Millwall Rugby

Not just for the boys!
Yes you read that right, I play rugby. Well, when I mean play, I’ve played a couple of games so far.  The ladies team is called Venus and they are part of the Millwall Rugby Football Club.  I actually started out playing touch rugby on Sundays about 2 years ago. Touch rugby basically means no tackling/less likely to get hurt (in theory).  The Venus team were wanting to increase numbers and build up the recruiting momentum, so I said I would come along to training not thinking I’d actually have to play!  I did have to play and I was fly-half the first time and inside centre/winger next time round! I had no idea what I was doing - but hey it was actually really fun. Although I hurt allot after and actually now I’m off with an ankle injury.  When rugby season ends, allot of the members play the touch tournaments which is what I enjoy the most.  The Sunday crew entered a team for the first time last year and won the Summer league which was pretty cool! (Go Mudshooters!!)

Sports Photography
But anywho…I thought…why not mix my photography with the rugby?!! No - not taking pictures whilst playing rugby, silly!  Taking pictures of our lovely rugby boys!
I took my camera along to training one night (Back in March 2009) and it was quite cold and bloody dark.  The coach thought it a bit odd that I was dressed for training and that I had a camera in my hand. So I did no training and took loads of pictures. Even though we had floodlights, I did not get to grips with my camera settings then and came up with this….oops!.  (This was still with the Canon 450D by the way)

Ah well, live and learn.  I did take some ‘better’ ones in the end (see here) and that’s when it was suggested that I should tag along to one of the games to take some action shots.

Milwall versus Writtle March 2009
So off I trek with the 3rd team to watch them play Writtle. Quite nervous as I had actually bought a new lens for this! Canon 55-250mm f4.5.6IS the more ‘affordable’ zoom lens…..and what a great day I had, but also realised that sports photography is bloody difficult and is more about quantity of shots rather than taking the time to set up the shot.  So after I finally figured this out, I had to find a suitable setting (and yes sorry I used the sport mode on the camera) - but that was a good clue as to what sort of shutter speed/aperture I needed to aim for.

You will also see in the shots that some of them look a bit yellow. That was my fault - I had set the tone* to a more greeny yellowly feel trying to be clever.  I will never touch that setting again!  Afterwards, I used picnic, a photo editing tool to add the black bars on the top and bottom to give it a ‘movie’ feel.  I also added a vignette style which darkens the outside of the picture of which looking at again - I might have gone a bit OTT on this!

I had learnt a new thing…panning shots (which I kind of did by accident!).  This is basically where you move your camera along with the moving subject and take the shot, the subject will be in focus, whilst the background is blurred, or has a feel of speed.

Nice work if you can get it
Well the rugby boys were pleased with the photos I had taken and asked me to turn up to other games too
Millwall V Bancroft (2009)
Millwall v Campion (2009)
Millwall v Gravesend (2009)
Millwall v Thames (final 2009)

Jazz and Hip Hop!!

New Camera?
Back in November 2009 I had decided to take a big leap in camera gear and upgrade my Canon 450d to a shiny new Canon 7D (gulp!).  Could I handle this beast?…er…well I did not have time to think about it

In at the deep end!
I was going along to support my younger brother for a Jazz Hip Hop project he was working on…and I had barely got the 7D out of the box and he asked if I could take photos of the night. How could I say no? Bugger, I had not even read the instruction manual.  Not only that, I didn’t have a kit lens as I only bought the 7D body hoping to save pennies for buying a lens later. So I went armed only with my Canon 50mm f1.4l lens as I knew it would be dark in there (eep!)…

Rebirth of the Cool

About the project…”In the autumn of 2009, RollingSound & Trinity College of Music, with the help of a generous grant from the Arts Council, created a band out of some of the finest young Jazz and Hip Hop musicians in London.  Trinity supplied the Jazz musicians, whilst the Hip Hop musicians were selected at auditions held at the British Music Experience at the 02. Over three months, the band worked with our three tutors above to create music and documentary videos exploring Jazz and Hip Hop, which have now been collected together on this website for others to benefit from. The band performed their work to a packed audience at Blackheath Halls in Nov 09 as part of the London Jazz Festival”

The tutors, or guides, were: my brother Eric Lau, Finn Peters, and Ty

Backstage

Cool, as Eric’s sister I got to hang out backstage. That’s as far as my coolness goes, I’m really the embarrassing sister who is very proud of my younger brother and I try very hard not to shout ‘that’s my brother’ when he’s on stage and/or with his peers

The students were lovely and it’s obvious that a lot of hard work had been put into this project.  They had become a close knit team over the 3 months of intense work.  The talent in the room was phenomenal and I was proud to see that UK does have something to look forward to musically (if given the chance!).  So watching them - I only can do the best myself and hope the camera doesn’t not fail me now! ….Right how do you turn the camera on?!

Result!
Okay, so I realised that after the first act, that I had just been taking photos of the Trinity students who had nothing to do with the project at all (doh!). No-one told me, I thought it was weird - I was the only person to be taking pictures. But hey ho, they were awesome especially guy on the trumpet.
 

