Studio lighting day sponsored by Lencarta

Jonathan's talking about his Lencarta Lighting Workshop in Maidstone tomorrow - just a boring day with a beautiful model in a nice hotel
Mine's the exciting one in my studio in Bradford with still life subjects, where you have to make your own coffee - don't go to the wrong one

Beautiful model, nice hotel you say! Hmmm, a difficult decision.
 
Hopefully not but at what point might it be postponed?

Shouldn't have problems getting across moors in my 4x4 unless they shut the roads....again!!

Just read this, doesn't sound too promising as I'll be setting off before the gritters...fingers crossed it'll improve or it'll be a no show from me:thumbsdown:

Latest report...

A169 North Yorkshire - Hazardous driving conditions on A169 Whitby Road in both directions between the A170 Hungate junction in Pickering and the A171 Guisborough Road junction in Whitby, because of snow and visibility is reduced
 
Just read this, doesn't sound too promising as I'll be setting off before the gritters...fingers crossed it'll improve or it'll be a no show from me:thumbsdown:

Latest report...

A169 North Yorkshire - Hazardous driving conditions on A169 Whitby Road in both directions between the A170 Hungate junction in Pickering and the A171 Guisborough Road junction in Whitby, because of snow and visibility is reduced

It's not as though you have many alternative routes either!
 
Looking forward to it. Just about to do a shoot in the studio now but the customers are 67 minutes late at the moment then I can pack my stuff up.

I will bring along an item of jewellery as a model if that is ok :)

Would love to get an idea of how to photograph it with the background going from black graduated to grey as is the current fashion (none of this black velvet malarky :))
 
It's not as though you have many alternative routes either!

At the moment the alternative route via middlesbrough is pretty much shut and the one via Scarborough ain't too good either, lets hope for a big thaw..........but then it'll be flooding to contend with:bang:
 
At the moment the alternative route via middlesbrough is pretty much shut and the one via Scarborough ain't too good either, lets hope for a big thaw..........but then it'll be flooding to contend with:bang:
My intentions were good, we decided not to run any of these workshops during the worst of the winter months but assumed that November would be OK:'(
Speaking of Scarborough, No.3 son reports that he went for a lovely slide going from outside the GCHQ all the way down to the A170. It seems that some bright HMG employee got the road from their place to the A170 scraped by a snowplough but didn't see any need to grit it...
Bill managed to come to a safe halt by driving into the banked snow. Let's hope that the GCHQ boys are better at the main part of their job:'(
 
My intentions were good, we decided not to run any of these workshops during the worst of the winter months but assumed that November would be OK:'(
So what's the word, are we 100% on for tomorrow or are you making the call a little later? I'll be leaving around 6am so kind of need to know tonight...
 
So what's the word, are we 100% on for tomorrow or are you making the call a little later? I'll be leaving around 6am so kind of need to know tonight...
I'll be here, I'm just hoping that other people can make it too.
 
Well that's me out!!:'(

No real improvement and don't fancy my chances being one of the first to cross the moors and then one of the last on way back. More white stuff on way too!!

Hope those of you that do make it have a good day and most of all a safe journey.
 
Well coming from Preston normal way gave way to the motorway. M61....M62....M606 then about 2-3 miles of clear roads into wibsey. I'm here having a coffee now
 
Well what a great fun day that was :D

Big thanks for Garry for the frank and honest way in which he passes on his experience with lighting. Was refreshing to have it told, and shown, just how it SHOULD be done. Well worth the trip to see Garry and the Lencarta kit in action, and very nice kit it is too!

Now just figuring out what I need to order... already have a couple of 150w flash heads but am lacking a few other bits and pieces, now where is that Lencarta website ;)

Nice to meet the other folk too, how random that there was someone else from just around the corner from me (literally) there too! We pretty much drove back following each other... a mini Subaru convoy :)

Thanks again, and highly recommended for anyone looking to improve or just understand how to light products :thumbs:
 
Well what a great fun day that was :D

Thanks again, and highly recommended for anyone looking to improve or just understand how to light products :thumbs:

Well sounds like I missed a damned good day.........f'ing weather!!!

Will have to hope Garry decides to put on another maybe next year and keep fingers crossed for better weather.
 
Well what a great fun day that was :D

Big thanks for Garry for the frank and honest way in which he passes on his experience with lighting. Was refreshing to have it told, and shown, just how it SHOULD be done. Well worth the trip to see Garry and the Lencarta kit in action, and very nice kit it is too!

