer opacity set to 80%  I have never used this and find it ugly as hell but I’m sure people somewhere must use it for something.

Darken - Allows the base colour to show through where it is darker than the blending (top) layer.

Lighten - Shows through the base (bottom) layer wherever it is lighter than the top layer.

Multiply -As the name suggests this one is a little more complicated and involves a bit-o-math, something about multiplying the pixel values by the hypotenuse of a mars bar relative to Jupiters casino.  Too complicated for me but anyway this is what it looks like.

Colour Burn - Darkens an image using the blend colour.  As you can see below, the darker the areas the more pronounced the effect.  Once again the trick is in the name and it often results in a sort of burnt colours look (if you know what I mean?).  Note that in the white(ish) areas very little darkening has occured.

Linear Burn -Results are similar to colour burn but more even across the image (darker across entire image).  Note that it clips (makes completly black) dark pixels.

Linear Dodge - Opposite of Linear Burn.  Given this you should already know that it is going to clip (make pure white) light pixel values which is why the image has this overexposed appearance.

Darker Colour - I f you look back a few images you’ll see that this one looks similar to Darken, but it works a little differently.  As usual, tricks in the name and only the darker colours on the blend (top) layer show through.   You can see this in the image below where the lighter (sky) areas have disappeared, letting the texture layer show through, while the darker areas remain.

Lighter Colour -You guessed it, this little puppy is the opposite of Darker Colour and similar to their cousin Lighten blend mode. But it works a little differently and only the light pixels from the blend (top) layer will remain visible.

Screen - Tired yet?  We aren’t even half way through!  Screen shows through the lighter colour of the two layers, except where there is black where it will show through.

Colour Dodge - With ‘colour’ in the name we can be sure it wil do something to the colours and we aren’t disappointed with this blend mode brightening the image relative to the colour.  See that on the flower the effect is greatest, basically the more colour you got the greater the effect is going to be.

Overlay - My favourite and most commonly used blend modes for simple image editing.  It combines the workings of the screen and multiply blend modes.

This blend mode is great for simple image editing.  If you need to add some drama to an image, bulk up some shadows etc on the run then simply duplicate the image layer (ctrl + J) and change the blend mode to overlay and bam, you have an instant change to the pic (if the effect is to strong then simply reduce the opacity).  This isn’t the best example but you can see that in the right image (where I have duplicated it and changed the blend mode to overlay) the shadows are darker and colours a bit brighter, try this one next time your in photoshop, pretty soon you will be doing it to every pic you open!

On that note, we are about half way through the blend modes, and it is 1am so I best be off to sleep.  Join us next week when we will pick up the rest of the blend modes and work out just what the heck they do.

Cheers
Dan