06. July 2014 · Comments Off on Week 05 : Lights · Categories: Image a Week

Week 5 hit while we were on vacation in Hawaii.  The theme for this week was “Lights”.  One of the fun parts about this weekly photo shoot is that it’s all about interpretation – I’m allowed to do anything I like that say’s “Lights” to me.  (My game my rules :-).

When I travel I do tend to take quite a lot of gear with me but I don’t normally take any lights.  This time however I had a single speedlight with an umbrella.  While talking to Abi one afternoon we thought it would be fun to take a picture of her flicking her wet hair back.  I figured to do this I’d need a light to freeze the motion and get that perfect picture.  So just after the sun set we walked down to the hotel pools to see if there were any empty ones that would allow us to make a picture.

Unbelievably the infinity pool was empty so we ran to that and Abi jumped in.

I put the Umbrella and speedlight on the end of a mono pod and asked Lisa to hold the light pointing at Abi.

Before Abi started to flick the hair I needed to get the lighting right, so we took 5 pictures getting the right exposure and light power.  Once done, she started to “perform”.  Amazingly it took less than 10 attempts to get this shot.  So from start to finish it was 14 photographs.

I have to say I knew what we were trying to do but didn’t think the image would come out like this, both Abi and I were delighted and celebrated the shot by swimming in the pool together for the next half hour.

Hope you like the shot too.

29. June 2014 · Comments Off on Week 04 : Landscape · Categories: Image a Week

Week 4 is here and the subject/topic is Landscape.  (I guess we weren’t very imaginative this week).  Anyway Lisa was out for the day so Abi and I hit the road.  We decided to head for Marymoor Park and see what we could find.  We walked down to the Sammamish Lake water front and took some shots there, then we walked over the this huge windmill and shot some of that, next we headed over to this old building that’s used as the Marymoor’s offices and shot that.

All the images were nice but none of them really grabbed me.  We were going to head home and we noticed that the sun going down over Redmond made the sky look amazing.  But where to shoot it!

So Abi and I started driving around looking for something to be in the foreground of the sky and sunset.  Then we passed the sports fields.  Wimbledon was currently on and the tennis courts were empty so I thought I’d try there.

We set up and immediately I knew I had a great shot.  We stayed there for another 20 minutes and I took loads of shots of the sunset.  The picture below was my favorite and I’m really pleased with the end result.

22. June 2014 · Comments Off on Week 03 : Natural Light · Categories: Image a Week

It’s week 3 and time for a new topic to shoot.  This week we had to shoot “Natural Light” and I figured, what’s more natural than a sunset. So I jumped in the car and headed over to Alki Beach in western Seattle.

It’s about a 40 minute drive and a lovely part of the city.  It has a large beach area where people picnic and play beach volleyball.  There are loads of hip restaurants and coffee shops along the shore line and it’s full of people just enjoying the water and sun.

When I got there it was still around 30 minutes to sunset so I just walked along the beach shooting what I could.  You have to be a little careful as it can come across as a little creepy walking around with a camera while people are in the swimming costumes.  (But I can do discreet 🙂

Eventually the sun started to go down over the Olympic mountains and the sky broke just at the right time so I could see the sun in the distance.  To add a little foreground interest I shot the image next to a beach telescope, positioning that so it didn’t get in the way of the suns reflection over the sea.

So that’s week 3, natural light.

16. June 2014 · Comments Off on Palouse · Categories: Photography

For the last two years I’ve visited Las Vegas for the Photoshop World photography conference in September. While the conference is great fun and you learn a load I thought this year I’d try something different. So for a change I decided to go on a Photography Workshop. I looked online for a workshop I liked the sound of and found a local Photographer (based out of Seattle) who ran a number of workshops all over the county.

Justin Resnick (here’s a link to his site) is a landscape photographer who travels all over the world. He has workshops all over mainland USA and others in Hawaii, New Zealand and Iceland. As some of the overseas workshops are pretty expensive I wanted to make sure I learnt something from Justin first and liked his training/teaching style. So for my first workshop I opted for “Palouse”.

Where the heck is Palouse I hear you say?

Well Palouse is an agricultural region in western Washington. It’s right on the Washington, Idaho border spanning down to the top of Oregon, and the best bit is I can drive there from Seattle in around 4 hours. The thing that makes Palouse interesting is the land formation. Imagine miles and miles of undulating hills, all different shades of green! It’s really something amazing to see.

So I booked a place on the workshop and off I went.

The workshop lasted four days and was pretty intense. We would get up at 4am go out and shoot sunrises, come back to the hotel for 6am, have breakfast and go to sleep for a few hours, head out at midday and shoot until sunset. Try doing that for four days.

During the workshop I shot around 3,500 images and I’ll still be processing the shots in August. This blog post just includes a few of the early processed ones I really liked.

So what was the workshop like? Well there were only 5 students in total so we all got lots of time with Justin. Justin was just fantastic. He’s an amazing photographer and spent the whole time making sure our experience was great. All he cared about was did we get the shots we wanted, did we have any questions, where did we want to go to today?

At each location he would tell us what to look for, where best to set up and what the best composition was. I really learnt a load and will definitely attend one of his workshops again.

One of the highlights of the trip was our visit to Palouse Falls for a sunset shot. This is a huge waterfall in the middle of nowhere. In fact it’s now the official waterfall of Washington state. When we arrived Justin explained how we had to set up right on the cliff face. This was pretty scary but definitely gave us the best view and some amazing shots.

Anyway I LOVED the workshop, and will try and get on another one next year. Hope you like the images.

15. June 2014 · Comments Off on Week 02 : Green · Categories: Image a Week

So here we are, week 2 and it’s time for another picture.  OK, I admit it, I created the weekly list and deliberately picked the topic for week 2 as “Green” knowing I’d be in Palouse 🙂  What can I say I’m a cheater.

Anyway this image was taken from the top of Steptoe Butte in Palouse and as you can see it’s definitely Green.

So Job Done I’d say.

The interesting thing is I had thousands of images to chose from, but this one was the greenest so it made the weekly shot.