Now just figuring out what I need to order... already have a couple of 150w flash heads but am lacking a few other bits and pieces, now where is that Lencarta website ;)

Nice to meet the other folk too, how random that there was someone else from just around the corner from me (literally) there too! We pretty much drove back following each other... a mini Subaru convoy :)

Thanks again, and highly recommended for anyone looking to improve or just understand how to light products :thumbs:

ha ha it was a good day - and i wanted to steal Garry's dog. Was rather funny when stuck in a queue of traffic at the M5/M6 interchange I look over to the other lane and see the other subaru. Traffic back was awful - did not do the trip as fast as the morning.

Apart from that it was a good day (though bloody freezing) - some really interesting info. Have to think what lighting set I am going to buy now (and i have to change my bookroom into a studio and move the bookroom to the top floor - i hate taking apart bookcases)
 
Blimey - what a day.

H-U-G-E thanks to the people who braved the pastries, the lemon tart and the really rather good coffee to attend (we didn't get any snow so food was as tough as it got).

Whilst we all slept, Zoë did a mini review and posted some of her shots from the course.

http://www.zlokey.com/blog/2010/11/28/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-on-day-332/

For people who weren't there....after a bit of chat and flashing a few lights I told a couple of the delegates to set up a high key white background using the creamy wall of the hotel. To make things more exciting I asked Vicki to dress all in white and made the delegates shoot tethered so their images popped up 8 feet wide on the wall behind them so everybody could see them before they did. Nothing like a pressure shoot....
 
Thank you Jonathan :thumbs:
I cant believe how much i took in yesterday and even managed to set my lights up this morning and get my first test shot within 5 minutes so some of what you said must of sunk in:lol:

For anyone who wants to learn more about their lighting i would recommend a day with Jonathan on the Lencarta training course :thumbs:

Craig
 
Cheers Craig - glad you made it back OK!

BTW I like a challenge on a course. And by "challenge" I mean chucking people in at the deep end ;) So with no real clues at all, I pointed 2 guys who had never worked with studio flash before at a big pile of kit and gave them 20 minutes to plan, light, pose, direct and shoot a small challenge.

Here's one of the shots I took when they had done all the hard work for me SOOC.

Studio%20Session-079.jpg


We could all spend some time critiquing it and talking about filling the hair shadow and sorting out the front left of the floor etc etc.....but I'd be pretty pleased with that at the end of my first day with studio flash.
 
Yes, a nice warm hotel, posh coffee and a beautiful model. Shame I was there to learn about lighting really.....

Had a great day, took in a few new things and at the same time drove some other of my thoughts home. Learned a few not to do's as well.

Great day, challenges were fun, and I've posted a couple from our challenge here.

Thanks again Jonathan, and to the others that attended, banter was good and the ideas kept bouncing.


Steve
 
That 20mins went really quick but i was happy with the end result :thumbs:
 
Big thanks for Garry for the frank and honest way in which he passes on his experience with lighting. Was refreshing to have it told, and shown, just how it SHOULD be done. Well worth the trip to see Garry and the Lencarta kit in action, and very nice kit it is too!

I agree. He did seem to make things look easy!

I really liked the Lencarta 'beauty light' (I think that's what it's called), that Garry showed us at the end with the rifle. I have no need for one, but the results were very impressive!

I learnt a lot from yesterday, and I'm looking forward to trying new things.

I have also realised I must:

1. Throw away the light tent
2. Buy some decent lighting
3. Buy my own DSLR
 
Well, just change ONE thing in my set up following yesterdays course and it's made ALL the difference!

Had always use a couple of soft boxes to fire "across" the products in an effort to just "light everything" but what is so obviously clear is that things should usually be lit from above... whilst I don't have a boom (yet) I did the best with what I've got and am stoked with the result :thumbs:

5217593552_6be866ac05.jpg
5217009109_ab81567976.jpg


Lightbox on the left isn't being used, only the overhead one... Result of 1st shot straight out of camera... some tweaks to be made but overall very very happy with what I learnt :D

firstshot.jpg


Thanks again Garry and of course Lencarta, well worth the money/trip :thumbs:
 
I'm glad that Jonathan's session seems to have gone so well, Maidstone probably isn't the easiest place for a lot of people to get to but it's a lot easier for people in the effluent affluent south than Bradford:)

I have enormous respect for the people who travel long distances to go to these lighting workshops, especially when the weather is as bad as it was yesterday in the midlands/north, and it's a great pity that 2 of the people who booked couldn't make it to my one.

I always feel a bit of a fraud - people travel very long distances (often over 200 mile) to come to my lighting workshops and all that I actually show them is how to overcome very simple problems. I think that yesterday went pretty well, but none of the lighting problems that people had were in any way difficult to overcome, which is why I feel a fraud. The only slightly difficult one was Cowaski's jewellery, which SWMBO wants photographed against a graduated grey background - it would be much easier and more striking on an acrylic mannequin.

