Cyclo Cross 2011

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Hi All,



On the 27th of November 2011 I was invited along to the National Cyclo Cross Championships at the Moorways Stadium in Derby to take some photographs of the event.


I attended an earlier stage in the championship in January 2011 and at that time I tried my hand at generally photographing the cyclists without any real agenda. 


This time I decided I wanted to concentrate more on the cyclists themselves rather than their bikes and gear. I wanted to capture the expressions on the faces of those taking part. 


As the main (Senior) event was taking place mid-afternoon I was a little concerned about how much light was going to be available to take some decent portrait shots. I decided to go to the stadium and into the wooded area where the main part of the course was going to run. It was immediately apparent that I was going to need a flash if I was going to have any chance of getting the shots I wanted. 


On the day I went along armed with my usual bag of gear. I'd already took the decision to use my Nikon 70-300mm lens and my SB600 flash unit. 


I initially put the camera on a monopod but in practice that made it very difficult to change orientation. I set up the camera in manual mode with an ISO of 200. I set the flash to manual and worked between the aperture and shutter speed to control the exposure. 


All in all I had a great day out. Four of my favorite shots from the day are seen here. 

Creating a Panorama in Photoshop

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Whilst out taking some photographs for a project called ABANDONED INDUSTRY I found myself photographing the old Rolls-Royce Main Works building on Nightingale Road in Derby. 

The building is pretty impressive and for years was the focal point for anyone visiting the company. The main entrance also housed the famous Battle of Britain stained glass window depicting a pilot with an eagle at his shoulders standing on a propeller overlooking the Rolls-Royce site.

Having taken the detail shots that I wanted I decided it would be cool to photograph the entire building frontage especially now this majestic building is surrounded by grey railings to keep out vandals.

The building frontage is enormous spanning about one third of Nightingale Road. However the width on Nightingale Road is that of a normal street which means that the photographer can’t get too far away from the building before bumping into the houses on the opposite side of the street.

From this position it is impossible to take in the full width of the building without an extremely wide angle or Fisheye lens, neither of which I possess.  I decided that the only way I was going to capture this building was to shoot a set of individual images and stitch them together in Photoshop to create a panorama. 

Using my Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 set at 17mm I found that if I stood at building centreline I could capture the full frontage in five individual shots.  The secret to shooting for panoramas is to ensure that each shot overlaps a little. This gives Photoshop a fighting chance of finding some detail to use to align and subsequently blend the images.

Having got my images onto the computer I fired up Photoshop and then selected File > Automate > Photomerge. I selected the five images below and left everything at the default settings.  Photoshop leapt into action (as much as it does on my PC) and about 3 minutes later I was presented with a merged Panorama on screen and a five layers with associated masks in the Layers Panel as shown below.

As can be seen, whenever Photoshop creates a panorama the final image is usually anything but rectangular in shape.  Dealing with this irregular shape is a matter of personal choice. It can be cropped, filled, cloned, etc. In this particular case I chose to use the transform tool to level the main image then I cropped it and used the clone stamp tool to fill in the few remaining pieces of empty frame.

The final result can be seen here. I’ve added a small, black stroke and some text to complete it.

Becki Thornber Studio Session

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I was recently asked by a friend of my daughter if I could shoot some portraits of her. She had recently had her hair coloured and she asked if it would be possible to emphasize her hair during the shoot.

During a recent eseminar organised by the Manfrotto School of Excellence photographer John Ricard explained how he lights models when the hair is of particular importance to his client. To emphasize the models hair Jon uses a hair light which is basically a light specifically aimed at the hair and balanced against the other lights on the subject.

Taking this idea I decided to try something similar. To light Becki’s face I set up a soft box about 1.5m from her and dropped its power down to 1/2 .  For the hair light I set up a strobe with a set of barn doors and dropped the power down to ¼ (shown below) . 

In practice I found that this setting was far too bright and put far too much light onto her. I adjusted the position of the light and moved it away from her hair but that spread the light a little too much. I managed to resolve the situation by putting a diffuser in front of the hair light and closed the barn doors in tight.

It took about 10 trial shots to get the lights and the exposure balanced before we set about starting the session.

In all I took 135 images of Becki from which she chose about 60. An example of the images I shot using this lighting set-up are shown below.

My thanks to Becki for her patience and for giving her permission to include them on this blog. 

A Walk Around Mercia Marina

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On the 2nd of October 2011 I decided to take a walk around the Mercia Marina near Willington in Derby. 

The marina is a photographers paradise with lots of different boats from narrow-boats to cruisers. Each boat has its own personality with boat owners painting and decorating their boats in their own unique way.

Rather than cart my entire bag of gear around I decided just to take my Tamron 17-55 and my new Nikon 55-300mm along with my Lowepro lens exchange bag which is one of the most useful bags I own.

The light was really strong especially with the reflections from the water so I also took a Cokin ND4 Graduated filter so that I could slow the light down if I needed to.

I spent a couple of hours wondering around the marina. A sample of the shots I took are below. As usual all of the shots I took are in my Photoshop.com gallery, a link to which can be found on the gallery page of this blog.

DDCPSC Cheque Presentation

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In my previous blog post I was photographing the Charity Clay Pigeon Shoot held by the Darley Dale Clay Pigeon Shooting Club.

The idea of the shoot was to raise money for a worthy charity. This year (2011) the shoot was in aid of the East Midlands Air Ambulance service based at the East Midlands Airport.

