Hiding from myself

One I have been meaning to do for a while...
The topic for the photography competition this month at TPS is "Selfie"... so I thought, why not?!


Photogeeking:  This photo took several years of planning... 4 or 5 years ago, I started developing a clone of myself (he is the one in the red shirt)...  he is not much good for most things, but was useful for this.  He sees things fairly simply and spends a lot of time cranky, so convincing him to do this was not hard.  A flash through an umbrella was used for the blue me... a direct flash for the red me, with another one filling in some of the detail.

Found: Invisible Man photograph.

Going through a box of old photos that I found... and happened to come across this interesting one, the back has a signature something like "H.G.Wells"... I think that what other people considered to be a work of fiction, was more of a biography!

It was book week last week, so given that Zak has been doing a lot of classic science fiction lately, he decided on the invisible man.  This was the result.


Photogeeking:  4 exposures.  2 flashes.  One giving light to the room, the other lighting from the stove.  One exposure for the background, one for Zak, one for the saucepan (with the handle) and a last, unlit one for the flame of the gas burner... put together in photoshop with a Nik plugin to make it look like a wetplate camera.

Yesterday's morning activities...

Here in Miluo,
out the back of my hotel...
after spending some time ferretting around randomly with my camera and flash...  I worked up the courage to ask the guy I wanted to photograph if I could shoot him while he was working....

He had no problems with it.... and this was the result.  He was shovelling coal from a big pile outside to a smaller pile inside and then from that pile into the boiler that was giving me hot water in my hotel - so I definitely appreciated his efforts!

Mini Swim meet this morning.

A tiny little swim meet this morning, just for fun at the Gail Walker Swim School.
In an indoor pool of course, cause doing any swimming outside today would be a little silly!

One of the nice things about this pool, apart from the fact that it is heated... is the big window at one end of the building, it makes an awesome spotlight as people get to that spot.

Here is Zak.

Photogeeking:  this is basically straight out of the camera, spot metering on Zak.  A tiny tiny bit of contrast adjustment afterwards.

...and sometimes you cannot get it right...

The boys had a sick day yesterday... and I was not sure if I was well or not... so I used it as an excuse to take a couple of photos at training instead of doing any real work.

So I wander in with three quarters of a metric tonne of gear (two flashes, a couple of flash stands - even an umbrella) and set up to take some photos of one of the black belts while he trains for his second dan grading....

Yeah...

did not work so well.

The question now is... after such and incredibly spectacular failure... will I be brave enough to ask people if I can do it again?

My hands

Couple of photos from this week.
One - playing with a couple of flashes and a punching bag (and Xander - whose timing was impeccable on these shots!) 

Some of the outtakes from the bag punching shots will never see the light of day.... lets just say that skin is not meant to be seen at highspeed under impact.


Photogeeking: punching the bag.  A flash well behind the bag as a rim light (also gets my face), another at the bottom of the back pointing up where my arm will hit....  then I dipped my hand in some flour to get the dust.

Second one - flash on the table raking across my hands to get all sorts of texture, and a much less powerful one above spotlighting down on it...

Weekend play

Last weekend, we went to a couple of parks and the boys and one of their cousins had a good, fun old fashioned play...There was swinging... and then there was flying....

Sometimes it is so hard to keep kids under control!

I try to let them know that it is impolite to fly in public, but sometimes they just do not listen!

Photogeeking:  first photos all taken with off camera flash on high speed sync, at about 1000 of a second so that I could get the background a little dark.  Then I played with some Nik software with them.  I am still trying to work out if I can afford to buy the Nik software - it does some nice things - but am I just being lazy when I could eventually get most of the results in photoshop?

The flying ones involved walking around with a step ladder and a tripod... taking a photo of the background and then of the flying... going into photoshop, putting the background and the people in the same document and then masking out anything that was not meant to be there.