I really liked the Lencarta 'beauty light' (I think that's what it's called), that Garry showed us at the end with the rifle. I have no need for one, but the results were very impressive!
I use the beauty dish A LOT for product shots because it can produce fairly soft but very directional lighting, and this is exactly what most product shots are about - using specular highlights and shadows as design elements. Having worked through the various specific products that people brought with them, I used a beauty dish on a French rifle , to create a specular highlight along the entire length of the barrel & stock - I'm sure there's no truth in it, but there's a theory that if you're buying a second hand rifle then it's best to get a French one on the basis that it's been dropped once but never fired...

Yes, Andy needs to throw away his light tent and get some proper equipment but I was able to explain how to use his light tent as a softbox and use it with his continuous lights, which will make it pretty easy to get yesterday's results without spending any money.

Although people like me tend to have a lot of very specialised and expensive gear, simply because time is money, I'm a great believer in making up special tools out of cardboard boxes, blackwrap, candles etc, which do the job just as well - and which, with some very small items, are actually better than expensive light shapers.

All that we actually needed to use yesterday were
1. An overhead softbox
2. A second softbox
3. A standard reflector with honeycomb
4. A boom arm
5. A beauty dish.
 
Well, just change ONE thing in my set up following yesterdays course and it's made ALL the difference!

Had always use a couple of soft boxes to fire "across" the products in an effort to just "light everything" but what is so obviously clear is that things should usually be lit from above... whilst I don't have a boom (yet) I did the best with what I've got and am stoked with the result :thumbs:

Thanks again Garry and of course Lencarta, well worth the money/trip :thumbs:

You should change your username to Zebedee:)
BOING!!!
 
Cheers Craig - glad you made it back OK!

BTW I like a challenge on a course. And by "challenge" I mean chucking people in at the deep end ;) So with no real clues at all, I pointed 2 guys who had never worked with studio flash before at a big pile of kit and gave them 20 minutes to plan, light, pose, direct and shoot a small challenge.

Here's one of the shots I took when they had done all the hard work for me SOOC.

Studio%20Session-079.jpg


We could all spend some time critiquing it and talking about filling the hair shadow and sorting out the front left of the floor etc etc.....but I'd be pretty pleased with that at the end of my first day with studio flash.


I would like to mimic the praise everyone else has awarded here and add more on top!

Jonathon did a bloody great job yesterday, and in my professional opinion as an educator - he is a really good teacher when it comes to getting accross the content from yesterday, refreshing tasks, his own 'string theory' and the way in which he made us explain what we were doing.

I would recomend him 11 times out of 10, anyone interested in this sort of stuff could benefit from this.

I would drive the 120 miles down there next weekend without a heartbeats notice just to do the exact same thing again - honestly

..oh, and thats my pic :D

Team 'folk' were clear winners, Craigm and I went all black for the best results :thumbs:

Rich
(The big irish one)
 
It's snowing hard outside, some kind soul drove into my Merc (didn't stop of course) so I can't drive it, not that it would go anywhere in the snow, and my 4x4 is in the garage having a new ignition switch fitted, so I'm stuck here...

So, a quick post about last Sunday's product photography workshop.

In a way, shooting products is easier than shooting people because everything is totally under our control, and the shot doesn't get ruined by a slight change of position or expression - but for the same reason, we have no excuses when we mess it up...

The first question is always 'Why?'.
Why are we taking the shot?
Who will see it?
Who is the product aimed at?
What are its benefits?

Once we know all this we can start to plan the shot, decide on the type of background and so on. And we can do the arrangement/composition.

The arty side is sometimes done by the photographer but, where advertising agencies are involved, they often send along a creature known to the agency as an art director or creative director - photographers have different names for them:)
Art directors are often failed photographers who, because they know nothing about lighting, don't understand the problems they create when they insist that a shot needs to be done a certain way. But that weakness is also often their strength, because when a photographer does the composition it's tempting to do it in a way that doesn't create lighting, depth of field or other problems.

Anyway, no art director here so I got the group to play art director and before we moved on to photographing the specific items that they needed to learn to light, we started on something of mine. 2 boxes of shotgun cartridges that I'd won for getting top score the previous week. (which I thought I'd mention modestly).

I didn't expect to win them, it doesn't happen very often and I just stuck 1 box in each pocket, then slung them into the back of the car. It was only later that I thought I could use these cartridges to make life difficult for the people on Sunday, by which time they were a bit battered, breaking the golden rule that all products must be in perfect nick.

So, they arranged them prettily, trying to make even a boring subject look interesting. I kept out of it as much as I could.

