The same video is also available in Luxembourgish.

Chris Willmott asked me for a casino-themed shoot before I was going to leave the UK. The School of Drama building at the University of Kent had recently been finished and provided a fairly modern setting that would work, seeing as I didn’t really want to go through the whole logistics of working in an actual casino. So, thanks to the university for letting me shoot there.

The photographs ended up somewhere between the styles of James Bond and Gambit. I used Speedlights and PocketWizards to set the mood in terms of lighting, playing around with gels to get some colour contrast and get away from the boring fluorescent light.

The post-processing was a challenge for me. For two of the photographs we wanted the cards to be in mid-air. Getting it all done in-camera turned out really difficult, so I decided that I’d place the cards later on in Photoshop. Thus I ventured forth into Photoshop’s 3D world :) I hope the results look somewhat realistic.

The Christmas holidays have started for me today. With a little bit of time on my hands before my friends from the UK arrive in Luxembourg, I went to the Prënzebierg in Pétange this afternoon. Shooting snow-covered landscapes has always been a bit of a challenge for me. With all the snow, pictures usually turn out grey and it’s difficult to get a decent composition going. I decided to try whether adding a bit of strobist gear would help. I also finally got around to trying the AC3 together with my PocketWizards. It came in very handy to control the manual power levels of the flash directly from the camera.

I’m not sure I want to do this again though, even water-resistant gear can only take so much molten snow…

During the evening I gave Olivier one of the transceivers so that we could both trigger the flashes that we had set up in the Orangerie to support the ambient light. The reception and dinner were very entertaining. I’m glad that I was at the right place at the right time when Savio’s friends spontaneously decided to lift him off the ground :) During the dances I used a technique I learned from David Ziser: get one slaved flash behind the couple to create both a nice rim and some cool lighting on the floor. Olivier had to put some effort into that, since he had to be in the frame without showing up on the pictures.

I had a really great time at the wedding, and I hope I captured the ambience in the photographs! That was probably the last wedding I’ll cover. My time as a student is up and I’m moving on.

[Update: Some people have asked about the editing of the 'splash' photo, so I've uploaded the original for comparison.]

I really liked Southlands Beach which Alison showed me when we were in Bermuda. I had a Fashion photography competition that I wanted to participate in while we were there, so I asked Alison to play the ‘local’ card and get in touch with one of the models she’s worked with before, Stephanie Wilkinson.

For most of the photographs I used three flashes. Two were used together with a shoot-through umbrella which Alison held on to to avoid it falling over. The third flash was used on its own as a kicker or sidelight and was safe on a tripod. Or so I thought.

The shoot went really great – until we got to the final location. The wind blew over the tripod with one of my flashes and a PocketWizard. The hotshoe foot of the latter snapped off, so tomorrow I’ll have to head over to the Flash Centre in London to get a replacement foot (they said they can fix it in time for my Eurostar to Luxembourg in the evening if I drop it off in the afternoon).

Sod’s law. I think I got quite lucky for the rest of the shoot anyway. The forecast had announced rain but it stayed dry, I got way too close to stepping on a Portuguese Man o’ War, and the light levels were just on the sweet spot for me to make use of the flashes at full power and a 1/500 sync speed whilst keeping a shallow depth of field.

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.

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.