Italy - the other days

As I was poking round Stanstead airport waiting for my flight to Genoa (or Genova if you're Italian - why do countries feel the need to change the names of cities in other countries?) I noticed one of the airport bookstores featuring signs proudly boasting "Exclusive airport edition" for many of their books. Has anyone in the history of humanity ever purchased a book at an airport simply because it's an airport exclusive edition? A particularly ardent Katie Price fan who already has the hardcover and regular paperback version of "Being Jordan" and needs the airport edition to complete the trilogy perhaps? Or maybe there are those who buy 1p Ryanair flights simply to get on the other side of airport security and gain access to the treasure trove of airport exclusive delights that exist in the land of plenty. While I'm on Ryanair, how can you take an airline seriously that offers 2 for 1 drink specials on spirits (who are they in competition with for drinks up there?) and has hostesses selling scratchy tickets on every flight?

Right, enough of the introduction, let's get down to some photos. The following are some of my favourites from the trip. It's tough to pick a handful of shots for something like this, especially as there are so many diverse shots, but here's what I've gone with.

First up we've got a super simple shot that is perhaps my favourite from the trip. I notices these glorious colourful umbrellas and thought they'd go nicely with the washing hanging up behind them. I wanted to go for a really clean composition, something from the "less is more" school of photography, initially I took some shots in landscape which I liked but thought were not quite right, when I decided to switch it to portrait that's when I became properly happy with it.



This next guy was hidden away. There was this mini bridge type thing which people seemed to think made a good photo, then if you snuck under the mini bridge you found this cave type thing which those who ventured that far also thought made a good photo. I took it a step further and went as far as a could down the cave and was rewarded with this fisherman casting off. I was shooting into the light so I really had no option but to play the silhouette card, I converted to B & W in Lightroom later on the PC as the original colours didn't really work.



I'm convinced that photo opportunities are placed in your lap by Aperturian (the god of photography) if you're prepared to seize these moments when they come. After a big day of hiking I was enjoying a tasty lager overlooking Vernazza when this cat comes out of nowhere and jumps up on to the wall right in front of me. I'd been taking photos earlier and happened to have the flashgun already attached to the camera, all of which was sitting on the table, all I had to do was raise the camera, frame the shot and make meow noises until the cat gave me some eye contact. Too easy.



I'll finish up with a couple of classic postcard shots. Well, they're not actually as good as the ones on the post cards (my excuse is that these postcard photographers have more than 4 days to get the perfect lighting and the perfect ocean conditions - that's my line and I'm sticking to it) but they'll give you more of an idea of what the place was actually like. The region consists of 5 colourful towns built onto steep hills/cliffs in little bays, each town between 1 and 5km from the next. A very picturesque part of the world indeed. This first shots was taken from a boat, I think the second was taken from the walking trail.



Right, my Picasa seems to have crapped itself so you'll have to make do with just the 1 postcard shot for now.

I did a little mini project the other day, stay tuned as I will be unveiling it exclusively here at some stage in the next 7 days.......

Till then.

Italy - 1.5 days in

One thing about the Italians, they sure love to smoke. I think it's pretty common in continental Europe but compared to London there are a lot of Marlborough men and women. Had a pretty transport intensive trip over here, it went walk, train, plane, bus, train, walk; it might not sound like much but when you've got 14kg of camera and laptop on your front and slightly more on the back (including a hefty tripod) all this picking up and carrying becomes pretty hard word.

I've met up with Mum and Dad in Levanto, a lovely little town just to the North of the Cinque Terra. For the next week or so the folks are traveling with friends of theirs from back home who I also know, a lovely classic Australian couple Anne and Chris. It was raining the night I first arrived and when I met Chris he was wielding an umbrella and proudly told me of his bartering conquest "I bought this off a guy in Napoli who tried to rip me off, he wanted €5 but I talked him down to €2.65". Yes, that's right, 2 Euro 65 Euro cents. Brilliant.

Today we headed to Rio-something, the bottom town of the 5. Lovely little spot. We managed to hike our way 2 towns up so we've seen 3 so far, it's kind of hard to describe these places, and after a few lazy beers after a full day's walking I don't have the patience to try so I'll just show you some photos.

Enough is ENOUGH! I'm sick of these mother f*cking dogs on this mother f*cking train! (Snakes on a Plane reference)



I really like this shot of Dad for some reason, don't ask me why.



I was well chuffed with this cactus shots. I took a few others and in the main they were, well, cactus, so it was nice to get a good one.



Really love this one, we were walking down a tunnel and I had the 10-20 lens on so I just did some experiementing, this one has the feel of an after life experience I reckon.



Lazy Italian dogs...



So, there you have it, 5 shots that could be taken anywhere in the world. If you want to see standard stunning shots of Cinque Terra do a google images or Flickr search, I might even post a few of my own in good time, until then I hope you enjoy these ones.

Yet another glorious victory

If you're a regular follower of my blog you may have read this post a few months back. Rather than give you the background to the Shoot London events again I'll suggest you take a squiz at the other entry and then return to this one.

