A big thanks to Luke Brooks and Peter Clarke who jumped on board to film this BTS video. It’s been really cool having someone different shoot each of the behind the scenes videos I do. This shoot was very chaotic with the weather changing on us and a small amount of time to get the photos and video we needed. It worked out ok though in the end.
A lot of work I’ve been doing lately (and haven’t been able to show) has been composite work. Superimposing portrait images onto alternative backgrounds. It’s something that I enjoy doing because I get to play with Photoshop a bit more and be a little more creative.
This self portrait image above was yet another one of my tests. This time I was testing out a new post production photoshop technique I am using to do my composite work which involves shooting on a seamless grey background. The technique means I don’t have to do any cutting out of people! Maybe I’ll share it on the blog at a later date.
So my new grey seamless arrived, and I had just set it up in my garage and I needed to test it by capturing a couple of really quick shots. This happened to be one of them, and I have no idea what that pose it meant to be. I never intended to use the photo so I just sat my butt down and looked away from the camera.
After I superimposed myself onto this gritty background, I played around with the whole desaturated, contrasty, grungey look and threw it through a couple of NIK Software filters and it was done. I’m only sharing it because I really like how it turned out.
Anyway, just a fun update. Check out my Terminator basketball Self Portrait I took a couple years ago, which was the result of another simple test. Photoshop works wonders eh!
My friends over at Camera Electronic have arranged for another Canon workshop, this time with award winning nature and wildlife photographer Darren Jew.
I’m no wildlife photographer, but I know a lot of readers have interests in all kinds of genres of photography so I just thought this might be of some interest to some of you.
I find you always learn new things anyway and you find ways to apply them to what you do in other areas of photography.
Anyway, it looks like a good excuse to spend a nice day at the Perth Zoo and take a bunch of pictures borrowing some of the best gear you can get your hands on and with someone giving you guidance and expertise.
Click on the flyer for more information, and contact Camera Electronic on 9328 4405 to book.
You can also register on their website to stay up to date with all the workshops they arrange, including Nikon, Hasselblad, pentax and more. Register for photography workshop updates here
You should already know I have a huge passion for filmmaking, but I also have a huge passion for snowboarding too. I just never get to explore the pow pow as much as I’d like to. Anyway, Travis Rice’s (legendary snowboarder) new film ‘The Art of Flight’ combines my two passions and is a true little piece of inspiration for me. I’ve been following this production for a long time and I’m so glad to have finally seen it on its release date here in Australia, alongside my future Japan 2012 snowboard tour pow pow buddies.
Check out the trailer above. You can see their creative use of the super slow Phantom Flex HD camera and the amazing aerial footage captured using brain farms gyro-stabilized Cineflex V14 HD Camera System. I was particularly impressed by the use of sound in the film too, as well as some cool timelapses. The whole thing came together really well.
Location scouting is an important part of every photographers job, and I’m a firm believer that a good location can make all the difference to your photoshoot. Locations are the biggest source of frustration for me. Being extremely busy week in, week out, it’s very difficult to find the time to get out there and search for places to shoot, and what makes it harder is that the most amazing locations are usually a long distance away, or they are restricted due to being private property. That’s why when you do head out of the office in your everyday journeys, you need to be prepared for any potential locations that you might stumble across!
I blogged about Location scouting with the iPhone just over a year ago now, which basically talked about how I use my iPhone (a tool that’s always with me) to take pictures of locations as I stumble across them. I download the images to my computer and keep them filed away safely in a Locations folder for a rainy day. You can even record your GPS location and all sorts of fancy stuff with the iPhone thee days too.
Well now I’m here to give you an awesome update and add a whole new level to Location scouting with the iPhone. Photos you take never quite do the location justice. When showing someone else, and even when looking at them yourself you can never quite get a true feel for the location and how big it is etc. Well how cool would it be if you could have a 360 degree panoramic view of the location. Sounds like a pretty tedious and time consuming task and requiring software etc. Well no, you can do it for FREE in a matter of minutes directly on your iPhone!
Let me introduce you to Photosynth. A Microsoft creation, that funnily enough only runs on the iPhone. Photosynth allows you to take multiple photos in a complete 360 direction and it stitches the images together for you in front of your eyes. Only takes a couple minutes from start to finish.
