South Bank Portrait Shoot - Karolina Szwemin by Neil Alexander

As part of my trip to London the other week I arranged with Karolina to meet on the South Bank in London at 5am. I was very surprised that I was going to get a model to meet me this early and was even more surprised to find that she was actually there before me when I arrived. I’d done a great deal of planning for this weekend’s shoots, and I figured that the corner of the South Bank by the National Theatre would get a little direct sunlight early on after it had risen from behind St. Paul’s cathedral, but would then be filtered a little by the rows of trees down the embankment of the Thames as it rose and moved around, if it appeared at all that is.
I awoke around 4am and peered out the window to see a pretty much cloudless sky, got the hotel to fill a flask full of coffee, and jumped in a cab with all my gear.

I had hoped to shoot on the oversized sofas outside the National but unfortunately there were some lads there who were obviously winding down from their Friday night out. So we proceeded up onto the balcony. I figured there would be no security around this early or if there were they wouldn’t bother us. Unfortunately I was wrong. We’d managed to get a few decent frames in the bag until two security guards asked us to leave as apparently we were on private property. We then moved further down the bank and preceded to shoot quite happily there for a good couple of hours changing outfits, moving around & changing location slightly. Although I expected some interest / harassment from late night revellers, drunks, security guards etc we were surprisingly pretty much uninterrupted.

South Bank Portrait Shoot - Karolina Szwemin by Neil Alexander

All these images were taken with the only two lenses I had taken with me which were the 17-55 F2.8 and the 70 to 200 F2 .8.

For the first half an hour or so I was quite successfully shooting with just one light. I didn’t really need much more than that to match the ambient. Once the sun had risen a little further I then felt I need a little more light to match and overpower the ambient so I mounted another SB 900 on a smaller shoot through umbrella. That was when I started to have intermittent lighting problems. As per my previous post, I made a point of doing all this TTL & I found that every now and then my flashes wouldn’t fire. Try as I may I was unable to locate source of my lighting issues. After a while this began to get really frustrating. I would shoot a half a dozen frames with the flashes firing perfectly, and then nothing. Either one or neither flash would fire. Eventually it became apparent that the problem was one of the hot shoes onto which I had one of the strobes mounted. This hot shoe which sits on top of the umbrella spigot mount was of the type that has a diode on the front in order to trigger older flashes manually. I moved it so that it was half on the hot shoe and half not so that there were no contacts made between the bottom of the flash and the hot shoe then all appeared to work much better. However I was nervous of the flash falling off. And none of the other cold shoes that I had with me appeared to take the SB 900 mounts. I had a vague recollection of having had this problem before, and had applied a little gaffer tape over the connections on the hot shoe to prevent contact between hot shoe and flash, but in my eagerness to keep the traveling load down, had left all of my tape at home.

South Bank Portrait Shoot - Karolina Szwemin by Neil Alexander

Walberswick, Suffolk at dawn by Neil Alexander

I recently spent a couple of weeks on family vacation down on the leafy Suffolk coast in a lovely little town called Walberswick just near Southwold. I went armed with a slightly trimmed down gear bag with the intention of doing some serious landscape work. However what with one thing and another I didn’t get out half as much as I had hoped. These two images were shot just after dawn on separate days. The first is a view of the water tower near Southwold from the footbridge over the River Blyth, and the second is a 3 frame HDR of a holiday home right next to the mouth of the Blyth where it meets the North Sea on the Walberswick side. Both shot with the D300 on a tripod and a little post & crop in Lightroom.

Walberswick, Suffolk at dawn by Neil Alexander

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

Last Friday I went down to London for Kelby Training’s “On location lighting workshop” with the legendary National Geographic and Life photographer, Joe McNally. Having been to David Hobby’s fantastic workshop in Leeds, where there were about 30-40 attendees, I was quite shocked to see an auditorium packed with more than 500 eager photographers. It was a somewhat less intimate affair, but equally as entertaining and informative.

