New portfolio work: Girl Fight

I've been working on a street fighting themed series lately. I find it a really interesting subject to explore from the standpoint of story driven location lighting. You can view my earlier work in the series here and here. The latest iteration of this series focuses on a woman as the central character, reminiscent of the great movie 'Girl Fight'. In the same way that 'Girl Fight' benefited from the casting of Michelle Rodriguez as the main character, I was lucky enough to have a great model who really helped make the shoot such a success (Thanks Maria!).

Through a combination of stark lighting and post-processing techniques we were able to transform a simple suburban garage into a dramatic theater - it constantly amazes me what light can do.

Workplace Hazards!

The Tokay Gecko (Gekko gecko) is one of the most commonly encountered reptiles in Southeast Asia (This one is from Thailand, near the Burmese border). They frequent houses and man-made structures, coming out at night to hunt for insects and smaller geckos. They are quite enormous for a gecko, reaching lengths over a foot long!

Tokays are renowned for their their loud vocalizations. Their mating call, a loud croak, is variously described as sounding like 'tokeh' or 'gekk-gekk', from which both the common and the scientific name are derived.

Now this information is all well and good. What they don't tell you in the text books is that Tokay Geckos have extremely strong jaws (as can be seen from the well developed jaw muscles) and really enjoy to bite anything they perceive as a threat. Fair enough. Not only do they like to bite, what they really enjoy is to bite and then hold on - chewing on their victim the whole time.

I found this out the hard way, after my hand came too close to a Tokay and we both decided to mount a small scientific experiment into bite strength...

More from Khao Sok National Park, Thailand

Unfortunately we were only able to spend a single night in the amazing Khao Sok National Park. This is my friend Tom, just as we arrived at the floating bungalows, setting up his 6x17 panoramic camera, racing against the fading light to capture the magical ambience of the sheltered lagoon.

The following morning, I rose early to photograph the magical early morning light. I was greeted by deep, mournful calls emanating from the dark forest - a family of Gibbons greeting the new day.





You can read more about our adventures as well as view more photos from the trip in an earlier blog posting, here.

Lightroom 2: Graduated Filter Tool - draw the viewer in

One of the great new features in Lightroom 2 is the graduated filter tool. Though simple, It can have a very powerful effect on one's photos, as we'll see. From darkening a washed out sky, to emphasising the billowing clouds of stormy sky, the graduated filter tool in Lightroom 2 is incredibly customizable.

Rather than me tell you about it, I have included an example of the tool in use, and some screenshots of my workflow in Lightroom 2 as I was working on an image of a longtail boat in Thailand. To get a closer look at the screenshots, click on them.



This is the final image. The early mornin stillness of this lake was entrancing. As a fine mist rose from the lake's surface, a Gibbon's mournful cry echoed from the forest. It was an amazing sight to wake up to - and I wanted to do my best to recreate that atmosphere for the viewer. Hopefully, I succeeded.

The tool is exceptionally easy to use, which is its main drawcard. It has been possible for a long time to achieve the same outcome in Adobe Photoshop, however, it was always a relatively convoluted process to do so. Now, Lightroom's powerful new filter allows one to customize colour tint, sharpness, contrast, saturation, and of course brightness/exposure. What's also really amazing is that one can adjust all these features after you've applied the filter!

Without further ado, here are some screenshots which exhibit how I used the feature on a photograph taken in Khao Sok National Park, Thailand.



This is the image after is has been cropped, just before applying the Graduated filter. Note the washed out sky, the image seems very unbalanced and the viewer's eye is immediately drawn to the bright void at the top of the image. What's important in this image is atmosphere and foreground. We want our viewer focusing on those attributes, so something has to be done to that sky.



Ahhhh, much better. Now that we've darkened the sky and increased the contrast to really bring out the definition in those clouds - the image is much more balanced. The viewer's eye is drawn through the image along the curves of the boat towards the horizon.

Unfortunately, in this case, where the horizon is anything but straight and simple, we've inadvertently darkened the trees surrounding the lake. This is unavoidable using this method, so one's best bet would be to use the brush function in Lightroom 2 and selectively brighten the trees which were darkened during the process.

Well there you have it, short and simple. I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial. If there are any questions, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer them.

As always, all the best information regarding Lightroom 2's new features can be found at the Lightroom 2 Learning Centre.

On White...

I spent this morning banging out some studio portraits of the full staff of Accountants and Financial Advisers who are based at an Accounting firm in Subiaco. Subi is a great place to work,a local suburb rich in high end professional consulting services and the height of Perth's creative scene.

As the staff are involved in a very precise business, the height of professionalism, we wanted their portraits to reflect this. However, we also wanted each staff member to express their personality, making them appear more approachable - more human.

So, the brief was white, studio white...and lots of it.







Shooting a number of portraits under the same lighting conditions and with the same background can be difficult, as it is easy for all the images to turn out the same, despite differences in your subjects. The best way to avoid this is diversity - diversity in posing. The other key is to coax a real relationship between yourself and your subject. One of the greatest challenges of this type of shooting (fast paced and with a large number of people) is that it can be difficult to coax a display of someone's real personality from them in the short length of time we have to photograph them. This is an important point in regards to this particular shoot, as an important part of the brief was to convey each staff member's personality - no easy task, but I believe we succeeded.

New portfolio work: Street Fighter

I've been playing with the concept of a street fighter themed shoot for a while now. Last week I brought it into fruition with a series of images shot on location deep in the dark underbelly of Perth City...