I thought it might be interesting for some of you if I explain how this image of a tennis player diving for the ball was created, starting with the concept and working through to the the post-production.
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Timothy Armes' blog
Photography as I experience it…
Archive for the ‘Studio’ Category
Anatomy of a shoot: the “Tennis Player” from concept to post-production
Monday, November 30th, 2009Choosing a battery pack flash system
Monday, May 25th, 2009I’m a heavy flash user, and typically I like to travel light (excuse the pun) with a set of hot shoe flashes – Strobist style. However I have a number of upcoming shoots planned that’ll be best served with a portable, battery powered, higher performance flash kit, one with enough oomph to overpower sunlight through a decent sized softbox.
To this end, over the course of the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research into the various options that are on the market. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any resources on-line that grouped all facts together to help make the decision easier, so I’m sharing the fruits of my labour in the hope that it’ll serve other photographers.
Vegetable landscape with jewellery
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I was recently asked to take a photo of the interesting necklace that you see in this picture. I was given a free reign to come up with anything I liked. The necklace is handmade and clearly quite fun, so I decided that I wanted a fun visual theme in the final image. I don’t know how or why the idea of using vegetables like this popped into my head, but I find the final result quite enticing. I can imagine a series of images for each piece in the range would be quite visually stimulating, and fun to do too.
Nautilus Shell in High Key
Saturday, February 7th, 2009Weather’s awful, wife’s out, baby daughter’s napping, what’s a man to do?
We have a nautilus shell that I’ve been meaning to photograph for a while, so I thought I’d have a bit of fun. It’s a hard
subject to take because it’s been photographed so many times before, by so many good photographers, that it’s virtually impossible to find an original approach. I decided to go high key and see what that gave me, and this is the result:
Fun with Chocolate
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
A very strange thing happened this Christmas – we made too much Chocolate sauce for the profiteroles. I know, it doesn’t sound possible – how can there ever be too much chocolate sauce? I can only conclude that there must have been a hell of a lot of it to start off with.
So, I thought I’d take advantage of the unusual situation to create this image that I’ve had in my mind over the last few weeks. I started by taking the photos of the chocolate sauce. The consistency needed to be just right to get the look I was hoping for, and I was thrilled with the results. I’ve put a couple of the resulting shots here to show you the results.
The photos were taken against a white wall which was lit just enough to overexpose it. There was a softbox to the left of the poured chocolate and a reflector to the right, and these are responsible for the lovely long highlights on each side. The twists were just the results of good luck.
I created an intial composition using three of the resulting images and then worked from there. We had a box of particularly tasty chocolates so I took images of some of those (note that unlike the chocolate sauce we didn’t have too many of these). I was careful to use the same lighting setup as above so that they would fit naturally into my composition.
The little round sweets were thrown by hand into the air and captured in mid-flight.
Finally I set forth upon the chocolate powder. This was a lot harder to get right. I tried all sorts of things to capture the powder in mid air but nothing worked well. Eventually I decided to take a close-up shot of the powder on white paper using a Canon 135mm and some extension tubes.
Once I had all the elements I put them together using Photoshop to create the composition above.
Ceramics in the Studio
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008I’ve just finished shooting some promotional images for local artisan Cécile Lienhard, so I thought I’d share some of the experience.
Cécile didn’t give me a remit, so I was free to do anything that I felt was appropriate. My main consideration was that her web site is a dark grey, so it was important that the images would marry well with this colour scheme.
I decided that I really wanted to capture her distinctive style rather than document the individual pieces themselves, that way she could continue to use the images to sell herself even once the particular pieces that she had passed on to me had been sold.
I started working with the clock, and after playing a little I thought that it would be best explored as a triptych. This decision then lead me to on to create each of the final images as a composition of photos. This sort of things often happens – I start out without any ideas in particular, and then once I actually take some photos the ideas come together.