I had been planning this weekend for some time, so I booked myself into a hotel and arranged three separate on location model shoots for the 24 hours after the workshop to try and put into practice some of the tips and tricks that I had gleamed.
For the first shoot I had intended on trying to shoot in Regents or Hyde Parks, but after a ridiculous email conversation with the Royal Parks people, I quickly decided to knock that idea on the head. The gist of the final email was “if you are aiming for your images to be published/promoted in the future, then we must treat you as a professional and therefore charge you £400 and insist on £5 million worth of public liability insurance”!
So I decided to go for Hampstead Heath instead. I’d done some extensive research online and found that there’s a really cool looking pergola over on the western edge of the park that looked like a real possible for a sunset shoot. It’s raised about 10 feet above the ground and runs in an east/west & north/south direction. We got there eventually about 8pm, but only managed about 15 minutes shooting time before the sun dropped down behind the tree line. We then left here and moved to a little hillock round the corner which still had the descending sun lighting it through the trees. The vibe here wasn’t all that comfortable – there were lots of single blokes milling around looking rather sheepish and it wasn’t until later that I found out that this was the “gay cruising” area of the park!

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

In spite of all that, Roseanne was great, and most definitely game, and I got a few keepers. Somehow I’d managed to heavily underexposed most of the images, and I’m not sure why. I can only think that it can have been for two reasons; just the other day I’d been shooting in bright sunlight so had turned the brightness on the LCD on the back of the camera right up, and for most of the shots of Roseanne, I had positioned her in the sunlight and I’d been in the shade which I guess made the pictures look brighter than they actually were.

As a result of travelling down by train, I came equipped as lightly as possible. So in the way of lighting gear, I just brought 3 strobes, a couple of stands and 2 reversible brollies and decided to leave the kitchen sink behind. I did bring my Pocket Wizards, but inspired by McNally’s amazing use of Nikon’s CLS system, I decided to try and shoot TTL all weekend. The top two images were lit with an SB900 on a shoot thru either side of Roseanne and feathered a little. In fact for the second image, I left 2/3s of the reversible cover on the umbrella camera right to prevent too much fall off onto the background. For the bottom image, I just used one strobe and shoot through camera left to fill in the shadows a little left by the falling sun over my right shoulder.
More to come…..

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

Location:Hampstead Heath, London

Frankie by Neil Alexander

Last week, I hooked up with Frankie for another on-location portrait shoot. I decided on Alderley Edge as a location, specifically Stormy Point, which has a great view as a backdrop. As I knew this was National Trust property, and after the debacle at Lyme Park I decided very early on to clear this with the relevant authorities to save any mither. I contacted the people at the property directly in the first instance, and was referred to the media department at their head office. Having already spoken to them the other week, I had a good idea of the process. I explained in a concise email that this was not to be a commercial shoot, no money would be exchaning hands, but I would be using what they might deem to be “professional equipment”. It was explained to me that this would be fine, and they would waive any charges (how kind of them), but I would need their standard cover of £5 million of public liability insurance. Any attempt to reason with this ridiculous demand was met with silence. Had I been shooting inside one of their mansions, or even in a busy park, then maybe I could have understood that a level of PLI was required, but were to shoot in a completely out of the way area in the middle of the day during the week. The chances of us even coming across another person were slim, never mind the possibility of me accidentally koshing them over the head with a light stand.

As it transpires, I do have PLI but to nothing like that level. Eventually they agreed that on this occassion this level of cover would suffice, and would I please sign their 12 page contract.

Frankie by Neil Alexander

Now normally, I would have paid the location a visit or two beforehand just to work out logistics of transporting and setting up gear, and to give myself a chance to envision how I would like the final images to look. But for one reason and another, this time I didn’t. Which was a mistake. The last time I’d been here must have been around 20 years ago, and my memory has clearly gone a little hazy over the years. I was totally unable to find the spot I was looking for, and after about 45 minutes lugging around camera bag, lighting bag, a portable changing room that I’ve knocked up and light stands, in the blazing sun, I gave up! We turned around and headed back to an embankment that I’d spotted as a plan B on the way down, and decided to set up shop there. We still had a decent backdrop, but being in the middle of a field recently inhabited by cattle meant that we had to pick our spots rather carefully, if you know what I mean. Having said all that, I still managed to get images that I’m pleased with.