YouTube Montage!
Job done, phew! After about 300 shots later on the ‘right’ act (yes that is the average I take on an event if not more) I have found the 7D auto ISO to be awesome! Especially in this low light.  It would have been difficult with the 450d (sorry I do miss you 450d, we had some good times).  It took me awhile to get used to the controls, but I think I stuck mainly to aperture setting f1.4 whilst I played around with just the ISO.

The only thing I was gutted about was the focal length as I could not get in close enough and I could not stand in front of the band as there was a camera rig set up and I would have been in front of the audience causing a nuisance. So all the shots are taken from the right or left of stage.  There was also a jib on the left hand side (basically a big mechanic arm with a camera on the end) so had to avoid getting knocked out by that too!

I provided the pictures to Rolling Sound and they were pretty chuffed with the result. They also put together my photos on YouTube as a montage with one of the tracks the students had recorded. (awesome!) It was a track they had performed that night and is their interpretation of J Dilla’s song Fall in Love.  I love this version! (double awesome!)
Enjoy!!

Am I Attractive?

Is not a question I want you to answer.

This is the name of the iphone app I supplied images for. Nooo - not of me silly! I’ll explain…
This is back in November 2009 (yes I know allot of catching up to do) My mate Charlie has got into iphone application development which is really exciting stuff and is doing quite well with it too.  He asked me if I would like to provide the photos for his latest app.  Each photo would need represent each of the female and male attributes included in the app.

The Creative Brief

So after Charlie had given me the design brief, we had to come up with the ideas for the images..
For Her:
Her hip waist ratio…okay easy, that would be a apple and/or pear with tape measure
Her BMI…picture of scales
Her breast size…er apart from the obvious - we are not going there…just sticking to a photos of brassieres
Her Age…hmmm, a bit more difficult but could only think of wine or tree rings
Her hair colour…again quite difficult- but could only think of hair dye samples you get in the hairdressers

And for him..
His Intelligence…light bulb or chess set
His Generosity…chocolates, or flowers or gift of sorts
His Wealth…stack of money
His Height…this pic was already sorted so I didn’t need to worry about this one
His Shoulder Waist ratio…this was also sorted
The homepage…
Charlie suggested a picture of a peacock would be ideal….and I thought, well that’s going to be difficult to get an original picture of a bird like that. But it just so happened that I had a picture of such a beauty taken one of my travels to Barcelona with my dad when we ran out of things to do and went to the zoo
It was also an opportunity to learn how to use photoshop

Variations
This is the original picture:

Then I learnt a little bit more on photoshop…mirror image of bird and transposing the image…

then I learnt how to play around with layers and erasing the top layer to reveal the colour on the bottom layer and also smudging to get the water ripple affect….

***********************************

Splash of Colour

After have a few ideas with the images and shots, Charlie had the great idea to have the images in black and white but only show the chosen object as its original colour.  Which means more photoshop functions to learn…awesome…

This is one of the ideas for His Generosity and I will talk through how I did this in the end.  I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 (yup I’m waaay behind) I believe there is Photoshop CS5 out now

Here is the shot I took which I cropped. Then made another layer (copy of this picture) by clicking and dragging the Background to the Create New Layer icon

Then on the new layer created, selected Image>Adjustments>Desaturate to make it black and white

Then using the Polygonal Lasso Tool….

I used this to draw round the object I wanted to retain the original colour

Once the shape was highlighted, you just select Edit>Cut to get rid of the object you have just outlined and the bottom (coloured) layer will appear!!






 This is what you get…

Interpretations
Here are some more test ideas.  The apple was actually a red apple, but I played with the hue/saturation to make it green

Download the App
Available on itunes store now. Download to see the final images used

 

Am iattractive iphone app

Fish Factory Studios

What? Fish what what?

An odd title for this post? Yes well sort of...it's actually the name of the location of where this chandelier is featured. 

A recording studio that is only known by word of mouth. Try searching for it on tinternet and you can't find much about it. It's an absolutely awesome place brimming full of fascinating musical bits and pieces and I had the pleasure of being there to take pictures for the whole day!!

What was I doing there? Well hanging out with my brother and his musically talented friends - they recorded some awesome tracks for charity! and oh my you are all going to be blown away!

The video is a photo montage of the day and the track is 'See'

Enjoy!
About the project
Here is an extract of the communications sent out to those involved in the project from the co-ordinator of the project...Kilawatt Music:

"The project is the brainchild of Eric Lau and Kilawatt Music. 

We asked Eric to provide the ideas for free in order to support his music and to highlight London’s finest musicians, which he agreed to, as long as the financial beneficiary of the music was a charity. Eric’s background in mentoringyoung people naturally led us to a charity we both see as playing a fundamental role in aid relief right now. Save The Children are an international charity who are carrying out countless projects around the world specifically designed to support young people and children affected by disasters, disease and war."


Kilawatt Music Bandcamp

YouTube Montage:

Here are some more pictures posted on Flickr