Pure Mono

Well I finally managed to get out and get some shots today, Sue picked us up at 9 this morning and we drove to Catterick for the market, while they were looking at the stalls and spending money I was scoping the market for some shots, I didn’t get many as it was very busy and very rough so I kept my camera very tight in my hand and had the strap round my neck, at one point I took a shot of a butcher and he freaked out as he thought I was working for the DHSS, he wasn’t to know but if I was working for the DHSS he would not have even knew I was there ha ha. I decided to do some “in your face” street photography and get in as close as I could to the subjects, most shots were taken at between 50-70mm never once over 70mm so the farthest away I ever was from one of the subjects was about 2-3  feet away.  More photographs to come when I get them processed.

20 degs

Originally uploaded by HotshotsSR1

The beauty of Ilford HP5+ is not only the fact that is a fast film that is suitable for most occasions but the fact that it can also be pushed to it’s extreme, all film can be pushed or pulled to some extent but this film has an amazing latitude, in this photograph I pushed it to ISO 3200, I used ID-11 for the development as I didn’t have any Microphen which is a special compensating developer used especially for pushing films, it took 27 minutes in a stock strength solution to develop, yes this is a long time but I feel it was worth it looking at the results, the grain is evident but it is only very slight, the slight toning is caused by scanning the negative in as a colour negative. This cat is my mothers cat and he is a natural poser for photographs, every time I am down my mothers house with a camera in my hand he comes over lets me know he is there and then jumps up onto a chair to pose for me, this has to be a first as every other animal I take shots of seems to run away from the camera lol.

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.

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.