Cathedrals and Pirates
Two recent self portraits that I shot for the Camera Bag and Boats II contests over at dpchallenge.com. No need to worry though, I still prefer being behind the camera rather than in front of it.
For the cathedral shot I placed the 5DII with the Peleng 8mm fisheye at the bottom of the camera bag and used PocketWizards to trigger two flashes, one below the lens in the middle and one to the right (you can still see the bright diffusor panel). For the pirate shot I used Canon’s ETTL system to trigger a 580EX in a softbox over the camera and a 430EX in some ziplog bags under water.
Summer Ball 2010
Kent Union hired me again this year along with Mikey and Alison to photograph the annual Summer Ball. Last year I went as a guest and had an enjoyable experience, and it was fun on the staff side this year too. The acts this year included Clacket Lane, Feeder, Pendulum and Florence & the Machine (whose tour manager, it seems, fails at communication). I’ve posted a selection of my photographs below, if you want to see more of mine and the other photographers’ images head to Kent Union’s flickr stream or directly to the Summer Ball 2010 set.
Speedlinks May 2010
- London, Geotagged. Which bits of London get photographed the most? Eric Fisher has collected data from a couple of photo sharing sites to create a map overlay which reveals London’s most photographed areas.
- The Battlefield Pinhole Camera records photographs on three strips of film roll simultaneously. Pretty cool. The site has a writeup on how to make one yourself if you’re in the DIY mood.
- findexif.com If you need to check the EXIF of an online image on the fly, tell findexif the URL and it extracts the info for you. No download required.
- Things We Love. Mediastorm has posted a new selection of their favourite multimedia projects out there, including some breathtaking short films.
Keynestock 2010
This was probably the last Keynestock I could go to. When I finish my MA this summer and leave the University of Kent this great little festival organized by the Keynes Student Committee will be one of the events I’ll miss in the future. The weather didn’t play along this time, but fortunately my equipment is mostly weather sealed; a small platic bag around the body kept most of the rain off anyway.
My favourite act this year was Black Sun Down. They’ve played at Keynestock and other local venues before but this time they really delivered a great performance. All in all, I was impressed by the talent showcased yesterday. Great bands and artists all day long. I also like the way the voting worked this year, the audience could simply send a text with their favourite. Black Sun Down ended up in third place, Alex Quaye second, and History of the Trade won, which, afaik, means they can play at the Summer Ball and Artsfest (at both of which I’ll be around with the camera again).
Keynestock 2010 photographs by Gilles Glod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Luxembourg License. You can download these photos for free, but you have to link back to this blogpost if you want to publish them elsewhere.
Here are the photos, the sequence is the same as on the lineup.
The crowd
Sam Miller
Lavender Town
Bardo Thodol (winners of Keynestock 2009)
Katerina Georgiou
Hot Balloons
The Dutch
Alex Quaye
Harvey Hyde and the Hecklers
Black Sun Down
Half a Crown (Keynestock 2008 winners)
History of the Trade
Southlands Beach
Southlands Beach has got to be one of the most interesting places in Bermuda, photographically speaking. Rocks are scattered along the beach and make for great focal points in landscape images. Getting up at insane-o’clock in the morning to get to the beach before sunrise was well worth it I think, and the clouds, which initially looked rather discouraging, actually made for a great atmosphere. After this session at Southlands, we went back there twice more for shoots with specific themes.
Bermuda
After my last class from the spring term, I visited Bermuda with Alison for a week two weeks, thanks to the ashcloud. Before then, I always thought the colours in the photos she’d taken over there were pure Photoshop. Well, no, the water is actually that blue. Below are some general impressions of this and that, from the places we visited in between me researching my essays (which I handed in yesterday, yay!). I’ll post some more sets from my visit later.
I’m trying a new way to display photos on the blog here, with the WordPress NextGen gallery plugin, instead of the SlideshowPro flash plugin I have used so far. On the one hand, it’s going to save me some time getting images ready for the web, on the other hand I can now show photos that are bigger than the main column in the blog. What do you think of the new gallery style?
