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This year for the birthday, did a fantastic 2 week trip to San Francisco and Sonoma.  Lots of touristy stuff, lots of wine drinking, and lots of photos… Cameras were the GF1 and a Holga – this was my my first “real” outing with the GF1 and it absolutely lived up to my expectations.  Was able to carry the body with kit lens and 20/1.7 in the corner of my daybag with room for the rest of my assorted junk.  Never missed carrying the big SLR one bit!

F/1.0

I’m a freelance photographer with a preference for Fine Art currently working out of Auckland, New Zealand.  As you may know, New Zealand is an extremely photogenic country, however it isn’t all easy peazy as you may not know that the light and weather conditions in New Zealand can be very difficult to foresee and plan for.

Rick Sammon famously talks about Exploring the Light and has a great book to prove it, but here it’s all about chasing the light. The skies can be grey for days on end, windy and rainy and all this can play havoc with your shooting schedule.  When you plan for a landscape shoot of a mountain vista looking out over the sea, inevitably the sky turns a blanket of blown out grey, blurring the horizon with the sea.  Granted some cloudy days can prove very picturesque, but you need definition in the sky for that to work.  You need to be able to bring out the contrasting shades of grey.  The old black glass or ND filter can help, but sometimes you just have to pack it in.  On other days you’re set for a macro shoot of the botanical gardens just as the southerly winds from Antarctica pick up and make shooting close-ups near impossible.  What is the frustrated photographer to do?  Well, one goes to the hardware store and buys a sheet of Perspex of course; wraps it around to create a cylinder and melds the edges together.  Now place that over the flower or other subject matter and wallah, no more wind interfering with my shooting.  Working in variable elements requires myriad techniques.  I have learned this nowhere more so than New Zealand.

Fairly recently I was sent to a beach just north of the country’s biggest city Auckland to do some fine art shots at low tide.  The plan was to use the images in an advertising blitz for the summer holidays.  Summer is just coming to an end here.  I had dedicated two full days to the shoot and closely monitored the weather forecast – it’s so changeable.  All looked good, my plan was to utilize golden hour, just before sunset,  as this time of day works perfectly at the beach.  I had some compositions in mind and set off on the hour long drive with my trusty assistant.  By the time we arrived at the beach a weather front had rolled in and the whole scene was grey and washed out.  Not deterred, we wandered about the beach looking for good vantage points and planned the shoot for the following day.  Patience is probably a photographers best asset.

Next morning the wind had picked up and the grey remained.  Disappointed, but not defeated we decided to forget the beach and instead headed off for a nearby temperate rainforest.  Shooting in a forest on a dull day can be very rewarding.  The light is even and there are no harsh bright spots clashing with the blacks.  We weren’t there long, when this amazing Tibouchina bud came to our attention.  There were a number of them, but this one looked incredible.  Now to get the shot.  The wind made shooting macro a little trying, especially as I was hand-holding the camera, but after just three shots I had captured it just as I perceived it.  The bud as it is about to flower looks like something out of that scary 1950s novel by John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids.  A few other nice macros were also taken that day, just to prove that when the light and/or weather isn’t behaving look elsewhere, try to match the conditions and never give up.  There is always something you can shoot.

Oh and btw, I finally managed to capture that beach shot.  I decided on a storytelling composition that has a foreground, middle and distant horizon that are all in focus.  I love to use this technique on landscapes and you can achieve this simply by focusing a third of the way in on your scene.  Here I shot with a focal length of 30mm at an aperture of f/16 which gave me an awesome amount of depth of field.  By using the small aperture with a wide angle focal length you can create images that have continuity, images that essentially have the potential to lead the eye all the way into the scene.

Links:

Website: www.photoopolis.com
Twitter: @photoopolis

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I had hoped to be landing in Dubai for GPP 2012 right about now, but our mechanically challenged plane yesterday objected. Rather theatrically, I might add.

So instead, I'm encamped next to the airport in Atlanta at a hotel sufficiently downmarket to have free wifi. So that's something good, I suppose.

To that end, my homage to Andrew Hetherington's ongoing Room With a View series. But cool as those photos are, he never tells you the lighting details. So we can at least accomplish that much today. Read more »

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