Javea Part 2: New Photography Friends

In my last post I mentioned having gotten briefly locked out of the house while in Javea and taking that opportunity to wander around and experiment with taking pictures in the garden, shooting with my lens wide open despite the strong sunlight to create beautiful bokeh effects.

The reason I got locked out of the house is that I forgot to my phone, of course, on the day I had taken some time off from spending time with family to go and spend time with some new friends, aspiring photographer Johana, working photographer Jorge Calderon Tapia and model Ben.  Had a great time practicing different styles and techniques from creating flare, silhouetting, flash and bounce flash with Jorge’s inventive homemade reflector; here are the results with a few pics of myself by Johana, Ben & Jorge thrown in.

Brighton Rock’ed: Vintage Photo Shoot

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       34 photographers, 14 models, 6 shops, 4 makeup & hair stylists, a costume stylist and a whole gaggle of mods:  The Brighton Rock’ed photo shoot on the Brighton seafront turned out to be an epic day of photo fabulousness.  What started out as a simple suggestion by Dade Freeman of Krysalis Photography for a casual photographers’ meet-up turned into a major event with three themed areas based on the film (film noir, 1950s, 1960s), a schedule rotation, bucketloads of gear, studio lights, scooters, costumes and props.

The shoot took place on March 27, when Oliver, Mark’s and my newly born son was only 10 days old, so Mark and I both were feeling pretty sleep-deprived for the festivities.  However, we’re hoping to give little Oliver the photography bug early, so we put him in a sling and kept him with us during the day long shoot, and luckily, the location couldn’t have been anymore conveniently located just outside our flat in case Oliver had different ideas about what he wanted to do that day.  He slept beautifully in the sling, however, while Mum and Dad got to work, with hardly anyone realizing he was there – several of our colleagues simply thought the Babasling was some sort of camera bag.

Film noir shots were pretty difficult to get during daylight hours, but I’ve posted a few results here.  Pictures from the other themed areas to come in separate posts.

Models: Cristiano Langella & Claire Morrow

SHOPS: Starfish / Immediate / Modern World Gallery / Kate & Aud / Dirty Harry / To Be Worn Again (all Brighton based stores)

HAIR & MAKE UP: The Blue Room / Natalie Lupton / Elloise India Willett & Sofia

Nadine: Brighton Portrait Session

A few weeks ago, we were finally lucky enough to have a beautiful sunny day to break the monotony of the dreary grey rainy days of winter here in Brighton.  Clearly, the weather was just as excited about the photo shoot scheduled that day as I was.  I got together with Nadine Burzler that day, a local contemporary lifestyle photographer, to help her get some pictures of herself together for her website.  Often photographers can be hard to photograph, but I have to say that wasn’t the case here – Nadine was a natural and she made my job easy.

Noah Kalina Workshop Results

Portraiture workshop class self-portrait by Noah Kalina; that's me 2nd from the left.

I attended a portraiture workshop at Garage Studios over the weekend with American commercial photographer Noah Kalina, who gained fame when his time-lapse video “Every Day“, which featured a photograph of himself with the same deadpan expression taken every day for six years, when viral on Youtube.  He’s now been at it for 11 years… (that’s Noah in the shot below being lit by a studio strobe set up and shooting out from the doorway of the studio).

Noah was super generous with his knowledge and expertise when it came to lighting and portraiture and I came away from the workshop feeling invigorated and excited to have learned some new things.  It’s amazing how even the smallest things like a slight movement of a reflector, changing the zoom setting on my flash gun or turning of a model’s face toward the light can work to make a photograph immeasurably better.  For example, in the shot below, even though we had a grey, rainy miserable day with flat lighting, Noah’s instruction that the model hold a reflector under her face just lit up the shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking forward to putting these new ideas into practice, especially for an exciting Brighton Rock-themed vintage shoot coming up on March 27.

Jess the Juggler

In the service of improving my repertoire of photographic skills, I’ve been taking courses in studio lighting techniques and this week, had my first studio session with a model, Jess, who is a talented circus performer.  Jess got in touch with me about putting together some promotional shots that would showcase her skills after seeing my “Masks” exhibition for Brighton Photo Fringe hanging at Colourstream. Because of a missing fire extinguisher, we ended up not being able to document her fire-eating and -breathing skills, but we did manage to get a few to show off her sword-throwing, contact juggling and slack line balancing, so I think we did all right.

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