Iron Man
One of the recent challenges over on DPChallenge was ‘Rejected Movie Posters‘. I came up with this parody of the Iron Man movie. The slides below should give you an idea of the process from the first concept ‘drawing’ to the final image.
I took the picture in a living room. Not much space, otherwise the lights would have been further away. I used to flashes with barn doors for the rim light, and two lights with umbrellas as side lights. My Iron Man, Aaron, had to balance on the ironing board I borrowed from my flat and which was propped up on a couple of pillows.
The background I ended up using was made in Photoshop using the Clouds Pixelate/Mezzotint and Radial Blur/Zoom filters. The bigger streaks are from a separate image I made with some christmas lights – I zoomed in during the exposure to create straks. The font used for the title is CGF Arch Reactor with a starting sand/soil texture from CG Textures.
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20100428ironman/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
Nightwalk
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20100501nightwalk/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
A couple of photographers from the Photogen community decided to meet up in Luxembourg City on the evening of May 1st for a ‘nightwalk’. Since I happened to be in Luxembourg that week rather than when my volcano-free schedule had planned, I drove up to the Kirchberg to join the others: -Kiischtii-, deBaemm, m-otiv, MB-Photos, McQueen, and Mexx. (Mouseover the photos to see the who’s-who in the captions.) We walked from the LuxExpo down to the Philharmonie, where Ben took a great group photo of us, using the combined light power of 4 PocketWizards, 2 580EXs, 1 430EX and 2 SB900s.
Some of us wanted to go see Iron Man 2 after the get-together, and with only 20 minutes to go before the screening, we realized that we had covered quite a distance on the way down from Utopolis. Doesn’t feel like it when you can just drive the distance in a car! Oh, Iron Man was crap by the way. But at least it inspired me to take another photograph, which I’ll blog about next week.
photogen.lu iPhone App (April’s Fools)
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20100401pgiphone/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
I wanted to have a bit of fun for April’s Fools this year, and apart from successfully fooling my girlfriend I had come up with something for my fellow photographers over at Photogen. A couple of users had asked for an iPhone app for the site. So I made one. Except that, since I have absolutely no idea how to program an app, I made one from scratch in Photoshop. Some got fooled, some figured it out pretty quickly.
Now I’ll probably have to watch out for everyone’s revenge next year.
Speedlinks April 2010
- The Adventures of BeetleCam, and how sending a remote controlled 4-wheeled DSLR to lions cannot end well.
- Philip Bloom interviews Greg Yaitanes about the decision to film the season finale of House M.D. on a Canon 5DMkII.
- Ghost Towns: WebEcoist has gathered photographs from abandoned towns and cities from around the world and adds a bit of background info. This might interest the Urbexers among you.
Vintage
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20100310vintage/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
The Photography and Modelling Society organized a 50s themed photoshoot in Keynes college at the University of Kent last month. I’m not sure if the clothing styles the models came up with all matched that exact time span, but let’s say it was all ‘Vintage’ to give the whole thing a coherent style.
The shoot was a bit of a challenge because there were about 20 people, both photographers and models, in a fairly small common room stuffed with tables and sofas. Without much space I made use of superclamps and magic arms to get my lights where I needed them to be.
The last image isn’t me, by the way, it’s this year’s (well, last year’s, since the elections were right after the shoot) Photography President Mikey, shooting Bert Stephani style with reflectors to shape the light from his main flash.
The editing is based on Matt Kloskowski’s ‘Ralph Lauren’ Lightroom preset which I adapted to my own needs. After that, some Photoshop to clean up the place: I mainly got rid of some stains on the floor and fix scratches in the leather.
Thanks to my models, Pulo, Laura, Solenne, Nicola, Chris and Rachel!
American Football
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20091115americanfootball/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
A friend invited me to come to one of the American Football games, at which he played for the Kent Falcons, the University of Kent’s team. At this game they played against the University of Christchurch team. He told me it was their first season as a team, which might explain why they lost quite badly against Kent.
It was also the first time ever I’ve seen American Football. It took me all of the first half to figure out more or less how the game works. Once I was able to get a feeling for where the ball was going to go I started to get some decent pictures.