Next decision is on camera height. The lower the camera, the stronger the reflection from the shooting table base and the more 'heroic' the subject, but the more difficult it is to read the info on the top of the box, or even to see the top of the box.
So, set the camera low and put the second box further back and out of focus so that people could recognise the brand (which they would if this was an ad to go in a shooting magazine).

Lighting here was very simple, it nearly always is. The job of the lighting was to make the shot look interesting, at the same time illuminating everything well enough for there to be no hidden areas. With shiny cardboard, fairly shiny plastic cartridge cases, very shiny 'brass' and so on, it's really just a decision about how close and at what angle the overhead softbox should be, as a starting point at least.

Now, on to the shots. I messed up on this one because I normally shoot tethered but assumed that everyone would want to take shots on their own cameras (they didn't) and I knew I wouldn't have the software for obscure cameras like Canon, or the time to set up tethered shooting for 6 different cameras. Cowaski Darren came to the rescue, using his own D700 for the first shot and everyone just used his camera for all of the other shots too... Darren then uploaded the photos to here - many thanks. The photos are straight from camera.

Here's the shot of the cartridges. OK, although I will never do anything at all to a shot in terms of PP when I'm uploading them for this purpose, obviously the shot needs to be cropped and generally tidied up.
_D7H4232.jpg

These particular cartridges are in a green translucent case. On the telly and in films shotgun cartridges always seem to be red but in fact they vary a lot, and a few of them have see through cases like these so, how can we light a cartridge to show the contents if we want to?

The answer is to backlight it and I showed how this was done, using a very expensive focusssing spotlight fitted with movable shutters that can create literally any shape of light - in this case a small vertical slit. But not everyone has one of these fancy gizmos so I showed people the slightly cheaper way of doing it, shining a flash head through a cardboard box with a slit cut into it.

_D7H4233.jpg


All pro photographers use bodges like this and my studio is full of blu-tak, blackwrap, masking tape, gaffer tape, car spray paint and so on. People who shoot advertising/commercial for a living don't have to worry about their gear looking 'professional' in the same way that portrait photographers may have to.

We then moved on to the various things that people had brought with them - jewellery, a go faster turbo dump valve for boy racers, wedding/greetings cards, a rucksack and so on.
 
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I would like to mimic the praise everyone else has awarded here and add more on top!

Jonathon did a bloody great job yesterday, and in my professional opinion as an educator - he is a really good teacher when it comes to getting accross the content from yesterday, refreshing tasks, his own 'string theory' and the way in which he made us explain what we were doing.

I would recomend him 11 times out of 10, anyone interested in this sort of stuff could benefit from this.

I would drive the 120 miles down there next weekend without a heartbeats notice just to do the exact same thing again - honestly

..oh, and thats my pic :D

Team 'folk' were clear winners, Craigm and I went all black for the best results :thumbs:

Rich
(The big irish one)

Blimey Rich you'll make me blush ;)

Hope that's enough to get some more courses in the diary!
 
Putting some more courses in the diary is fine; but we think it's best to avoid the worst of the winter months - admittedly the south doesn't get much bad weather but when they do it seems to affect them much more:)

Which probably brings us to March, but I have a feeling that Jonathan may be busy at the beginning of March, I know I will be...
 
Blimey Rich you'll make me blush ;)

Hope that's enough to get some more courses in the diary!

Let me know when those spare 200's are in the post, as payment for my comment :)

You can put me down for any course you're running in the futurewithin 200 miles haha), im a cert :)

Rich
 
Mmmm this wouldn't have something to do with a certain Focus on Imaging show at the beggining of March, now would it.....
 
Some new lighting workshops have now been arranged for next year and are on the Lencarta website.So far there are the first 3 portrait ones hosted by Jonathan and the first 3 art nude ones hosted by me. More to follow later at each venue.
 
There are now a total of 7 of these lighting workshops on the website - there will be 1 each in Maidstone and Bradford until November, the later ones will be added later on.

The first one will be in Maidstone (Jonathan Ryan playing mine host) on 20th March, and there are still some vacancies on it
 
There are now a total of 7 of these lighting workshops on the website - there will be 1 each in Maidstone and Bradford until November, the later ones will be added later on.

The first one will be in Maidstone (Jonathan Ryan playing mine host) on 20th March, and there are still some vacancies on it


I'm going to the Maidstone one on the 17th April it would be nice to see some other TPers there.

:thumbs:
 
I may well see you there Pete, not sure yet which one i'm going to go to yet, was looking at the 20th March, but then realised it clashed with the TP British Wildlife meet...
 
I may well see you there Pete, not sure yet which one i'm going to go to yet, was looking at the 20th March, but then realised it clashed with the TP British Wildlife meet...

Yeah but this will be way more fun ;)

BTW rumour has it that the March one will have better coffee than the April one (for real).

There's a bit on my Tumblr about this too.
 
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