The image at the top of the post is one I did today while out and about. I’ve been meaning to go to this rooftop for almost 10 years! I’ve been eyeing it off for so many things but just never made it up there. Well today, I made it and I have a 360 panorama to remember it by. The image looks a bit funny on the computer, but when you browse the image on the iPhone, you can scroll through it and it feels like your still standing there again.
I’m still a bit befuddled by the fact that this young girl has never posed in front of the camera before until last weekend with me. Sophie Archer is not only amazingly beautiful but she has a complete natural talent for being in front of the camera. After I took the first frame I knew the rest of the shoot would be a breeze, you just know when they have “it”. We took so many images which goes on to prove that.
This photo is something a little bit different from me. It just strikes me as such a beautiful photo. Analyse it all you like there wasn’t really any intention or story behind it. I was just trying different things and seeing what looked great. Evidently, this frame looks great!
I completed the photo with a bit of a gold tinge to it in Photoshop, I just think it added a beautiful sense of warmth and value to the image.
Stay tuned for much more from Sophie, and some behind the scenes photos and lighting setups too!
Model: Sophie Archer Photography:Perth Photographer Brodie Butler Hair & Make-Up: Narissa Cullen Assistants: Jade Gear & Jay Wells
This is the coolest thing I have seen for a while, with some smart engineering! This ball is full of little cameras which will take a 360 panoramic picture for you. The best part though is the shutter is triggered automatically when it reaches it highest point after being thrown into the air! This could be handy in so many different application if you could review the image instantly somehow.
Experiencing corrupt images on a memory card is every photographers worst nightmare, and after almost 8 years of shooting it has finally happened to me. It was only a little while ago I posted on my blog about which memory cards you should use and I talked about photographers reporting troubles with different brands of cards. I also mentioned that I have been lucky enough to never experience a corrupted card in all my years of shooting, but obviously I didn’t touch wood hard enough after I typed that!
So after a lengthy shoot out on location today, and a few hundred frames all stored on one of my Sandisk Extreme 32gig cards, we were wrapped and had some amazing images. I put the card away safely like usual and then I grabbed it out when I got home to load it onto the computer and start browsing. I plugged it into my card reader, cranked up Lightroom 3 and tried to import them. However, none of the previews were displaying and it wouldn’t import them. Uh-oh. I opened up a Finder window (mac) only to see that none of the .CR2 RAW files were viewable! Usually you can preview RAW files on a mac, but not these ones. So I was a little worried.
Straight away I remembered that with every Sandisk compact flash card I’ve bought I have received a serial number for RescuePro. So I jumped onto the website as per the instructions that shipped with my memory card, downloaded the software, and plugged in my serial number that was also provided to me.
I ran the program and used it to scan the memory card that was still connected to the computer. It took about 15 minutes or so to scan it all and that was the longest 15 minutes of my life.
Anyway, once it finished scanning, it automatically started saving .cr2 files to a directory on my hard drive. Turns out, it was saving every file it found on the memory card. So I managed to recover all the RAW files from todays shoot, plus a bunch of other images that were on the card previously. They obviously hadn’t been overwritten yet. It was a 32gig card so I rarely fill it to capacity.
So that was a very lucky finish. Will I change memory card brands? No. All memory card brands are prone to this kind of thing. I have had such an amazing run with Sandisk, they make an awesome memory card, and their rescue software seems to work wonders too.
TIP:
A lot of photographers, especially event photographers that take bucket loads of photos, choose to shoot on smaller cards usually around 4-8 gig depending on whether they are shooting RAW or JPEG. This way all their work is spread across multiple cards so should you happen to have a card failure or lose a card, then you won’t lose everything! It’s a good practice.
Dont forget folks, Backup Backup and Backup again!
The October edition of Perth Street Car magazine hit the shelves last week (Volume 19 Number 2) and this time round I was lucky enough to take part in playing a little tribute to Tom Walkinshaw with the help of Brett Stewart from Formula Tech and his rediculously well built Walkinshaw.
Brett put a lot of effort into the car and I think its something Walkinshaw enthusiasts will really appreciate!
Check out the magazine for the full feature accompanied by Christie-Anne who adds a bit of spice for us! To see what else is in th emagazine jump on over to the Perth Street Car Website and look at their latest issue page.
For now, here are some teaser behind the scenes pics for you to have a look at…
Here’s a good tip for you assistants out there… Don’t look at the flash! Ever! Here’s my assistant Jay below getting flashed by yours truly. I was a bit mean on this one.
