It was a lot of fun shooting the cover photograph for the The String Contingent’s new CD, TSC II.
It’s out there and starting to be heard, and it’s great to see that it will be the featured CD on the Weekend Planet — the music program on Radio National — on the 19th of February this year.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the problem of taking photographs of people that we don’t know. I’m talking about those situations where you might be walking along a street and you see a person that you think would make a good subject for a photograph and you then have to decide whether you’re going to approach them and ask to photograph them, or try to photograph—perhaps furtively—without engaging with them in any way, or let the opportunity go. (more…)
I made this picture for two reasons. The first is that I wanted a kind of visual sketch of the oil lamp — just to see how it would render photographically because I have in mind using it for another project; and the second reason was to see if it would make a suitable exercise for my next flash photography workshop next month.
Here’s how I made it …
This particular image was put together from a bracketed exposure sequence using the HDR software, Photomatix Pro. I’m generally not a big fan of HDR images — I find the HDR effect tends to flatten the dimensionality of the image too much for my liking — but I do use the technique when I’m concerned that the dynamic range, or latitude, of the scene (the brightness range of the light from the shadows to the highlights) is too much for the camera and when I think I might actually need both the shadow and highlight details in the image. This is especially true when I don’t have graduated ND filters with me, but that’s another story! (more…)
Finally … after a great deal of procrastinating, I have at last built a new website — and here it is.
Until now I have managed two sites: one for my own images (which has been sadly neglected), and the other for the photography workshops that I run. I have been wanting to integrate both into the one site, with room for expansion. I think this new site accomplishes those goals.
It’s still a little bit short on content, but I reached the stage where I just had to get the thing online even though it’s not yet quite to the point that I would like. So in the future I hope you’ll find more images in the portfolio pages (including samples of my studio work, commercial work, and personal projects), as well as the option to purchase selected images as prints.
As for this blog section … well, it will be a mixture of whatever I happen to be thinking about or working on, notes and information written primarily for my workshop participants that I think can be shared with everyone, as well as discussions of particular images. We’ll just see where it all leads, I guess.
And, well — I built this website myself, all hand-coded and put together from scratch. No templates or web designers involved, so if you notice anything wrong with it please do let me know. There’s no-one to blame but me for any problems with the site.
Equally, if you like it let me know too!
– Brad.
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