Frankie by Neil Alexander

Now, I have made a point of trying to record camera and flash settings, but the more I’m shooting this kind of thing outside, the more I find that recording settings isn’t really practical – the light is generally constantly changing and so therefore are my settings. Though in general these were shot with SB900s and shoot through umbrellas positioned either side of Frankie. This was certainly the case for the top two, though I think for the middle one, I may also have used a ring for a little fill. For the bottom image, I struggled to light the full length of the model appropriately against the fairly bright background. I ended up using both brollies, the ring flash and a bare flash directed straight at her to try and bring out those funky tights she was wearing.

Natalie by Neil Alexander

As my Friday last week was spent dealing with the horror of a financial year end, and fortuitously I had a completely free Saturday, I arranged for another couple of testing shoots. In the morning I shot the delightful Linda on the beach by Hoylake (details in a future post), and in the afternoon I arranged to shoot Natalie (who is also training to be a make-up artist) and her 9 year old cousin in Buile Hall Park in Salford.
A few days prior, Garry, a fellow “tog” from Twitter had commented on my work, and asked if he could join me on a shoot to see if he could get more of a handle on the whole off-camera flash thing. Well I was a little flattered (I’m a lot more comfortable with strobes than I was 12 months ago, but still so much to learn), but also delighted to be able to try and help.
However as the light was constantly changing, and I also had a few more technical issues, I struggled myself to get what I wanted. So I hope that Garry managed to get something out of it.
Natalie and her cousin arrived with stunning ivy themed make-up. I decided fairly quickly that some dramatic lighting was required. For the top shot, I dialed out the ambient almost completely (1/250 at F11). I had one SB900 and a shoot through umbrella to her right, and one smaller one slightly off-centre to her left. I had also placed a snooted strobe behind her head to try and lift her jet black hair from the background a little. It was working well, but she moved around a little and keeping her head between the lens and the snooted strobe was a little tricky. Just by happy accident then that this occurred. I really quite like the way the flare throws a little rainbow into the picture that ends with green on her cheek to match the ivy.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad day’s shooting, and I’ve since ordered a couple of replacement hotshoes from eBay for the princely sum of $10 to prevent any further technical difficulties.

Natalie by Neil Alexander

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

Last week I had the pleasure of shooting the delightful Amy once again. I predicted that we were on for a pretty decent sunset, and as such wanted to shoot in a location where we could use the colour of the setting sky as a backdrop. Our planned location had been turned into a temporary screening area for the World Cup, but fortunately I had a plan B. So from the top of the car park behind the G-Mex centre (not the most glam location for a portrait shoot) we had clear line of sight to the setting sun, and a steel staircase construction to use as our platform. Fortunately no park wardens or narky NCP staff this time. I could see right from the get go, that my little SBs were going to have work hard. Fortunately I’ve just added to my lights with an immaculate condition SB600 off eBay for the princely sum of around £70! (it’s in original box with leather sleeve and all manuals!). A test exposure to meter the background got me a nice bluey orange sky at 1/250 @ F22 (probably an hour before sunset), but it left me with total blacks in the foreground. Tried with an ND400, but that left me with too slow an exposure even at 800 ISO, though it wouldn’t really have made a great deal of difference – the contrast range was just too much. Oh, and it was pretty windy too up there, so anything on a stand other than a strobe was going to get blown over. We shot a little to get into the stride, and then waited until the sun was a little lower in the sky. By 20 mins to go, I was up to F8, and I figured it was time to get going. With one SB900 to Amy’s right, at about 45 degrees to her on 1/8 power, another slightly to her left on 1/16, both bare. I toyed with gelling them to match the ambient, but I wanted a stark contrast in the light. By now I had quite a harsh fairly unflattering cross light on Amy, so I supplemented it with an Orbis on camera (I’m really loving this thing) to add some more flattering fill to fill out the shadows from the cross lights. This was powered by my new SB600 pretty ramped up. The 900s I triggered with Pocket Wizards, and the 600 via it’s inbuilt CLS system using the 900s as a trigger.
All in all, am quite pleased with the results. For the top image, I played a little in Lightroom adding quite a dramatic vignette which I feel more portrays the scene as I’d envisaged.

