Cardiff & Caerphilly
In June, before attending Oliver and Lucy’s wedding in Southampton, I visited an old friend in Wales. I first met Thierry when we both read English and American Literature and Linguistics at the University of Luxembourg (where proofreading is nowadays deemed superfluous). My trip to the UK was the perfect opportunity to pay him a visit. He showed me around Cardiff and we visited Caerphilly Castle in between hanging around in pubs and looking for geocaches.
Casino
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.
Dancing on Ice
I’ve pretty much finished work on my dissertation now, so I could take a day off when Coralie and Oliver came down to visit us in Canterbury. Together with David and Alison we drove to the Ice Bowl in Gillingham.