Pure Mono

Originally uploaded by HotshotsSR1

I took this image when I went on the annual camera club trip, we went to York for the trip. York has a lot of art installations all around the City centre, there are huge paintings on lots of walls and along the riverside, most of them are very nice indeed you can’t help but just love classical style paintings, there were no skinny female icons in their day only curvy women, I prefer to shoot models with curves as well, the reason is I like the curves over skin and bone. The other great thing is that they were all painted in natural light, the master in my eyes is definitely Rembrandt, I liked his low key work and as you can guess by most of my portraits I love doing low key, the main one that sticks in my mind by Rembrandt in low key is the portrait of Saskia van Uylenburgh she was the daughter of the top lawyer Rombertus van Uylenburgh and the youngest of 8 children, she actually married Rembrandt after meeting him through her cousin the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh whom which Rembrandt lived with in Amsterdam. The painting in this photo is not by Rembrandt but Sir Joshua Reynolds is it titled “Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons”. I think about another three photographers got this shot, including my friend and President of Washington Camera Club, Ken Henderson, so now you know why group photography shoots are mentioned in the title, the reason I put it in is to tell you that if you want to take a unique shot then you have to make it unique, so not only do you need a creative idea you also need to make sure you go it alone as you could take days setting up a photoshoot and invite other photographers but at the end of the day if others are there they will take the same shot as you, if you are just portfolio building and not wanting to set the world on fire then it is totally acceptable go for it, group shoots make a great fun day out and help reduce the cost of hiring models etc it is a cool social aspect of photography, but, like I said if you want original go it alone!

Originally uploaded by HotshotsSR1

For adding atmosphere to a photograph if there is no people in the shot I think that a bit of mist goes a long way to add to the mood, this shot was not set up at all or even planned. My parents came to our house for dinner one night and it was quite sunny when they entered the house, a couple of hours later when it was time to go we got to the front door and it was very dark, not only was it very dark but it was also very misty, not only was it dark and misty but is was also raining very lightly and as soon as I seen it I just knew I had to take a shot, I quickly ran upstairs and grabbed the D700, it was very cold and wet so I didn’t want to stay out long with my gear so I upped the ISO to 6400 and set the aperture to F/2.8 and widened the lens to 28mm, the reason I widened the lens was because you get a longer hyper focal distance the wider the lens so shooting at F/2.8 will not be much of a problem for the depth of field. The hyper focal range of the settings I used were a bit like this, I was 20 feet from the subject so the near limit was about 12 feet and the far limit was about 58 feet, so after a little bit of mathematics in my head (way to much info to type in this post I may write a tutorial on the subject at a later date) I worked out that the hyperfocal distance will have been around 30 or 31 feet this was enough to keep the shot in focus for the length of the alley. The shutter speed was 1/50 but to get a faster speed I would have had to up the ISO which would have added more grain to the shot so I leaned on the fence and stood as solid as possible to avoid camera shake.