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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Marc Collis


Marc Collis
Originally uploaded by brendan.oshea
Marc is ex-frontman for Melbourne band Whiteroom. We spent a couple of hours getting promo shots for his new projects. Very talented guy. Check him out playing live with Whiteroom. Just go to Youtube and type in Marc Collis.
Lighting was a couple of Sunpak 383 Supers triggered by Elinchrom Skyports. The one on camera right was fired through a 2ft x 2ft softbox with the softbox slightly above head height. This puts more emphasis on the face with some nice subtle falloff below that. You can see the softbox creeping into shot top right. I've since photoshopped it out. A bare 383 fired from camera left lit the background. The post production technique is pretty much the same as I've documented on a couple of my other shots.

Friday, September 21, 2007

furniture after retouching


furniture after
Originally uploaded by brendan.oshea
I took a job doing an office furniture catalog, and it was a lot tougher than I thought. It took at least an hour to get the lighting right for this shot, taking care not to get any hotspots and making sure there were no distracting shadows. I ended up hanging a large white scrim (What's the old sheet for? Watcha doin'.. hangin' out your laundry? etc...etc...) to the camera left and firing a couple of sunpak 383's through it at full power.
Light falloff was a problem inasmuch as the desk was blown out, but the shelves were underexposed. I had to have the scrim some distance away to reduce this falloff effect. Shadows were reduced further by a Canon 430EX fired into an umbrella camera right. You can see the stand in the "before" photo.

I took all the shots for the catalog using a Canon 24-105mm. Normally my favourite lens, but as it turns out, not so good when it comes to barrel distortion. Something I only noticed when I was trying to create a room for the furniture in Photoshop. No amount of work in lens correction could fix it entirely. I could never get the walls looking right. I'm saving up for a 45mm tilt shift lens, but in the meantime my 10-22mm has much better distortion characteristics.
The frame on the wall was made in Photoshop, and the picture is one of my shots from a visit to Bryce Canyon last year.
To see the "before" shot, click on the photo and follow it through to my flickr page.

clouds


clouds
Originally uploaded by brendan.oshea
There were some crazy looking clouds over my house early yesterday morning. Reminded me of War of the Worlds or something.
I've seen some photos on the intertubes like this, but always assumed they were touched up. Seems they were totally real after all.
I guess that's global warming for ya!

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Carly


Carly
Originally uploaded by brendan.oshea
My buddy at work is always very accommodating when it comes to letting me experiment with new lighting setups.
I've always pointed the softbox or umbrella straight at the subject, but this time Carly couldn't be bothered standing up, so she just sat on the floor. The quality of light was completely different. The softbox was directed at a point just above her head, but the feathering created a very subtle aura.
Sunpak 383 Super fired into a softbox, triggered by a Skyport.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Piano player in a recording studio

I got tired of lugging my umbrella around, but I figured there's nearly always something to bounce my flash off. In this case, I had my 430EX on my shoe cord pointed at his sheet music. The bounce off the white paper lit his face just right.
One of a series of 30 photos for a Secondary College.