Castaway
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20100418castaway/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
The second season of the DPChallenge Photography Leage started this week over at DPC and I decided to submit a warm-up entry before the season begins to get back into the game – I haven’t taken part in the site’s competitions for a while. I decided to shoot something for the Out of the Ordinary challenge.
I’m staying with Alison in Bermuda at the moment. (My flight was meant to leave 4 hours ago but with the airspace around the UK being closed for some foreseeable time I’m not going anywhere soon.) We borrowed some furniture from her house and drove to Warwick Long Bay. We set the things up where I thought we’d get a wave washing over them once in a while. Turns out that for a long time the only wave that would make it that far was the one that got my feet wet when we set up…
In order to make the lamp light up I placed a Canon Speedlite 580EXII inside the lamp head. I had taken out the bulb earlier. My initial plans to keep it there with a superclamp didn’t work out because there was not enough room inside the lampshade. So I kept the flash and the Pocketwizard FlexTT5 that was attached to it in place with a ball bungee. A Full C.T.O. gel gave the flash the colour temperature of a tungsten lamp. The flash was set to ETTL, I let the camera do the metering for the lamp, which was easier since my aperture, shutter speed and ISO kept changing as it got progressively darker after sunset. The settings for this photo were f/4, ISO400, 1/30. I also asked Alison to point a snooted flash at the plant to give it a bit of extra definition.
Wedding: Lynn & Tim
Such a cute couple. I had a great time at Lynn and Tim’s wedding last summer. Tim used to work with my aunt and that’s how we got in touch. As usual I went to see them and we discussed the details of their wedding well ahead of time, so that everything could go as smoothly as possible on their big day.
Once again, Olivier Kerschen assisted me throughout the day. It’s great to have an assistant with you who knows the way you work. We started the day at Lynn and Tim’s home with detail photos and some shots of Lynn getting ready. The church in Obercorn in which the ceremony was held wasn’t far from their home, so we could spend a good deal of time with Lynn and still meet Tim at the church, early enough to confirm with the priest the decisions Olivier and I had made when we had scouted the church on an earlier occasion.
The ceremony was great, with some brilliant solo performances by the choire and lots of emotions.
The reception and dinner were at the Claimarais in Belgium, a lovely hotel-restaurant with a beautiful parc surrounding it. We stayed with the couple and their guests well into the night: the dinner was followed by catchy music by an Italian trio, and the family and friends had come up with some priceless games for the couple in between the dances.
We took the couple photos of Lynn and Tim on a separate day, which allowed us to visit a couple of locations. We started in the Grund in Luxembourg city, which looks great in summer; then we moved on to the Schueberfouer, the yearly Luxembourgian funfair for some photos in a more unusual and exciting setting. Finally we drove to an abandoned warehouse to finish the shooting with a modern, gritty edge.
Speedlinks March 2010
- Shoot-out: “What do you get when you challenge David Hobby, Zack Arias and Joey L to make an image of a surprise model(s) in 25mins in a packed auditorium.” A fun video, spiced up with comments by Joe McNally.
- BBC Wildlife Photography Masterclasses. The BBC has published a series of wildlife photography classes online, filled with a wealth of info.
- Greg du Toit takes the meaning of endurance to a new level: he spent months in a puddle to get some breathtaking phots of wildlife animals at their water hole.
- DIY rain cover. diyphotography.net has a how-to on turning a pair of old rain trousers into a protective cover that protects your camera from the elements.
- LADIG have put together a nice and easy bounce card to use with external flashes. I think I prefer this design to the one by Gardner which I’ve used so far, mainly because this one does away with the need for velcro at the top end.
- CS5 Sneak Peek: Adobe has posted a YouTube preview of a new feature for Ps CS5: content-aware fill. Looks very useful for photo manipulation.
Zazu
Meet Zazu, Alison’s African Grey parrot. She’s a crazy one. (Zazu, not Alison.) When I took this photo, Zazu was about three months old. You may already have seen this photo in my PAD collection, but I wanted to show you a bit of behind the scenes information from when I took this. The setup shot below should give you a pretty good idea of how I managed to light Zazu in her ‘natural habitat’.
