I’ve just got back from 12 days in Alabama and Florida (mostly the former) with my other half, and we managed to shake off the jetlag pretty much by staying up from 8am Florida time Friday morning, to 10pm UK time Saturday night. Sleeping on the plane didn’t happen – crappy flights, don’t ask – but daylight and plenty of coffee at the other end did. We did have some great times over there visiting family and friends, but it was also good to get back. There’s something about American food I just can’t get used to…
Then on Sunday I went over to Le Gothique in Clapham where my friend Ryan Haysom was shooting a new short called Fragments. Just a freebie, really small crew (there were 3 of us, and 3 actors), using available light for everything. I got some great moments down but I’ll save the plot stuff for Ryan to reveal when he’s ready.
For now here’s a few completely spoiler free portraits I grabbed both in and out of the action, all pretty much straight out the camera bar a couple of cosmetic tweaks.
Hiram Bleetman
left to right: Sean Turner; Hiram Bleetman
left to right: Hiram Bleetman, Ryan Haysom, Hannah Douglas
The light on that first one I really like, the way there appears to be various differently lit layers – the brighter background, the sharper but darker foreground with some kick, and the sort of frontal rim around Hiram’s face and jacket. It’s just the sun, filtering through trees at coincidentally exactly the right moment as he was walking towards the camera, which is literally one pixel outside the left of the frame. I was running alongside at a distance to stay out of shot and this was the only frame possible that kept out the cameraman (Ryan), but I do really like shots like this where the looking room is the wrong side and the tree on the right really sold it to me. Only really noticed the lighting aspect later when checking the LCD.
While I was State-side I’d taken my 18-200mm DX lens. It’s not the sharpest pencil in the box, nor lens in the bag, and has to employ the DX cropping mode of the D700 sensor. Decided to embrace these and got some great photos by not being too precious for a change, doing B&W shots in camera, shooting JPG (and very occasionally RAW+JPG for some monos just in case colour worked better). Usually, I wouldn’t ever do a B&W in camera – the greyscale conversions are the least interesting B&W possible – but the Nikon Picture Controls are quite flexible so got some nice contrasty results.
I’ll try and post some of my favourites this week sometime. Thanks for reading!