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander

I was asked to shoot the return of the elections in the constituency of Tatton where George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, was standing for re-election.
This was going to be a first for me and I learnt quite a lot from the experience, so I thought I’d share the lessons I learnt. I was given a “Counting Agent” pass which gave me open access to the whole area. The TV crews were squeezed onto a tiny platform raised a foot off the ground, and not allowed to leave, whereas the press photographers were restricted to shooting from way up in the gallery. Me, I was on the floor right in amongst the action.

I had been told right from the get-go in no uncertain terms that I could not shoot any pictures of the counters or the ballot papers even from a very wide angled perspective, so this left me without a great deal to focus on. After about 15 minutes, I noticed that the BBC News website, which was being displayed on a large flat screen displaying the other results from around the country, were accompanied by numerous photographs of various election counts varying from wide-angled overviews, to close up focuses on ballot papers and people counting them. I was led to believe that this is actually against the law – so either I was feed inaccurate information or the Beeb were blatantly flouting the law, either way I didn’t want to risk getting ejected so early on!

George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander

The first thing I did when I got there, was assess the ambient light. The count was to take place inside Macclesfield Leisure Centre, so I figured the sports hall would be fairly well lit. It wasn’t! I calculated that in order to be able to hand hold the 70-200mm racked all the way out on the D300, I needed to use the glass wide open at F2.8 and the camera’s ISO at 3200 (the highest it will go). (1/focal distance * 1.5 for cropped sensor=1/300 sec.)
So 1/300 sec was the minimum shutter speed that I ought to be shooting at if I wasn’t going to be using a flash, which I didn’t want to do early on whilst the count itself was in progress.  I knew that later on, when the results were announced, using a flash wasn’t going to be an issue.

This didn’t really give me a great scope for movement. There were several scenes where I needed a deeper depth of field than 2.8, however stopping down meant I had to compensate with shutter speed. Having assessed this early on, I was disappointed that I didn’t think of bringing my monopod, and so a great many of the images I shot at long focal lengths were riddled with camera shake. Something else that I ought to have done, was to take an accurate white balance reading. I left the camera in Auto White Balance, and spent ages in post trying to fix this as the colour cast was horrendous.

Another important lesson I learnt, was that when using flash always make sure that you have spare batteries handy, not in your camera bag 30 yards away! As the results were about to be announced, I managed to jostle my way to the front of the crowd. I fired off around half a dozen frames and my flash died! I had two choices: stay and shoot without flash, or try to squeeze my way back to my camera bag to get replacements and then try to get back to the front of the crowd again probably missing most of the decent opportunities to shoot! In the end, the TV crews fired up their lights which lit up the scene like a Christmas tree.

George Osborne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor and Richard Jackson, Labour, at the Tatton count for General Election 2010 the by Neil Alexander

See more on Demotix here.

St Peters Square, Manchester by Neil Alexander

If you’ve been following this blog for more than a few posts, you’ll know that I’m immersed in an A-level photography course at the moment, and I’ve been so focused on it of late, that I felt I needed to get out and shoot something different for a bit of mental exercise.

Lately, I’ve been looking more and more into High Dynamic Range photography and found myself drooling over the work of Brian Matiash. He’s a “commercial architecture photographer, writer, and lover of all things social media” based over the pond in Framingham, Massachusetts and I absolutely adore his work. His modus operandi is to shoot specifically for HDR images with a tilt / shift lens and his blog is just a constant stream of inspiration. I’m also conscious of having neglected my Manchester Calendar for quite some time (The last cheque I got was for a sum total of 2 calendars!), so I figured the next available opportunity, i”d head into Manchester for dawn and have a play.

Typically, after all the beautiful sunrises and sunsets we’ve been having of late, the first available opportunity I get to do this is on what looks like is going to be a typical grey and damp Manchester morning. Armed with a fully laden CompuTrekker AW, my tripod and a flask of coffee, I headed into Manchester around 5am.

I had a pretty good idea in advance of what I was going to try and do, in fact I had two or three specific shots in mind. This is the first. Unfortunately it was clear from pretty early on that the best I was going to get was the occasional glimpse of direct sunlight, but generally the light was going to be diffused, soft and cold.

