So I got a text from Neal this past Wednesday asking if I was up for heading back down to the Banksy Tunnel for a car/promo shoot with some friends of his.  The plan as I understood it was to photograph a couple of cars along with a few models and just have a bit of fun with it.

Given I’m less than 2 months into my 365 project and already running out of ideas I jumped at the chance.  It’s been a while since I’ve worked with models and I’ve never shot cars properly before so it sounds like a fun evening.

While I won’t say it wasn’t fun, it was quite a bit more work than I’d anticipated.  I was expecting 1 or 2 models and 2 or 3 cars, but we ended up with 5 girls and 10-12 cars of which we probably only 6 or 7.  Neal and I managed an almost assembly line style production of taking around 20 shots of each car with and without the girls, but there was little time to get the lighting down.  I used some ‘safe’ settings and we fired away but looking back I’m wishing for a hair light in a few of them.  Live and learn I guess.

Overall it was a good night.  Met some friendly people and walked away with some fun photos for the day, which is always better than yet another shot of my cat.

Thanks again to the folks at South East Customz for providing the cars and the promo girls, as well as helping to organize the shoot itself.  I don’t think we would have managed the number of shots we did without those guys lining up the cars so we could do one after another without much hassle.

There are a few more shots in the gallery.

I was out shooting with my good friend Rob and a few others this past weekend in Grays.  Ordinarily our shoots involve buildings, scenery or light painting but today was a bit different.  One of our fellow POTN members had set up a day of shooting with a few lovely models (are there any other kind?) for a Trash the Dress practice shoot.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept and don’t like following links in blogs, it generally involves a wedding dress or equally elegant gown and a setting you wouldn’t normally wear such an outfit in.  In today’s case, we had the sunny Amy and Natasha modeling a couple of eBay wedding dresses out on some estates and a beach in Essex.

The day started off slow as we (the photographers) were all more or less new to this type of shoot and we were tripping ourselves up trying to get different light synching methods to all work together.  In the end, we stuck to my trusty pocket wizard Plus II’s and just shot everything in manual.  After that, it was just a question of trying to figure out where and how to pose the models, which for me is the trickiest part of a shoot like this.  Fortunately, both of the girls had done this before and didn’t need a whole lot of direction.

Setup shot by Rob Bridgens

The main event of the day was to end up down at the beach to shoot a bit of a paint fight in front of the wreck of an old lightship called The Gull.  Rob and I snuck in a few more final shots in the dwindling light while everyone else waited patiently.

The paint fight itself was a bit chaotic; 6 photographers and a videographer all vying for a better vantage point while simultaneously avoiding paint splatter is not conducive to an organized shoot.  It was fun (for the girls especially), but there were lessons to be learned for the next attempt.

In the end, I think everyone walked away with some decent shots and picked up a few new skills or ideas which was what the entire process was about.

Thanks again to Steve for organizing it all.  Also thanks to Razvan for taking the videos of us shooting all day (and for holding light stands as well!).  The first video of our daytime shooting is available here and the second video which covers the paint fight is here.

There are a few more photos in the gallery.  It was hard to pick my favourites to post in the blog this time, so check out the rest!

I’ve finally gotten around to making a quick post about the course I took in July.  It was a week long outing with Ross Perkins of AClassPhotos, which encompassed a lot of different things.  Lots of off camera lighting like I was hoping, but also posing models, location scouting and a healthy dose of photoshop training.

It was a great trip as well as a great learning experience.  Prague & Brno are really cool cities and I’m pretty sure you could spend your whole life there and not run out of places to shoot.  Plus, it’s always nice to be able to get out in a city with big cameras, lighting stands & gear and not get chased off by the police or security guards.  Some days, London can really suck for things like that.

Those are a few of my favourite photos from the week…the rest can be found here.