Apologies for the lack of action on the blog. I took a break over Christmas and while I’ve not been updating this blog much, I’ve been busy behind the scenes. In January I’ve not had many images to post but I have…
- booked 4 weddings
- run a lighting workshop
- been putting together a huge shoot for Beltcraft Studios in London
February is looking pretty exciting as well. I’ve just gotten the 35mm f2 from Fuji, having finally sold my D750 and 50mm 1.4. The X-Pro2 is on order, I’m hoping it arrives before my first wedding, which is in London on 5th March. Oh, and I did an underwater shoot ( more on that below ). So there will be some reviews of the 35mm and the XPro2 coming soon, once I’ve tested them. There are a bunch of reviews out there already, but they are all by people who have not paid for the camera themselves, so I tend to take them with a pinch of salt ( Kevin Mullins aside, his stuff I do take seriously ). The X-Photographers in general I think are great but its hard to be objective when the camera is given to you. I know most of the time they have to give it back, but I’ve been reliably informed that many of them get to keep freebies. I think maybe Fuji needs to take a hard look at this scheme, as they now have 700 X photographers, which dilutes the quality and impact of the whole thing in my opinion.
Anyway..before the underwater shoot stuff, here are a couple of cool links I’ve found recently that have given me plenty of food for thought and things to work on.
http://www.diyphotography.net/using-gelled-lighting-color-theory-driven-stories/
http://petapixel.com/2016/01/30/10-myths-about-the-rule-of-thirds/
Both of these are great articles and well worth a read.
OK..the underwater shoot..this came about because a guy I taught is a qualified scuba instructor, we got talking after the tutor session and decided it would be a good idea to do an underwater shoot with models. He had all the gear as he had been photographing fish on dives for years. He kindly let me use his Nikon D7000 with full underwater housing. We did the shoot and it went well considering I’d only ever scuba dived once, 20 years ago! I picked it up again quite quickly but it was a steep learning curve and the keeper rate on a shoot like this is very very low unless you are using models who have a lot of experience in this sort of thing ( ours had never done one at all so they did really well ). Here is my favourite image from the shoot.