On Friday 7th of October I was asked to take some photographs of two of the members of the DDCPSC as they presented the cheque for £1700 to the crew of the Air Ambulance. 

Whilst we were there we were also treated to a rare look around the base and the helicopter itself. Time was at a premium as the ambulance could be called upon at any time. 

Below are a few shots taken on the day. The rest of the shots can be viewed on my gallery the link to which cane be found on the gallery page of this blog. 

Kevin and Neil Davison present the cheque to the crew.

Air Ambulance

Rotor mechanism

Cockpit

Control Column

Darley Dale Charity Clay Shoot and the Nikon VR system

Hi All,

On Sunday 18th September 2011 I went along to help at the Darley Dale Clay Pigeon Shooting Club annual Charity Shoot. 

I went along to help with the scoring but whilst I was there I took the opportunity to take a few pictures and also to try out my new Nikon 55-300mm f4.5-5.6G AF-S VR ED DX Lens. This is the first lens I've purchased incorporating the Nikon Vibration Reduction system and I was eager to try it out. I persuaded my daughter to stand in the garden and pose for me. There was very little light around as it was early evening on a dull day. I set the camera to f5.3 at 1/80th and an ISO of 1600!!. Even with the high ISO it was difficult to hold the camera and lens still to get a good, sharp image. I switched on the VR system and re-took the picture with the same settings. You can see the results below. These images were taken a few seconds apart and VR system makes an unusable situation usable.

Looking at the two shots I realised that the VR system was something I should have been thinking about for a long time. 


Happy with the lens I decided that I would keep it on throughout the day during the clay shoot and just see how it would cope with the varying light and full zoom situations. I needn't have been worried. 


For this image I was stood quite a distance away from the subject and consequently the lens was at maximum zoom with the VR switched on and the camera handheld. As you can see the image is extremely sharp. I probably could have achieved this with a non-VR lens but it would have been much more difficult and would, more than likely, required a tripod.   

In the image below I wanted to convey the power of the shotgun as the trigger is pulled. This particular trap was set up down an embankment with me standing above the shooter. The camera was set at 7fps so that I stood some chance of capturing the shot as the gun went off. The VR was on again as the light was now dropping away. 

The VR system once again allowed me to use the lens at full zoom, keeping the image stabilised sufficiently to freeze the shot and keep the details on the sign clear and sharp.

Whilst walking around the grounds I noticed a small Dragonfly sitting on a piece of wood near one of the traps. Each time I approached the insect it flew away only to return a few moments later once I'd walked away. I hadn't got time to change the lens out so I had to do the best I could with the 55-300. I set the camera to 1/2000th with an aperture of f6.3 and an ISO of 640. The lens was at 300mm and the VR was on. Without the VR it would have been impossible to capture anything at the zoom. However as you can see below, it made a reasonable job under the circumstances. 

You can probably tell by now that I'm very impressed with the Nikon Vibration Reduction system and if you're an Nikon owner and considering a new lens then I can heartily recommend it. More details about the Vibration Reduction system can be found at this link and, as always, all of my images can be found by following the links from my Gallery Page.  

  

Portraits using a simple 2 light set up

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Hi All,
This particular blog entry was going to be about creating panoramas but as I’ve recently purchased a couple of studio lights and I’ve been dabbling with some portrait images I thought I’d show you my results so far. 

Portrait photography is an art form in itself and I’ve always wanted to try it but with studio lights rather than pop-up or off camera flash. I purchased two 160w flash heads, a gold umbrella, a soft box, some gels, barn doors and a diffuser. I appreciate that 160w flash heads aren't the most powerful in the world but bearing in mind that my ‘studio’ is actually my dining room, they’re powerful enough.

I looked around on the internet and found a few tutorials on simple two light set-up’s. I found a few that gave me some good ideas so now I needed a subject. Luckily having a 20 year old daughter means I’m never short of a model so having persuaded her to sit for me I set up the ‘studio’ in accordance with the various tutorials I’d seen. 

The set-up, shown below, comprised 1 flash head firing into a 32” gold umbrella set 45 degrees above the head of the subject and 45 degrees to her left-hand side. I set the slave head up slightly behind her and to her right. The intention was to allow the slave head to illuminate the white background. I attached some barn-doors set with a diffuser to the slave in order to spread the light. Having the barn-doors also allowed me to add some coloured gels for different effects. 

Simple Studio Set Up

I chose to use my Nikon 50mm f1.8 portrait lens which proved to be a good decision but finding the initial settings for the flash heads and the camera proved to be every bit as difficult as I’d imagined. Not having an external light meter meant a lot of trial and error and a lot or patience from my model. I tethered the camera to a laptop using NK Remote which gave me a 17” viewing screen rather than the monitor on the back of the D300s. This made it much easier asses the various adjustments made to the heads and the camera. After about 30 unusable shots I began to get the hang of the settings and I actually started to see some acceptable results appearing on the laptop. 

I finally settled on an exposure of 1/100th second at anywhere between f8 and f16. I used an ISO of 200 which I now realise was too high for this sort of work. The main head was set to half power into the umbrella and the slave was set to tree-quarter power through the diffuser into the background. 

I took 250 shots over a three hour period changing settings and set-up’s throughout. Of the 250 images I took about 75 were usable. This represents a success rate of about 30% which wasn't too bad for a first attempt.  From the 75 usable shots I selected 18 to work on in Photoshop Three of my favourite images from the session are below and the rest can be found in my gallery or on facebook.