It runs in the family..

Having just blogged about my sister and her creative endeavors I now find myself blogging about a second creative family member, my cousin has been staying with us this week for a much needed catch-up and we braved the cold and the drizzle yesterday to take some portraits.

Kayleigh blogs about fashion, books, music, crafts and miscellaneous pretty things and has been documenting outfits she's worn so this was a dual purpose shoot, photos for her to put up on her blog and practice for me at being speedy about setting up a light on location. This gorgeous wall is literally just around the corner from my house and I'll definitely try make use of it again.

Due to it being incredibly overcast the ambient light was very flat and created the fill so I used the strobe as a key and underexposed the ambient by between a half and full stop (I think? I forget now). Key was one umbrella-ed strobe camera left at about 8/1 power with an exposure of 100ISO f/2.8 and between 200/1 and 125/1, or something very close to all that. I got the exposure very quickly and changed things on the fly which means I have got a better grasp on the basics than I thought! I feel like this has been a good exercise in building confidence, on to more creative options next!

Textile design by Mia Eldekvist

My very talented sister is half way through her degree and had some leggings she needed photos of so, we brought out the lighting kit and jumped around in front of the only available, plain wall in the house for a bit!

For a spontaneous and unplanned shoot I'm pretty pleased with the results, hopefully next time we can plan a little more and get even better shots!

To-do lists and learning curves

My to-do list is very long at the moment. Lots of little things I've been putting off for one reason or another. One thing, I wasn't really putting off but kept forgetting to start, was editing the footage I took over Christmas. Finally did it today.

It's really short, it only exists because I wanted to play with the 85mm f/1.8 and because I needed to start learning the basics of Adobe Premiere. Mission accomplished!

So apparently it's all about video at the moment. This is not at all a bad thing! I'm enjoying it rather a lot but I have much to learn about editing. I managed to avoid it for such a long time too! This one has had no colour corrections or anything, when I say 'learning the basics' I mean TOTAL basics. Saving the rest for another time and perhaps a more exciting project.

Also, I need to sort out some shoots so that I don't keep taking photos of my cat.

Tasha McCoy 'Never Land'

Some may recall I mentioned that I was going to be helping out on a music video shoot and now I can share with you the result of that! I spent a day with Tasha McCoy and Sidney Diongzon in Bath where we were blessed with some fantastic light and Bath is beautiful anyway so every direction we looked seemed perfect. I was there as a second camera and Sid (director/editor/general creator of the whole thing) has worked his magic on the footage we got and put it to Tasha's beautiful song...

So seeing that for the first time certainly brightened my day! I've been pretty quiet the past month or so, working lots so not much time to be doing my own thing. That will hopefully start to change now that I have more time and also this beauty...

Such a nice lens, can't wait to use it properly. I have a few ideas and mini projects floating about half-finished so I'm going to focus on completing some of them and getting them up here over the next few weeks.

I have a good feeling about 2012.