So, first of all, for Zazu to be sitting somewhere outside her cage with not too much clutter around her, I first set up a lightstand with a superclamp, which in turn held one of her perches in place. To keep her occupied we let her play with a pen top, one of her favourite toys.
The lights are all triggered using Canon’s ETTL system. An on-camera ST-E2 sent out the signal to the slaves, which were all set to manual mode. The lights on the left and right in the back are 430EX Speedlights with my DIY snoots on them. (The snoots are cookie boxes lined with gaffer tape.) The snoots shape the light into a tight beam, to reduce flare to a minimum and to avoid the light bouncing around the room.
The softbox on the left is the Westcott Apollo set with a 580EX inside it. It’s rotated towards the camera so as to avoid it spilling light onto the wall in the backround. On the table on the right side is another 580EX. This one is flagged by a tissue box (whatever comes handy, really!) and I put a CTB gel on it in order to end up with a strong blue background. I also didn’t want the background to be homogenous, so I placed a basil plant in front of the light. The shadows from the plant add a bit of interest to the background.
Oh and the white thing floating at the top of the image which Zazu is staring at in the setup shot is an origami crane. She has since taken care of it.
UKC Fashion Show 2010
Design: Alison Hollis
Yesterday the Photography and Modelling Society presented the Annual Fashion Show in Eliot Hall at the University of Kent. Each year, the society organizes this event, in which students from the university get on the catwalk to present clothes from local shops and designers. The sets for this show were Slaters Menswear, Kaliko Minuet, Bhs Casual, Animal, Fancy Dress, Recycling, Noa Noa, Fat Face Streetwear, Bhs Bedwear, Fat Face Summer, Punky Fish, Unique, and Armoire. The show also featured guest performances from the UKC Capeira Society and the UKC Circus Society. The proceeds from this year’s show went to Save the Children’s Haiti campaign.
Hit the jump to see the footage of each set. (Fair warning: there are over a dozen embedded videos.)
(more…)
Impressions from London Zoo (Film)
Last week I posted photographs from London Zoo that I took in October, this time I would like to share with you a short film I made in the same zoo last weekend. The trip was organized by the Photography and Modelling Society. I had about four hours during which I could shoot. Some of my favourite enclosures, including the rainforest indoor area, were closed to the public, and somehow I ended up shooting birds more than anything else.
Around 20 minutes before we had to catch the train the delivery guy showed up with my new LCDVF as well! I had been thinking about buying a Zacuto Z-Finder, but since they are sold out pretty much everywhere and cost 2-3 times as much I had ordered the LCDVF from lcdvf.pl. (The buying part was a bit tricky since the payment instructions got lost in translation, but I called them up, got everything sorted out and had the parcel within four days.) I might write a short review of the LCDVF, but in a nutshell, I prefer it’s 2x magnification to the 3x of the Zacuto (which I tried briefly at The Flash Center), and the magnet mount they use seems like a good solution to me. Having the LCDVF with me was really helpful for focusing, especially as most of the animals kept running or flying around. The experience is definitely very different from shooting stills! I had taken my tripod with the Manfrotto 808 head with me. There really would have been no way around a tripod, at least for the telephoto scenes: I used the EF 70-200 2.8L IS lens with both the Kenko 1.5x and Canon 2x Extenders on it, giving me an effective focal length of 210-600mm, and without the IS the footage would have been fairly shaky even on the tripod.
For the wide angle shots I used the Canon EF 24-70 2.8L which was attached to a shoulder mount. This helps to distribute the weight of the camera a bit, but I had to find out that it’s not very practical to use it whilst carrying a backpack.
Unfortunately Canon won’t release the new firmware for the 5DMkII until later this week, so I still had to shoot at 30p rather than 24p. I hope the video doesn’t look too choppy! I also think that I’ll have to invest into some kind of external microphone sometime soon if I ever want to make anything that isn’t overlaid with music. Here I mixed the song with the ambient sounds, but I was fairly limited even with that, since the camera picks up the noise from the IS as well as the wind and the noise when I touch the camera.
If you’re interested in the music, the album by Denis Richard can be downloaded from Jamendo.
