LRG: Riots of Spring

London Rollergirls are on: www.londonrollergirls.com/ You can also find them on Facebook.

The above pictures brought a lot of traffic to my Flickr profile. On most days I get about a dozen views, whenever I do a major posting I get a few hundred in the 24 hours that follow, when I posted a batch of 35 Rollergirls pictures I got over 1600 views in 48 hours and it's still counting.

I don't think that the Rollergirl pictures are my best pictures; I did not even tell that many people about them; still they generated about 50% of the number of views that all my other pictures managed to make over the space of 7 months. What's that? I am sure there is an important lesson to be learned here... somewhere. What is it? I refuse to believe that all this traffic is due to the subject (good looking girls in short skirts) - there must be something else to it as well!

Eastbourne Train Station

This weekend I went to Eastbourne, Sussex to hike across the 7 Sisters Cliff. It was fun - well recommended as an easy day trip from London.



This picture is just a quick over-the-shoulder grab shot. I was getting on the train and the colour of the sky was so good - so I just turned around and zoomed out very quickly during the 1/8sec at f/5.6 exposure (ISO 400). IMO: It came out amazingly! It was taken with Sigma 10-20mm; it is such a fun lens to play with. Note: this picture is 100% Photoshop-free.

Product Shot

A weekend project - no less...

:-)

Funny. That's me!

As seen on XKCD.

New Studio

London's full of warehouses converted to flats. They are surprisingly easy to find. I just moved into one and there is so much space...

Lighting info: no ambient light, 2 strobes (SB-24 and SB-26) one gelled blue, one with a DIY honeycomb.
Exposure info: Nikon D40 with Sigma f2.8/50-150mm at 50mm (1/30s, f/8, ISO 200), manual focus

Composite shoot

This is a great post about making a very complex image. I always wonder how it's done for this type of picture. There are other great ideas on Brian Niven's blog.

There is also a really cool video on YouTube documenting Brian's workflow (well, sort of) on the photoshoot of Branden Steineckert, drummer from Rancid, and his dog.

Faces of Hackney??

I came across this website: Faces of Sunset Boulevard. It's amazing. I so want to make one like this about Hackney.

Lighting Schemes - pictures worth thousands of pictures...

I have got this irresistible urge to try and reverse-engineer all photos in glossy magazines that I see. I can't help it, but to keep on analyzing shades, catch-lights and specular highlights for ages, just to try and guess how a picture was made. It's a condition that was only to be expected after my first strobe arrived, but it is getting worse.

Websites like this one and this one make it a bit easier to get the few basic setups visualized.