Ridge

Autodesk have an amazing resource available for anyone interested in learning CGI modelling, visualisation and animation using Maya - the Personal Learning Edition (PLE). It's no longer on their website but it can be downloaded from here and uses a generic key / activation code:

I love being a professional photographer for shoots like this: a dark, lurid basement, fun clients and an immovable deadline. It fits with my instinct that good art needs limitations to force new techniques and insights.

The brief was an editorial / advertising shoot for Stacked and PKR, shot on location at the PKR studios in London. What I hadn't quite realised until we arrived at 2:30pm was that their commentary show was airing at 4pm and we couldn't be popping flash bulbs on the airwaves after that time. Eek!

So eschewing our usual deliberations over cigars and Malibu, we set up a 5' brolly in the corner to give a soft but directional light throughout the room, and then adjusted speedlights on-the-fly as rim-lights and fills when needed. This gives both versatility and speed. The brolly was triggered by a long sync cable from the camera and everything else left as slaves, triggered by the initial flash.

I needed to do something... different...

The idea was to do an advertising image but take the studio out into the wild so I hired a Mini Cooper S, called my assistant Pat (www.pathall.co.uk) and headed 179.61 miles down the M4 to Brecon, Mid-Wales.

That's the short version... unsurprisingly it took shitloads of planning: the route, car hire, insurance, accommodation, shot sketches, lighting sketches, lighting, rigs, video, cameras, etc, etc, etc. All told, give it a week.

We set off on the Friday afternoon and arrived in Brecon in the dark around 10pm. The next morning we got up at 4am, in the dark, and drove out for the sunrise shots beside the Usk reservoir.

This is the rough strobist setup for the second shot:

We were fortunate because a week later the whole area was deluged and the Usk burst it's banks. Some things you can't plan for huh? I had reckoned on it raining heavily though, which was the main reason for getting a Nikon D700 - I was lucky enough to assist on a shoot for BMW a couple of years ago (also in Wales) and was amazed that the photographer Tim Andrew was shooting with a $5000 D3 in t-o-r-r-e-n-t-i-a-l rain. The D700 was not $5000 but does have the same weatherproofing. The SB900 flashes aren't so hardy so there were a few zip-lock bags and Post-Office elastic bands knocking about too. Other precautions were a backup camera, sandbags to hold down the rigs in high winds and batteries galore. The total cost of the shoot was ~£600.

The Usk location was really done by 9am, which gave us plenty of time to drive the few hours west up into the Black Mountains, which was the highlight of the whole trip.

The last shot there was taken around 10pm and with hindsight we should have driven back to London then.

The following day we were pretty tired and couldn't match the momentum of the first. But that's what these test shoots are all about - making all the mistakes you'll know to avoid next time when the client is paying. Like, say, this one...

Käthe Kollwitz: Tod und Frau (Death and Woman), 1910.

Over the weekend I saw a great exhibition of German Expressionism and the way it was curated gives an interesting insight into the development of thought and expression over time.

Expressionism was born from a desire to infuse the progressive techniques of Impressionism with greater depths of feeling. A good case study is Käthe (Katya) Kollwitz, whose 'Peasant War' series typifies the combination of impressionistic technique with emotional weight.

Käthe Kollwitz: Die Gefangenen ('The Prisoners'), 1908.

What the exhibition noted though, is that within the techniques and emotion, the characters are Rodinesque, and overall, the scenes are idealistic. On a chart of human development, this era before WWI seems adolescent; it's courting emotional depth, but lacks the experience to avoid formulaic expressions and caricatures.

Unfortunately, true originality and pure expression only emerged from the Dantean horror of WWI. For Kollwitz, this meant the death of her youngest son Peter and a wilderness of years before her Krieg ('War') cycle in 1922-23.

Käthe Kollwitz: Das Opfer ('The Sacrifice'), 1922.

Whichever era one prefers, I think it has to be said that Kollwitz's suffering gave her a unique clarity of principle to create art which was truly the offspring of her heart rather than her education.

If I thought it before, it's even clearer now, that art and advertising cannot mix - they are different domains with different objectives and to be genuine, my personal photography projects have to either be one or the other. 

For all the strobists, this is a basic studio setup, which suffices for the majority of my editorial work in London.

Behind the trace on the left is a 'monobloc' flash head, usually with a common 8" reflector on it, which I'll move away to make the trace into a softbox or close in as a soft spotlight. The versatility is amazing, especially because I could be shooting a usb stick, then a tft, followed by an inflatable mushroom followed by 30 more heterogeneous devices. The overhead softbox is on an extendible boom, so is cranked and creaked around but pretty much stays where it is.

The camera itself is a Sinar 4x5 with a Phase One digital back sitting on what could easily be replaced by a ball-head, were it not for the tilt and shift bellows, which need separate adjustments. The major benefit of such a contraption for me is that focal length can be very, very short. Otherwise, gimme a Hasselblad!

The three cards on the table act as flags or reflectors where necessary and one, all or t'other are used on most shots. The battered paint tin (which I'm sure will explode one day) is to elevate screens and things so the table edge isn't visible in them. The rest of the stuff is for cleaning fingerprints, marking edges of similar items and the spirit-level is to keep the camera flat.

In such a fast-paced, commercial studio, the reality is that most shots are done with variations of this basic setup. Soon I'll post something for an intro or advertising shoot.