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!

One is not amused

Originally uploaded by HotshotsSR1

Well I can’t add much today as last night some horrible geek hacked my pc, now I have lost all of my JPEGs and web sized images as I had to flatten my whole drive to fix what they had broken, I’m so glad I keep my RAW files on a different drive, if I hadn’t I would have lost all of my digital work from the last four years and most of my film scans, only one word to describe them…..twats! This photo was taken of people in the crowd at Steels Club when I shot Cirkus.

Cirkus at Steels 17-01-09 Derek

Originally uploaded by HotshotsSR1

Well this photo was taken of Cirkus in a Working Mans Club in Sunderland, this is probably the highest ISO a DSLR is capable of at the minute, the ISO is 25,600, Nikon are the world leaders at the minute on producing cameras with a highly sensitive sensor with little or no noise, coupled with the right processing knowledge you can get shots as clear as this, don’t get me wrong the original image was very noisy and very grainy but if you know how to process then you get better results, there was NO NOISE REDUCTION WHATSOEVER on this image when I took it or processed it, it is all down to the way you process the file, I will be adding a tutorial when I get time on how to process RAW files that have been shot at ISO 3200 and over using Nikon Capture NX. I will also be writing tutorials on how to use Capture NX from simple processing to using masks and also showing how to get the most out of U-Point technology, so watch this space!

Setting up a studio is not an easy task, I didn’t know that but I do now ha ha. It has taken nearly a year to get one sorted to get all the right equipment and location. If I knew it would take this long I would not have bothered lol. On a lighter note I have got some great new lights and and the all impressive Nikon D700, the D700 is a dream camera for a photographer as it really opens up new avenues for shooting in conditions you would not normally be able to shoot in.