Connecting Generations
About an hour ago the results for a photo competition entitled The Connection Between Generations (Lëtz: D’Verbindung tëschent den Generatiounen) organized by 45Plus together with photogen.lu were announced. My photo above won the public voting and convinced the professional jury. I’m now the happy winner of a Macbook, the photo will make the first page of a calendar and I can take part in a workshop during the Rencontres d’Arles.
I’m a happy camper, and the least I can do is to share some of the behind-the-scenes info of this photo. The competition had been announced months ago, but students are masters of deadline dodging: the picture was taken the day before submissions closed. I had had the idea for the shot in mind for a while, but the problem was my lack of models: pretty much anyone I know in the UK is around my age, whereas I needed to photograph a parent with their child. So I got on my bike, cycled to the playground looking for a family to take pictures with. It didn’t take long before I met Dan and Esme. I explained Dan why I wanted to take photographs with them and offered them a copy of the photo for their family album in return. So when Esme was ready (going down the slide takes priority, after all) we started shooting.
The concept required the photo’s point of view to correspond with Dan’s. So I put the Canon strap (see setup photo) around his neck; the Tamrac strap which can be clipped on went around his waist to further reduce camera shake. After some test shots the camera was set to burst mode (6.5fps) at f/5.6, 1/80, ISO 160 and 10mm, the camera was triggered with a radio-controlled shutter release. Dan was spinning fast which meant that I could get away with quite a short shutter speed and still get enough motion blur on the background. Four of the about 80 taken photos had enough sharpness on Esme’s face, the others were blurred. With all the movement and spinning, the camera ends up wobbling around a bit. Before packing up I asked Dan to sign a model release for Esme - this is something you should do whenever you take pictures in which people can be identified. The one I use confirms that I as the photographer retain all the rights to the image, including the right to publish it, and on the other hand states that the people who were photographed are entitled to a copy of the image(s).
At home I processed the RAW image in Lightroom 2.1, with multiple virtual copies which were adjusted for the different areas of the image. Those files were then put together in Photoshop CS3, where I added a picture of a blurred sky which I took after the shoot. I cloned out some distracting elements on the ground and selectively worked on contrast and colour. Finally I added a slight vignette to draw the viewer’s attention even more into the middle of the frame.
Many many thanks to Dan and Esme for spontaneously shooting with me, and to the jury as well as all those who voted for my entry!
Photogen.lu meetings
Over the summer various members from the photogen.lucommunity organized a series of meetings. I attended two of them, one in Mersch hosted by Kiichiii which lasted until late into the night, the other at the traditional Luxembourgian funfair, the Schueberfouer, organized by Marc Gerard. It’s cool to see how this little community keeps growing, at the moment it has close to 2000 members, which is not bad for a community based on such a small region as Luxembourg is.
Photographs of me: Tom Ewert, Lex Kleren.
Hengendag
The eve of the Luxembourg national day, “Nationalfeierdag”, is one of those occasions on which our small capital seems to be bursting at the seams. I set out with my newly acquired 50mm 1.4 USM lens to capture the athmosphere of the evening and it didn’t take long before I bumped into some friends, then I moved on to watch the torchlight procession and the fireworks. Seeing as the last time I watched them I ended up with smoldering firework chemicals in my eye I chose a safer spot this time though.
DPC Canterbury GTG
For some reason it has rained at each and every DPChallenge get-together I’ve been to over the last year. No surprise then that the one I hosted myself didn’t greet us with sunshine. Even so Dain McGowan came all the way down to Canterbury to explore the city and the cathedral with me and Sebastian Andersson. In the afternoon we went up to campus to take photos at Artsfest.
World Book and Copyright Day
These are some older pictures from a shooting with Cazz Walker in the University of Kent Library. The shooting was aimed at the DPChallenge.com photo contest ‘Books Smarts’ where the first picture posted here got second place. There’s something in this photo that adds further interest to it for me. The half a dozen black volumes in the upper right hand corner are copies of Bennett and Royle’s Introduction to Critical Theory, a work that has simplified and simultaneously complicated my life as student of English and American Literature for some years now.
For the copyrigth part of this UNESCO organized international day, this may be a good point to explain why all of my new images that ever see the internet, and most others, are watermarked. One reason is that some of my pictures have been taken from this website and different photo communities and have re-appeared on sites with a somewhat dubitable reputation. Other instances include publicity managers ‘forgetting’ about the payment part of non-use agreements, or even big organizations like the ‘Lëtzebuerger Guiden an Scouten’ printing a book with one of my photographs on its cover without asking permission or giving credit.