London Zoo
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20091025londonzoo/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
A day after having visited the London Aquarium, Alison and I went to see the London Zoo. I had been there quickly once during a DPC get-together, but this was my first opportunity to actually explore the zoo properly.
The photos above were all taken with a Canon EOS 5DMkII and EF 70-200 2.8L IS lens, handheld.
Mouse-over the photos to see the name of the animal on the photo. I can’t ID the owl on the third picture, if someone can help me there please leave a comment.
Speedlinks February 2010
- After I uploaded some photos from the Pimpamelen blogpost to Photogen I half-jokingly said that the next step would be 3D macro photography with flash. Well fotoopa on flickr has been doing just that for a while, check out the photos of his setup(s) and his insect and water photographs in his sets.
- A trawlerman recovers a digital camera from the Atlantic with its photos still intact and now tries to find the owners. You can read more on this over at BBC News.
- The Mostly Color Channel has a neat tutorial on how to ceate a light tent out of nothing but paper and binder clips. Cheap and disposable! A Paper and Binder Clip Light Tent.
Wedding: Kirstin & Christophe
What an awesome wedding. Kirstin and Christophe made sure that their guests would have a marvellous time, and the great atmosphere made being their photographer a great experience. Christophe is a user on photogen.lu, where he and Kirstin had seen some of my work. In fact quite a few members of that community were present at this wedding, apart from myself and Christophe, there were his brother-in-law Alain and of course Olivier, who assisted me throughout the day.
We arrived at the church well ahead of the couple to give us a bit of time to reevaluate the positions from which we’d photograph – children from the church communion had built a symbolic space rocket which remained set up between the altar and the congregation. It turned out not to be a problem though, the Belair church is fairly spacious. The ceremony was one of the most beautiful and entertaining ones I’ve witnessed this summer. Both the bride and groom are members of church choirs and they’ve been friends for a long time with the priest that ministered.
After the ceremony Christophe was made to showcase his talent with the accordeon and Kirstin hers as conductor. Quite a fun interlude! After Kirstin and Christophe had shaken hands with all the guests at the reception we drove to the communal park in Hesperange that I had already visited with them beforehand, to shoot their couple photographs. The weather played along nicely, a slightly overcast sky makes it easier to balance artificial and ambient light. Like before, it was Olivier’s job to make sure the light was held in position just where I needed it.
The dinner was in a lovely restaurant near Altwies, called Le Moulin. We took the group and guest photos outside the restaurant in front of the picturesque brook before moving inside the luxuriously decorated converted mill to cover the dinner, games and emotions for the rest of the evening.
Behind the Scenes: Shot Glasses
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20091008shotglasses/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
I wanted to play with some water and came up with this constellation of shot glasses. The glasses actually stay like that on their own – no glue needed. To light this image, I used the back of a poster as background – probably a Star Wars poster, I have more of those than I have space on my walls. In order to avoid highlights in the wrong places on the highly reflective glasses, I directed the light from the flash at the background. The whole thing is therefore backlit. I used a DIY snoot to concentrate the light on a small area and to create a soft fall-off, so that the center of the background would be slightly brighter than the edges. I also put a double CTO on the flash. As a result, the background in the original RAW was plain orange. When I turned the background back to gray during RAW conversion, the ink in the main shotglass got a stronger blue colour as a result. The post-processing consisted mostly of getting rid of dust and scratches on the glasses.
The photo was used in the last issue of inQuire to go along with an article on drink spiking.
London Aquarium
I visited the London Aquarium and decided to film a bit rather than take photographs. I lost quite a few takes because somebody bumped into me while I was filming… The place was really packed with people.
The video is CC-BY-SA.
Kasematten
[kml_flashembed fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://gloda.net/pb/20090924kasematten/2009.swf” targetclass=”flashmovie” publishmethod=”static” width=”740″ height=”547″ wmode=”transparent” base=”.” /]
Alison and I visited the Kasematten as part of a touristy visit of Luxembourg. I’ve been there a couple of times, but it’s the first time that I’ve seen a bat hang from the ceiling of one of the tunnels! The little guy didn’t seem to be bothered by all the people passing through there (most of whom didn’t notice the animal was there), and it didn’t even move when we photographed it close-up with flash.