Category Archives:  Photo Tips

Meredith Music Festival 2010

The 20th anniversary of the Meredith Music Festival heralded some great performances from ‘oldies but goodies’ such as Custard, The Dirty Three and Neil Finn alongside newcomers Kimbra, kyü and El Guincho.

These are the three custom settings I pre-programme when shooting where the available light can range from full sunshine to dark in a matter of minutes. I’ll often adjust these slightly depending on the conditions but find these a good place to start.

  • Bright Sunshine – f8, 1/250th, ISO 100
  • Shade – f5.6, 1/120th, ISO 400
  • Dark – f2.8, 1/100th, ISO 1250

Most of the time I use two cameras, one with a 70-200mm zoom lens and the other with a 16-35mm and switch between the two depending on the type of shot that presents. For a shallow depth of field effect I’ll use a 50mm f1.4 or (as I was fortunate to borrow for the Dirty Three set) a 85mm f1.2 lens with its crazy halo effect when shooting into the light.

Most of the shots get some sort of curves/saturation/dodging/weaving treatment in Adobe Lightroom to help make them stand out or focus attention on certain aspects of the composition. Turning a shot black and white while adding extra contrast helps if the original wasn’t colourful or dramatic enough.

I was able to get few backstage band shots during the weekend including one of Custard who turned out to be more than happy to be photographed, especially since it was only their second gig in a decade.

It’s always interesting seeing different interpretations of the festival from other photographers perspectives and worth checking out Kristy Millikin’s festival photos and also the review from Mess and Noise along with photos by Leah Robertson.

Gun Street Girls – Bakehouse Studios

The Gun Street Girls, having recently finished off a new batch of recordings took some time out at Bakehouse studios for some photos.

Although predominantly a rehearsal studio, there is an amazing space upstairs complete with a Chinatown/Wild West bar that makes for a nice backdrop.

It was a conscious effect to not make the leader singer, Dave Larkin too prominent in every photo so I took a mixture of shots with each member in different positions to keep things as equal as possible.

A mixture of  ‘looking at/not looking at the camera’ posing was used, since it’s often hard to tell until later which method works best for the group.

The band were keen to check out what different clothing/hat combos worked best, this photo was taken as an off-the-cuff shot to show Dave his hat in the camera LCD screen. It ended up coming out as a nice natural portrait shot, something I’m always keen to capture.

Most of these shots were taken using the Canon 50mm 1.4 lens as I was able to get far back enough to include everyone in shot and the shallow depth of field helps the photos ‘pop’ out a bit more. Post production was done with Lightroom, using a number of the presets like ‘bleached bypass’ and ‘aged photo’ as a starting point, as they seemed to suit the surrounds.

DIY Lightbox

A friend recently asked me to help him take some new product shots for his health food range so I thought it a good opportunity to put into practise this handy DIY lightbox tutorial on strobist.

It took a little bit of trial and error positioning the flash to provide an even amount of diffused light through the baking paper. A piece of glass was used to provide reflections and Lightroom’s auto mask feature was a huge time-saver cleaning up around the edges of the products.

Blackrock Beach day/night

Shooting directly into the sun with a reduced exposure and aperture is a good way to simulate the ‘day for night’ effect often seen in movies. This photo has had the sun replaced with an image of the moon taken on a separate occasion.

This is the original shot after crushing the black levels a bit and setting the white balance at around 3900K. The exposure was f16, 1/8000, ISO 100.

This is a shot of the same scene straight out of the camera with no effects and an exposure somewhere toward the middle of the range  (f11, 1/1000, ISO 100).