Night Photography

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Admin

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This is a photo taken at a workshop run by Chris Benbow an excellent light painter at Crewe Heritage. He’d demonstrated spinning some burning wire wool which I photographed and added to an image of an old bit of steam engine thet I light painted. It was a quick blend in Photoshop Elements 9 using the Hard Light blending mode.
Hope you like it.

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Audi A6 Avant

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Admin
This is a composite of six flash pops, Lumiquest softbox3 for the bonnet, then bare flash for all the others. Used my Canon 580Ex2 for mot of them with the 430 gelled inside the car. Layered in Photoshop Elements 9 and just used then Lighten blend mode, job done!

Audi A6 Avant

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British National Track Championships

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Admin

On Saturday I was lucky enough to have a media pass to the National Track Championships at Manchester Velodrome. I turned up at 9 am and worked for 13 hours taking photos and sweating a lot in the heat. I was very nervous at first but once I’d got a few shots under my belt I relaxed a bit. Also my friend Simon turned up so I spent some time throughout the day with him solving problems together which was very good. The main problem was light or the lack of it to be more precise. To a camera the velodrome is like being down a coal mine without lights, welcome to the land of high ISO and wide open lenses, forget anything over f2.8. Thankfully I had my Canon 50mm f1.8 and Sigma 17-70 f2.8 (only at 17mm though). Flash was the order of the day, sometimes both my 580Exii and 430Exii together, 580 on camera flashiong and controlling the 430 wirelessly, on high speed sync. As the day went on I got more adventurous and tried slow shutter speeds 1/100th ish and panned using rear curtain sync on the flash in the hope of motion blur. Theres a selection of shots below. All in all a very pleasurable and tiring day, one I’ll never forget, many thanks to British Cycling for the opportunity of a lifetime.

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I’m A Winner!

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Admin

I was made up the other day when I received an email from Outdoor Photographer Magazine to say that I’d won their Flash Competition. It’s the first time I’ve ever won anything and nice to get recognition from such a well respected publication. Here’s the two images to be printed in the magazines December edition:

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Settle

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Admin

We went to Settle in the yorkshire Dales on Friday and had a nice walk across the tops. One field we passed had a great old tractor in a dilapidated condition so I did a 3 shot HDR of it and blended in the Nik HDR Efex Pro plug in for Lightroom.

Here’s a galery of other shots:

 

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Cycling: Tour Of Britain Stage 3

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Admin

Liam Holohan Team Raleigh

I went to watch the Tour Of Britain Stage 3 last week and picked a spot on Morridge Ridge, just above Leek in the Peak District 2/3rds of the way up a sharp rise. The sun was slightly in front of us so I decided to use flash to fill light the riders as I wanted to show some detail from the surroundings and also the moody cloud detail. I set my camera to manual mode for a reasonable baseline exposure to show the surroundings and sky well. I had to use high speed sync on my flash as the exposure was 1/3200 sec, f2.8, the 2.8 was needed as the flash power decreases massively on HSS. Test flashes before the riders arrived showed that on full power it was struggling to light half way across the road. Thankfully this Team Raleigh rider came very close to where I was shooting  so got a great result. I also got good results for other riders in the pack, see Thor Hushovd below.

Here are more TOB photos:

 

 

 

 

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