For this image, taken around 20 minutes after sunrise (about 10 to 6), I tried shooting St. Peter’s Square from the very end of the tram platform with the Sigma 10-20mm F4/5.6 right out at 10mm with a 7 stop bracket of a 1/20 exposure. I then processed the image in Photomatix. Unfortunately, as I don’t have the pleasure of owning one of Nikon’s stunning tilt/shift lenses, I ended up with a whole bunch of converging verticals. I just felt that I had to open up the image in Photoshop and apply a little “verticalisation” to it – looks a whole heap better if you ask me – my eye certainly didn’t see it and think “but those converging verticals make the scene look so odd”!

Oh, and I used the brilliant new content-aware spot-healing fancyness of CS5 to remove the cone in the foreground.

Swinging Tyre over the River Bollin by Neil Alexander

As part of my final A-level project for this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time round one of my old play areas as a kid. The River Bollin meanders from the hillsides on the edge of Macclesfield Forest, through deepest darkest Cheshire, crosses the Manchester Ship Cancal near the Lymm viaduct and gets swallowed up by the Mersey shortly afterwards. As a youngster, it was a great playground. Whether it was bike rides around the valley, mammoth bridge building with the Scouts or just pottering around with an OM10, this place holds a lot of memories for me. So it was I decided to venture back there and make some photographs.

On this particular morning, there were a few clouds in the sky pre-dawn, but it looked as if I’d be set up for some nice dawn light over the particular location I’d chosen. I played with a few compositions, and tried different exposures and then waited for the sun to rise, which it promptly did. Followed closely by really dense morning mist! I’d set up a composition on a fallen tree about 50 yards down the stream. By 5 minutes after sunrise, and long before the sun had got up over the far embankment I could barely see my own hand, never mind my proposed composition.

So I decided to try to do something with what little I could see. I moved a little farther back up the stream and chose this shot instead of a tyre on a rope hanging from a branch over the river. I wanted to try and soften the water with a long exposure, but I also wanted a really shallow depth of field. To add to my woes (I had already waded too far into the river, and the water had breached the top of my wellies – I hate soggy socks!) & as I appeared to have misplaced my 77mm ND filter, I realised I was going to have to use the 72mm ND400 on a 77mm wide Tamron 70-200mm F2.8lens. Now I’ve tried this before and it works, you just have to make sure that the lens is pointing upwards slightly and rest the smaller filter up against the lens front inside the lens hood, and you may have to crop out a tiny bit at each corner. (The hood for this lens is really long, so there may be a few light leaks from the smaller filter, but generally I haven’t noticed any) The problem I had was that the tyre wasn’t far off the top of the water so to get my camera pointing upwards it was practically in the river itself! Thank heavens I had my little Nikon View Angler thingy as composing would’ve required a snorkel.

Anyway processed in SilverEfex Pro. Exposure was 1 sec at F2.8 ISO200.

Actually getting the damn flashes to fire was quite a bit tricker than I’d anticipated. I knew that I had to switch the SU4 mode off, but I still couldn’t get both SB900s to fire. So I eventually reset both strobes, changed the channel on the D300 and TaDa!

So my two lucky subjects for this shoot, were two Brahma beer bottles that I’d had chilling in the freezer for the last couple of hours.  I was particularly parched and this pair looked rather tasty – so I had to work quickly before my subjects vanished. Firstly I set the camera up on a tripod and composed my frame. I then dialed in an exposure that would completely eliminate all the ambient light (1/60 at F8 ISO200 if memory serves). I then set up a shoot through umbrella up to camera left pointing down onto the bottles, aimed slightly in front of them. As the edge of the umbrella was probably about 2 to 3 feet away from the bottles  (I couldn’t get it any closer because of the edge of the table), I had to dial this one up to +3 stops.

This gave me a nice soft light cast over both bottles. I then felt that I needed a little kicker light off to the other side. So I attached my longest grid to another SB900, dialed this down to -1 stop and directed it at the necks of the bottles producing the little highlight that you see down the necks of the bottles.

All in all, quite an interesting experiment and the Nikon CLS system is definitely very easy to use, though I am glad that I invested all that time over the last few months in full manual as it made deciding on my exposures and flash levels much easier. And more importantly it meant that I could pop the top of one of those bottles much quicker than if I’d been using the Wizards and doing!!