Pictures, Videos and other meanderings…

I said yeh yeh!, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

It’s May Day – and that means that the summer starts here. got a busy few months ahead with weddings and portraits and this week I am going to be covering Oxford Fashion Week 2010, this kicks off today at Oxford Town hall, Oxford Union on Monday, Randolph Hotel Tuesday, Malmaison Wednesday and Cherwell boathouse on Thursday.

Should be an interesting week, and I’ll post some photo’s on my Flickr page – click on the picture above to access that if you like.

Summer time people! Enjoy!

Shocking, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

Went out to the beautiful village of Horley near Banbury on Sunday for a succession of portraits, this is one of my favourites from the day. I love the way her blond hair is captured by the lights and the effect that it has.

I’m currently working on putting a package together through my main site http://www.tonyculshaw.co.uk to focus on these lovely portraits which are timeless in style.

To kick it off I’ll be offering some freebies via my facebook page http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Tony-Culshaw-Photography/253998465625 so if you want to be in with a chance of winning, become a fan!

Please let me watch TV, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

Playing with a low key setup and distracted my son from the TV for long enough to get a nice photograph.

I have always been a fan of classic portraits, especially in black and white as I think theybring out the character in the person having their picture taken, in fact I think I might start offering this as a product in the near future – need to get something better than a door to hold the background up though, so might invest in a lastolite backdrop – easy to hang off a stand.

If you would like this type of photograph for you or your family, let me know and we’ll make it happen!

Happy days…

Racer, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

This afternoon, I challenged my son to a race – after all he does have a racer. Trouble is, he was racing against the car – and after getting my wife Sandie to do the driving, he knew he was up against it.

So there we were, Sandie driving, me hanging out of the rear tailgate of the car and my son desperately trying to keep up with us, whilst getting zapped by a touch of flash every so often.

Lesson learned from this escapade, is find a smooth road – I banged my head a few times as we hit bumps, and lots of the photos were quite blurry as I was using a slow shutter speed to get the motion effect.

Still, a bit of fun on an otherwise grey Sunday afternoon )

The Hat, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

Recently bought some gels for the flash units from ebay, and have been trying them out, they can give quite interesting effects.

This picture was taken with a flash on camera right with an orange coloured gel on it and a shoot through umbrella on it, the other flash was simply left bare behind her.

I set the white balance on the camera to tungsten, as that matches the flash with the gel on it, and also why the un-gelled flash came out blue.

I kinda like the effect, and i have a whole bagfull of gels and wireless triggers, just need another couple of flash units for use outside and anywhere, as the one at the back has no manual controls on it, so it was getting a bit flashy for the model as both flashes were firing on full power – you could feel them go off!

Watching TV, originally uploaded by Coleslawz.

First step in using artificial light is to get a balance – unless you’re using only one light source of course.

In this photograph, my son is lying on the sofa watching TV, and behind him is the window, so I had nice window light which was fairly diffused as it’s overcast and with around a foot of snow outside, that gives the hair and backlight.

On the right of the frame, I had a 580ex flash on a stand fired through a white translucent umbrella at 1/4 power.

This gives light without it looking like flash and good detail in the image with the contours and textures of his jumper.

Increasing the strength of the flash caused it to overpower the window light too much and resulted in a much flatter image.

Balance!

Had a fantastic couple of weekends, photographing the Grays - six kids running about the place tests your reactions with a camera I can tell you! It was good laugh, and we got some great photographs that I’m sure they’ll enjoy for years to come!

Giggles

Also been practising with different ways of using the light, I really like the effect of photographing into the light, it gives the pictures an ethereal quality that you can’t replicate with studio flash – well, you judge for yourselves, comments are more than welcome.

extreme contre jour

Later this week I’m going to be at the Oxford Folk Festival with the Afropean Choir, which is quite exciting – I’ll post some photos after the weekend!