If you’re a regular follower of my blog you may have read this post a few months back. Rather than give you the background to the Shoot London events again I’ll suggest you take a squiz at the other entry and then return to this one.
So this time round the event was held at the Tate Modern, an enormous unique structure (formerly a power station?) in the postcard-photo epicenter of London. A short walk to the West will take you to the London Eye, and a little further Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, a stroll to the East will take you through the famous Borough Market, London Bridge (which is a non event for the record) and on to the iconic Tower Bridge, while a waltz North over the millennium bridge will take you to St Paul’s Cathedral. Needless to say there were landmarks galore to capture, but as we are band of photographic mavericks we shunned these so called “great photos” and instead opted for our own take on London’s Southbank. Or maybe it was because we didn’t understand the clues so shot the wrong thing.
Indeed,it was actually us shooting the wrong thing that earned us another winners badge. The clue was something about a monument and the answer was St Pauls Cathedral, I still don’t really get how the answer fitted the clue but it doesn’t matter. Dave had been wanting to model his Sherlock Holmes hat in a photo for a while, and as we were told a week before the shoot that the theme was “senses” we figured there would be a clue involving sight that we could tailor to our props. In the week before I’d gone out at lunch time and purchased a magnifying glass, the idea being we’d take a shot with Sherlock looking at the camera with one eye magnified. Turns out the prop I got was too big so another team member Danny went and got a smaller one on the Friday, he also picked up a pipe and the props were complete. Can’t remember who came up with the idea for the shot, but I remember Bec thought it was stupid and not funny at all, however we told her that boys find that stuff funny and we were proved right.
Next up we have the first photo of the day. The clue here was “See no evil, hear no evil, speak to evil”. I searched my ipod for songs with the word “evil” in them, didn’t find any but I find “The devil is bad” by the W’s so I thought that would be a good fit. We wanted to go for a Guantanamo Bay feel with the lighting. I picked up an off camera flash cord on my magnifying glass expedition from earlier in the week which allowed us to get this cool side lighting effect. I really liked this shot, we were all talking ourselves up after it, thinking we’d just hand in the one photo for the day safe in the knowledge we had a prize winner. Wait, I don’t think I’m supposed to tell the world about our arrogance…..
The answer to the next clue was Borough Market so we just took a shot of us having lunch. I used my Sigma 10-20 set pretty wide to capture as much as possible, I set the exposure for .8 of a second to create a blur in the background and used rear curtain flash to freeze the subjects. I like how Dave in the middle is dead still and anchors the shot while Bec and Danny are moving a bit and people in the background are moving even more. For the record my wild boar sausage was exceptional, although my wild boar burps later in the day were less so.
To close things out we’ve got our most technically difficult shot of the day. Again we suspected there may be a clue involving smell, and we were right. It’s actually quite tricky to capture clearly the spray from a perfume bottle – as I learned on a Wednesday night practice session 4 days before the shoot (Andy’s girlfriend was quizzing us the following day why her boyfriend was returning home smelling of men’s cologne) – the trick is to shoot with a black background and have the spray lit frmo behind. The off camera flash really came into its own on the shot, unfortunately the cord only allows the flash to get around 50cm away from the camera, but I got Danny to hold it right up against the wall and point it back towards the camera getting as little light as possible on the wall. As you can see we did light the wall up a little on the left of the frame, but considering our equipment limitations and the fact that any editing was strictly forbidden I was stoked at how the shot came out.
Stay tuned for the next installment on the blog, I’m off to the spectacular Cinque Terra in Italy on Tuesday so I’m sure to get some nice images there, even if the weather is forecasting rain pretty much every day. As always feel free to leave a comment if you’ve managed to get to the end!