So, yes, the watermarks are a necessary evil. It doesn’t make the images theft-proof, but makes stealing them more difficult. [Rant over.]
UKC Student Activity Awards Night
Each year those students and societies that put special effort into making student life at the University of Kent worthwhile or/and contributed to the newspaper and radio station are honoured at the UKC Student Activity Awards Night. This year it was on March 28th and apart from covering the night for inQuire, I received one of those shiny glass awards myself. Bragging is healthy once in a while: I am now officially Best inQuire Photographer 2007/8. Yay!
For the pictures of myself on stage I passed the camera on to fellow photographer Dave Cater. All pictures were taken with the Canon EOS 40D and EF 70-200 2.8L IS lens, mostly at F/2.8, ISO 1250 and 1/100.
Goodfellas Poker Night
Since our hosts decided we’d need to wear appropriate clothing for the Goodfellas Poker Night I thought I might as well take the camera along and take some shots before we get started. I still had a friend’s Canon Speedlite 480EX from a poster shooting the day before (which will be posted soon) so I went for off-camera lighting. The basic setup is the 480 in slave mode triggered wirelessly by the 580EX as master.
Uhm yeah I lost the last game against Juan. Tonight’s James Bond Poker night, so watch out Juan, you won’t get away with it that easily this time.
Update: I beat Juan but lost against Goose this time…
Halloween at the Venue
What a fabulous night at the UKC’s Venue. People do tend to show up there in all kinds of fashion, but Halloween allows everyone to look as unique and ridiculous as they want without being turned away by the bouncers. A costume was quickly found, I put on my camouflage poncho I bought for shooting sports when it’s raining, the camo trousers, got some brown and green face paint and I was ready to go. Well, not quite yet, I made the camera fit my outfit.
I started the night with the Photographers and Models Society and a Halloween themed shooting around Eliot college (photographs coming soon), then queued a whopping 25 minutes to get a drink in the Lighthouse and spent the rest of the night in the Venue partying and shooting. Well, the shooting bit ended at around eleven when the place was so packed I couldn’t even hold the camera in front of my face anymore!
Goose’s Birthday
Another night out with my £20 digicam. Happy Birthday Goose!
Format: C
A tip for those who want to backup tomorrow… do it today. I had planned to upload a gallery each day until my portfolio is complete. Well, my computer started becoming really slow a few days ago. Instead of ringing the alarm bells and backing up everything, I first tried to solve the problem. The antivirus scan remained fruitless, so I thought defragmenting might be a good idea. The next reboot greeted me with an enthousiastic ‘Disc error. Press any key to restart.’ which then left me with a black screen. A friend of mine brought Knoppix to my attention, on which I eventually managed to launch Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier, which is attempting to salvage my C: partition as I type (on my sisters’ laptop). Let’s hope it’s as unstoppable as it claims to be. This major crash in conjunction to me moving back to the UK beginning of next week means there won’t be any updates for a week or so.
New gallery: European Cities
This gallery, European Cities, is similar to ‘In the Streets’; the focus of these photographs however is on the cities’ landmarks and peculiarities rather than the people living in them.
David’s Birthday
David Lang became 19 yesterday! Hooray! In order to celebrate we went to town and played Pub Golf. Ed and me came first with ten sips for nine holes.
Click here to see the album.
Necrophilia
I am taken aback time and again by the cultural differences between Luxembourg and the UK.
Softair in Veckring
Benoit, Olivier, Yorick and me went to Veckring and gave their paintball arena a try. Here are some pictures I took with my new 40€ digital camera:
(First two pics by Olivier Gauthier.)
It’s all over!
…for this term. Most of my flatmates have already left Canterbury; I’m going home tomorrow. Since there was nobody left to trick me, the laundrette decided to play April’s fools with me instead: it’s controlled by a computer which was determined not to let me wash my clothes, instead displaying nothing but a sarcastic ‘Thank you.’ Of course, it’s the end of term and there’s nobody around to fix it. The receptions are closed, the campus shop is rather empty, the few remaining students take refuge in the library (still open until 3am). With nobody else around, I’m afraid that, instead of painting eggs, the UKC bunnies will decide to take over the campus. Or maybe they already have…
Late Night Session
I’m disappointed about the library. It’s almost 2AM now, and when Ollie asked me to come along to work on our essays (I am, I am, this is just… multitasking), I had imagined the library to be dark and spooky, with owls hooting from the History bookshelves. Instead I’m sitting in a well-lit study area among 50 other students, all diligently working on their essays. Beyond a doubt, being a student messes up your biologic clock.