gloda.net » publications

Fashion Shoot: Unique

gloda — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:56:43 +0000

For this week’s edition of inQuire’s fashion section we photographed clothes from Kent Union’s clothes outlet, Unique, situated on the University of Kent campus. Since the clothes are intrinsically linked to the student experience here at Kent campus itself seemed a suitable location for the shoot. We were lucky to have sunshine and tolerable temperatures for our outdoor shoot.
In technical terms, one comes closer to the limitations of flash photography with these bright conditions though. I wanted to shoot with a wide open aperture, but if I wanted to use flash without moving into Canon’s HSS system, in which a good deal of flash power is lost, I had to stick to the 1/250th sync speed of my 40D. Solution: I popped a .9 ND filter onto my lens. That way I could shoot wide open without having to reduce the shutter speed beyond the x-sync.
For some of the photos I also used a single reflector as a fill light source instead of flashes. Since we were shooting with more than one model, one of the others could easily hold the reflector for me.

Fashion Show Poster 2009

gloda — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:47:01 +0000

UKC Fashion Show Poster 2009

I made this poster about a month ago, it has now been put up all over the University of Kent campus to advertise the annual Fashion Show. It’s organized by the Photography and Modelling society, of which I’m co-president, and full infos about the show are available on our website, here. I’ll say a few words about the poster.
We took this in the Templeman Library with permission from their administration. Mikey and Alison helped me set up the lights. We used 2 430EXs behind the models pointing towards the camera for rimlight and lighting the books. 2 580EXIIs were in the bookshelves to either side of the model. One 580EX was lying on the floor to provide some fill from below. One 430EX sat in a shoot-through umbrella just above the camera pointed towards the models. I used Alison’s Canon 5DMkII (its 21MP allowed me to print the poster on A3 at over 300dpi).
I took photos of about a dozen models and later on decided to go with this one, because the lighting, the pose and the dress came together so well. Then the editing started. For a before and after comparison, have a look at the two photos below. First I cleaned up the bookshelves and coloured them in after boosting the saturation on them. Then I got rid of the emergency exit sign in the ceiling and the chewing gum on the carpet. Next up the model (Carole Mathias) got a quick digital makeover. I made the colour of her dress more striking, cloned out some stray hair, and added some colour to her make-up. The title logo uses the font AvantGarde, on which the society logo’s Maple Origins is based. The waves in the background were made following a tutorial I found on psdtuts. After getting plenty of feedback from fellow photographers at Photogen, the text with all the information ended up at the bottom rather than in the shelves.

Fashion shoot: BHS & Burton in Abode

gloda — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:29:58 +0000

[The video may take a moment to load and contains strong language.]
The inQuire newspaper features a section on fashion. For this issue the focus was on suits, which we got from BHS and Burton Menswear. I met up with features editor Laura Harrison and five models in the Abode Hotel in Canterbury, who kindly offered us a common room and one of their regular rooms to shoot in. Alison Begeman assisted me for this shoot; since things had to move relatively quickly with changing models, scenes and clothes I needed someone to position the lights where I needed them and set the required power settings.
The common room had a great antique athmosphere to it. The furniture looked expensive enough to stop me from attaching superclamps to any of it. I was shooting with my 40D and the 17-55 at around 1/15-1/50 @ f/4 throughout the shoot to balance ambient and strobe light. I used an ST-E2 to trigger the flashes using Canon’s wireless system and the main flashes were gelled to make them match the colour of the ambient light. One of the advantages of the common room was space, I didn’t have too many problems putting the lights exactly where I needed them, albeit we moved some of the sofas out of the way. I used my shoot-through umbrellas most of the time, but I think it’s time to invest into a softbox to get a better control over the way the light spills.
As you can see in the video, the doors to the room had glass windows. A few of the guests that passed by the room stopped to have a look at what was going on, including one old lady who seemed to check out the models as they were changing… Still the audience was smaller than during the Varsity Poster shoot.
The second part of the shooting was in a regular-sized hotel room (the Cathedral-view room they were going to give us had unfortunately been booked that morning). With six people in that room space was more of an issue but I think it worked out alright. The only thing I’m not so satisfied with is the shadow that one of the flashes has cast in the mirror shot.

Connecting Generations

gloda — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:55:23 +0000

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!

Similar stuff: Photo Shopping, Nightwalk, Iron Man

Kent Union Annual Report

gloda — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:59:25 +0000

Last autumn Kent Union contacted me and asked if they could use some of my photographs for their Annual Report which is sent to their stakeholders. I think the layouter did a pretty good job in using the photos to accompany the information-heavy text in the booklet. But see for yourself:

I should note that, contrary to the statement on the back, not all photographs are by me. I did not take the pictures on pages 4/5 (overexposed and white balance issues, ouch), nor the ones on pages 12/13. [And in hindsight I should have cloned out that can on page 8...]