So this time round the event was held at the Tate Modern, an enormous unique structure (formerly a power station?) in the postcard-photo epicenter of London. A short walk to the West will take you to the London Eye, and a little further Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, a stroll to the East will take you through the famous Borough Market, London Bridge (which is a non event for the record) and on to the iconic Tower Bridge, while a waltz North over the millennium bridge will take you to St Paul's Cathedral. Needless to say there were landmarks galore to capture, but as we are band of photographic mavericks we shunned these so called "great photos" and instead opted for our own take on London's Southbank. Or maybe it was because we didn't understand the clues so shot the wrong thing.

Indeed,it was actually us shooting the wrong thing that earned us another winners badge. The clue was something about a monument and the answer was St Pauls Cathedral, I still don't really get how the answer fitted the clue but it doesn't matter. Dave had been wanting to model his Sherlock Holmes hat in a photo for a while, and as we were told a week before the shoot that the theme was "senses" we figured there would be a clue involving sight that we could tailor to our props. In the week before I'd gone out at lunch time and purchased a magnifying glass, the idea being we'd take a shot with Sherlock looking at the camera with one eye magnified. Turns out the prop I got was too big so another team member Danny went and got a smaller one on the Friday, he also picked up a pipe and the props were complete. Can't remember who came up with the idea for the shot, but I remember Bec thought it was stupid and not funny at all, however we told her that boys find that stuff funny and we were proved right.



Next up we have the first photo of the day. The clue here was "See no evil, hear no evil, speak to evil". I searched my ipod for songs with the word "evil" in them, didn't find any but I find "The devil is bad" by the W's so I thought that would be a good fit. We wanted to go for a Guantanamo Bay feel with the lighting. I picked up an off camera flash cord on my magnifying glass expedition from earlier in the week which allowed us to get this cool side lighting effect. I really liked this shot, we were all talking ourselves up after it, thinking we'd just hand in the one photo for the day safe in the knowledge we had a prize winner. Wait, I don't think I'm supposed to tell the world about our arrogance.....



The answer to the next clue was Borough Market so we just took a shot of us having lunch. I used my Sigma 10-20 set pretty wide to capture as much as possible, I set the exposure for .8 of a second to create a blur in the background and used rear curtain flash to freeze the subjects. I like how Dave in the middle is dead still and anchors the shot while Bec and Danny are moving a bit and people in the background are moving even more. For the record my wild boar sausage was exceptional, although my wild boar burps later in the day were less so.



To close things out we've got our most technically difficult shot of the day. Again we suspected there may be a clue involving smell, and we were right. It's actually quite tricky to capture clearly the spray from a perfume bottle - as I learned on a Wednesday night practice session 4 days before the shoot (Andy's girlfriend was quizzing us the following day why her boyfriend was returning home smelling of men's cologne) - the trick is to shoot with a black background and have the spray lit frmo behind. The off camera flash really came into its own on the shot, unfortunately the cord only allows the flash to get around 50cm away from the camera, but I got Danny to hold it right up against the wall and point it back towards the camera getting as little light as possible on the wall. As you can see we did light the wall up a little on the left of the frame, but considering our equipment limitations and the fact that any editing was strictly forbidden I was stoked at how the shot came out.



Stay tuned for the next installment on the blog, I'm off to the spectacular Cinque Terra in Italy on Tuesday so I'm sure to get some nice images there, even if the weather is forecasting rain pretty much every day. As always feel free to leave a comment if you've managed to get to the end!

Lazy London Weekend

I think it's been 2 weeks since my last update, I did actually head to Borough Markets on the weekend before last and managed to get a few shots, but I think I'll save those for a rainy day and instead talk about the weekend just passed. On Saturday I headed out to Richmond Park on the weekend to take advantage of the sunshine. Armed only with my 18-200 super zoom (decided it was overkill taking my big boys along for a lazy picnic where there was no guarantee the camera would even find its way out of the bag) I set about seeing what what I could conjure up.

I thought this first photo summed the day up quite nicely. I tried to just go for a very simple shot with a dynamic composition, didn't include anything unnecessary (besides that distraction in the bottom right corner), and went for a bold crop to fill the frame.




Next up we have Josh and Emma, 2 of my favourite models. Josh in particular is always jumping off stuff, climbing things and generally getting himself into photographic situations, one of these day I'm going to make an album and call it Jumping Josh, you mark my words. In this shot Emma was impressing us all with her fleibility, so Josh, not to be outdone, decided to impress us with his athletecism by fly kicking over her. I, of course, was there to document it for the ages.




Seems I'm not the only one who likes taking photos of Josh




To finish things up I'll bring you a collection of tree related portraits. In our fruitless pursuit of deer we decided to take a rest on a log which happened to be lying on the ground. There was a hole in the log which I thought would make a nice frame for a portrait, after my first attempt I insisted everyone there line up and have their portrait done in the same style. People think I'm weird.




Josh in a tree. The lighting was a little tricky here as there were light patches and dark patches. I made Josh look directly in to the sun (no complaints, another reason he's a favourite model!) to make sure his face was well lit and snapped away.




And finally a double tree portrait. Em had had a few wines in the sunshine and was keen to climb as high up the tree as possible, Sensible Simon vetoed the idea on the grounds that he didn't want to have to call an ambulance. In the end it worked out Nicely with Em in the foreground and Josh a slightly blurred monkey in the background. Had 3 shots of this scene that I liked, tough to pick just one but I'll go with this one.



Finally let me experiment with this Picasa slideshow they're touting, let's see if it works......