Testing Testing 123

I've been looking for something to inspire me back into doing more shooting as to be 100% honest i've felt a bit yukky towards photography recently, which isn't a good thing.

So to get myself inspired again i've booked in a few models for some work in the coming weeks, partly for fashion at college and partly just to get myself back into the swing of photography for fun.

I realised that 2009 was a dramatic downturn in the number of shoots i did for me, so 2010 will be back up there with lots and lots to come.

Today though i did some testing, with Kyle as my model, for a project i have in mind for the guys at Livingston Pipe Band, which if it all goes well will look pretty damn cool.

I remembered seeing a shoot by Haristobald Photography a while back and used some of what he'd done as inspiration for this test.

Lighting on this is pretty simple, stand kyle in the garden at 4 in the afternoon, pop a softbox at either side of him on full and use a small aperture and high shutter speed to get the very dark surroundings. I've made it darker in post, as i wasn't getting enough light from the softboxes, so next time i'll remove a layer of diffusion to see if that helps.

I think this might well be something that gets me inspired again... at last.

Meet Keith

As part of my college Portraiture block I need to produce a High Key image of a lady and a low key image of a guy.

Charlie is helping me out by being my model in mid January but Keith kindly offered to help me out with the Low Key stuff.

I really think he should get back into doing more modeling, it's just the usual story in Scotland of not many photographers being happy shooting males, but I'm sure he'd get plenty work.

Scott (blog here), Sian and I spent a few hours with Keith in the College studio and i'm most happy with the main image on this post although i do like some of the others and the one below was one that i kept going back to look at.

Waltzing Matilda

It's been quite a good week at college this week, I got a quick lesson on the 5x4 camera yesterday which was awesome and today I had a little play in the studio with Low Key Lighting.

My model, I'm sure she's called Matilda, was really great at staying still throughout the poses.

I've played about with the settings with help from Allan and this is probably one of my favourites from the testing, although I think Allan really wants them with a little more detail on the shadow side but I do like them this way.

I've attached the lighting chart below and used a 5x4 camera as the camera on the chart as i will be shooting the actual images using a 5x4 but this one was shot, as usual, with my Canon D-SLR.