Great Scott! More Project 365

It’s this weeks round up of Project 365 images…

I was in Southport on Monday. Becky was getting her hair done so I thought I would grab a few pictures around the Pier and the lake. Unfortunately the weather was really poor so I couldn’t get the shots I was after. I did manage to grab a couple of windswept pictures (such as the one below) but my favourite from the day was this one, taken when I got back to the salon. I liked the contrasts between the different coloured towels and the white of the shelving.

I recently bought some coloured gels to use with my flash. These are of the theatrical variety, instead of the colour correcting gels that I normally use. I’m planning to put together a short tutorial on using gels, so watch this space.

I wanted to try out the gels so I used this metal trivet that we got to protect the kitchen worktop from hot pans along with a red gel (seemed to suit the trivet). I used a bare flash, held off camera, to try and create some shadows and also to get a hot spot from the flash showing in the metal (another themed item in the image). The flash was on a fairly low power to give me a strong colour and I used a white background so the colour would show up well.

Another gel shot on Wednesday and a shot that I thought about doing a while ago, but was I unsure about the best way to use the light to get the effect I wanted. The green gel added the missing ingredient to add some more interest to the image.

The subject is a metal container that we use to keep the wooden kitchen utensils in. I wanted to fire my flash into the upturned container so that the light would be coming out of the holes. The tricky bit was finding a way to position the flash to light the holes evenly. If I sat the container on the flash, just the top row of holes are lit up properly. The solution also came from the kitchen in the form of a tall glass tumbler. The tumbler was just wide enough to go over the end of the flash (and hold the gel in position - bonus!) and tall enough to allow just the edge of the container to shield the flash from the camera. The tumbler also had bobbled glass, which helped disperse the flash around.

With the setup like this, the holes are lit up but the exterior of the container is dark and you don’t really see the effect of the green gel. Adding a reflector, just out of shot to the left, lights up some of the container, using the green light coming from the holes, and also gives the container some shape and colour.

One of my cousins and his family called for lunch on Thursday so I took the opportunity to grab a shot of their photogenic daughter. This shot was mostly lit by the large bay window in the living room. I also used some fill flash to lift the shadow side of the face and add some catchlights in the eyes. I like closely cropped images, so I used my 70-200 lens to allow me to fill the frame with her face and use her long hair to frame the image. I took a few shots to try and get some decent eye contact and a natural expression. When photographing children you have to be prepared to make silly noises or faces, anything to get a natural reaction that isn’t a rehearsed, “cheese”, smile.

Since it was Good Friday, I was eating fish and chips for tea. It was always a family tradition to eat fish on Good Friday, despite none of us being particularly religious. Anyway….it was whilst I was eating that I noticed, through the patio doors in the dining room, the sky was turning a pink colour. The colour continued to darken until it was a fairly dark red where it met the rooftops of the houses behind us.

I knew that this light wouldn’t last long so I went upstairs to grab the camera. I’d wanted to get a silhouette shot of the telegraph pole in the street, behind the house, but had never been satisfied with the colour of the sky behind it. The current sky was ideal, so I grabbed a few shots through the back bedroom window. I set the camera to underexpose a bit to get a good silhouette and get better saturation of colours in the sky. I upped the contrast in processing to enhance this in the final image.

On Saturday we had been invited to a friend’s parent’s house for tea. They have a fantastic, unobstructed view from the back of their house over farms and fields near Southport. On a good day you can see Winter Hill, where the main TV mast for the area lives. I waited for the sun to get low in the sky before taking some shots of the view. The sun was just about to disappear behind the house when I took this shot of some farm buildings and vehicles. I used my 70-200 lens to isolate the subject from the rest of the view. I had to remove some overhead pylon cables from the sky when processing the shot. I’d positioned them over the sky in the frame to make them easier to remove without losing details from the main subject.

For Easter Sunday, I decided to do a play on the egg shot from 3rd April  last week, but this time with Easter eggs. Becky and myself had got a large Creme Egg Easter Egg between us, which came with half a dozen Cadbury Creme Eggs (so much chocolate…).

For the darker egg in the original image I used an unwrapped creme egg (which I had with a cup of tea later - would have been a shame to waste it). I used shallow focus to isolate this egg, as in the original, but I altered the composition of the other eggs this time around. I think the original shot is more subtle than this one, but the bright colours of this one really work with the theme of the shot.

More next week!