Adobe MAX 2011 was held in Los Angeles recently, and in this video above they demonstrate a new image deblurring technique which the crowd seems to be amazed by. Quality isn’t great but check it out.
Photoshop is just going to do everything for us soon.
To be honest I don’t think this is a very common mistake, but I still see it from time to time in all sorts of photography. Something you really don’t want to do, is crop a photo at any point of a person where there is a joint. By joints I mean elbows, wrists, knees, ankles and even fingers and toes!
This is an example below. Maybe not the best example because it’s hard to make Carla look bad, but have a play with some of your images by cropping them in different places. In this case, you should either include all of the knee, or none of it. Don’t crop it in the middle like I have on the left.
If you crop at any form of joint then you will have an awkward looking photo.
I’ve always wanted to strap my 5DMKII camera to a car and record something. Well my new car rig enables me to do exactly that! I recently put together a rig for taking still images of a car at low walking speeds (more on that later), but I wanted to step things up a bit and build a rig that was more secure and could handle filming while driving around!
So this image above is it! It’s my new 5DMKII Car video rig. I guess it isn’t limited to the 5DMKII of course, that’s just what I happen to use. It took a while to research it and find all the compatible parts to do what I wanted, but I’m very happy with it. (Filmtools in Los Angeles sell an almost identical version but it was too expensive to buy and ship to Australia.) I can reconfigure the rig to be attached to just about any part of the car. My main goal was to be able to attach it to the bonnet, and the side doors for filming people inside the cabin. This was going to be one of the solutions for filming some car chase sequences in the short film “The Manuscript” that I’m currently shooting. We may not be using it for that anymore, but I certainly have plenty of uses for it and the ideas are still coming in.
Sucking on the bonnet are 3 x Avenger Pump cups one of which you can see above. I have the ones with a baby swivel pin so I have more flexibility.
Then to hold the arms, I use an Avenger D200B black grip head on each pump cup. The arms/rods they hold are 20″ Matthews arm. They are thinner and lighter than the typical C-Stand arms but they still fit into the grip head.
Then at the far end of each arm/rod shown above, there is another grip head, so thats 6 all up. Then into the grip head goes my cheese plate below.
This Cam Caddie Scorpion EX Cheese Plate has twenty-one 1/4-20 mounting holes and nine 3/8 mounting holes. I have mounted 3 Avenger 5/8″ studs to it underneath which will drop into the grip heads on top of the rig and just about make it complete.
On top of the cheese plate I just grabbed one of my tripod ball heads to hold the camera. This one is the Manfrotto 322RC2 grip action ball head. A ball head was important so I can level the camera. Trying to get the car rig itself perfectly level would take a lot of fiddling.
You will notice another suction cup product sitting on the bonnet in this photo above and the first photo. I was playing around with this on the day and I actually placed it there for a bit of extra support incase. It was a Fat Gecko mount. I don’t normally use it though.
So anyway, here’s a quick little video of me testing the rig. I strapped my 5DMKII with a 24-70mm 2.8L lens onto an adjustable 322RC2 ball head. I placed a circular polariser on the lens to help me see through the windscreen without any glare, and I also placed a variable neutral density filter over the top so I could open the cameras aperture right up to 3.5! I did this to send the background out of focus and make it a bit more visually interesting and appealing.
Check it out…
P.S. I didn’t really pull the handbrake, thats just me being stupid. Get used to it.
So hopefully you will be seeing some really cool on-board camera footage soon from brodiebutler.com!
Today I wanted to share a couple of images I did for Johhny Ruffo, a seriously talented Perth singer who's in the middle of putting his first album together. I've been lucky enough to score a preview of a few of the tracks and I think Johnny will be someone to watch out for!
Now using a grey card can help you achieve a correct white balance, and will also help remove any colour casts that may be present in an image. However, what if you want to go one step further and take full control over all your colours in your image? Make sure your RAW files are converted accurately. Well let me show you how I do it.
I use the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.
I've always wanted to strap my 5DMKII camera to a car and record something. Well my new car rig enables me to do exactly that! I recently put together a rig for taking still images of a car at low walking speeds (more on that later), but I wanted to step things up a bit and build a rig that was more secure and could handle filming while driving around!
