Shedding some light on the matter

I spent Easter Monday with a professional photographer Damian Comans learning about lighting (especially incorporating artificial lighting).  It is something I had not looked into and I knew there was a lot to learn and did not feel confidant in going out and buying any speedlites without knowing how to use them.  Damian was introduced to me through a work colleague of mine who said his mate was looking to do some photography workshops and would I be interested. Of which of course I said  yes. It turned out that lighting happened to be one of his strong points so it was all looking good.

We covered a lot during the afternoon and I had written up lots of notes during the day.

Things we covered:
- Getting the basics right (Aperture/shutter speed)
- Setting the position of the light source
- Setting the power of the light source
- Using only 1 light source e.g. shots indoors
- Using another light source e.g. outdoors!
- Using reflectors and positioning of reflectors
- Using gels and adjusting the white balance (OMG this is where I need my notes)
- oh and shooting in RAW files (of which I had to convert to DNG as the Aperture seemed to not like portrait photos!)

It was a brilliant insight and can’t wait to play around with lighting shots again.  I just ordered my Canon speedlite 540ez, reflectors (5 in 1!!), light stand, umbrella and wireless trigger thingy!!


Here are the shots from the day which shows my learning curve. Ignore the compositions, the purpose is to show you the different shots I took throughout the day of which there were looooaaaaads of. (well that’s my excuse anyway). Thanks very much Damian for an enjoyable afternoon and thanks to the lovely model Nadine for braving the windy weather outside! 

Light source to left 

A bit too light?

Aperture: f/4 ; Shutter speed: 1/125; ISO 400

Too dark!

Aperture: f/4 ; Shutter speed: 1/125; ISO 400

Almost right!

Aperture: f/4 ; Shutter speed: 1/125; ISO 400

 Light source behind

Aperture: f/4 ; Shutter speed: 1/125; ISO 400

whooo - halo affect!

Outside 

Standing too close to Nadine with the lens in her face gives her a bulbous head - a NO NO when taking pictures of people! (picture of left)  Instead, stand back and zoom in instead (picture on right)
   






Light source from sun and flash




This one looks like the power was too much from the speedlite
Aperture f/13; Shutter speed: 1/160; ISO 100

This one incorporates both light sources (the sun and the speedlite), but still has harsh shadows in her right side of her face

Aperture: f/9; Shutter speed: 1/125; ISO 100

Using Gels
This is really cool! The use of colour gels stuck on the speedlite gives the photo a completely difference feel. It colour gel removes that colour from the scene.  And the white balance is re-adjusted using a grey card as a reference.

So looking at my pictures this was using an orange gel, and the shot of me using the grey card to re-adjust the white balance

and hey you get this…

And so we used a blue gel

and the outcome is this…

Cool huh?! Yeah well it will be once I find my notes!! :/
Reflectors were used throughout the afternoon - but I can’t remember which shots - but they will be ones with less shadows on the side of the face!

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)