I got to take this Self Portrait in the recently refurbished Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A section of the museum has a wall made of glass that has been engraved with the names of those people that have donated to the museum.

Like most photographers, I’m not one for getting in front of the camera, so, this shot suits me fine. It shows what I look like every day and pretty much everywhere I go. My messenger bag is incredibly worn and pretty threadbare in places as it is what I use to carry my camera with me every day and everywhere I go.

I knew that using any camera equipment at the beach would be fraught with danger, but trying to set up a flash or two, the triggers and the lightstands, all the time having a small and very excited child playing in the sand, was all more difficult than I planned.

Thankfully, there was very little wind, otherwise, the sand would have got into even more things than it did and I would probably have given up on using any lightstands. Consequently, I got some well lit shots, but the composition suffered. Constantly moving the lights with a constantly moving little girl whilst keeping trying to keep the sand out of everything expensive was more than I could handle.

I did learn a lot about the differences using the flash whilst shooting into the sun and away from the sun. A grater difference than I had expected. All in all, a good attempt that I’d like to try again if the conditions are ever good enough.

This shot was taken without too much forethought and whilst under the influence of enough alcohol to make me confident enough to keep asking Michael to come back for one more shot.

One more shot, I’ve got the lights right now

Michael was extremely patient and he was more than capable of giving advice that made this shot much better than it would have been otherwise.

There are two flashes, but only one lighting Michael. It’s high up on camera left and firing through a shoot through umbrella about 4 feet away from him. I’m stood on a chair with the camera held just below the height of the flash. The second flash can be seen in the shot as the white hot light below Michael’s right eye. I know. It’s such a distraction but it was proving too difficult to remove seamlessly in Photoshop so it was better (slightly) that it stayed. The flash has a full CTO gel over it to make the red brick wall a deeper orange. It is sitting on the floor about 1 foot from the wall, pointing up and at it.

Finally, there is the reflection of the lit brick wall in the window. A (very) happy accident at first, and then tweaked (more calling Michael back) to make the most of it.

Driving through London yesterday, I couldn’t resist a trip to Heathrow Airport while it is closed because of the eruptions from a volcano 1,000 miles away under the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in Iceland.

I parked in a very deserted short stay car park and took the empty lifts and walkways from the car park to Terminal 3 Departure area. In retrospect, I am surprised there was anybody there, but the occasional person that appeared at the end of a corridor or walkway was a far cry from Heathrow’s usual activity.

Outside the Departure hall, the flight timetable showed all flights cancelled. True to current British form, as soon as I took a photo of it, someone came up and told me I couldn’t take a photo of it. I asked why and he had no answer. I told him I’m taking photos for fun not for the press and he didn’t know what to say so he slunk off and left me alone.

Is all of Heathrow airport private property? What part of it becomes private and what part of its roads and pavements or public? Does anyone know? Let me know in the comments if you do.

This is the platform of the Lyon St. Exupéry Airport Railway Station. We were flying out of Lyon from the St. Exupéry Airport and you cannot help but notice the amazing winged building that seems to be part of the airport but doesn’t seem to have any planes. If you have the time to wander through the airport in the general direction of this structure you can quickly find a walkway that leads to the Lyon St. Exupéry Airport Railway Station.

25km east of Lyon, Saint-Exupéry Airport (formerly known as Lyon Satolas Airport) is named after the Lyon-born writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry station was designed by Santiago Calatrava, cost 750 million Francs and opened on 3 July 1994, at the same as the high speed line to Saint-Marcel-lès-Valence. When we got there, the place was completely deserted.

This building is a photographers dream. From the outside and from the inside at any angle, there is not a bad shot to be had, and, because the TGV trains that it serves run so infrequently, the place is deserted except for the odd airport passenger walking to or from a distant car park. You could spend hours, even days here. With flash equipment, this site would have endless possibilities and, for most of the day, hardly anyone to disturb you or to get into your shot. It must change constantly as the light of the day changes and must look spectacular from outside when it is lit up at night.

We visited Waterperry Gardens, just east of Oxford, and we stayed longer than I thought we were going to. This meant that we were still around as the sun was just beginning to get low in the sky. Not sunset by any means, but the sunlight was coming from low camera right as we found this natural avenue carpeted with snowdrops. The sun was lighting the woody branches and there were more snowdrops bunched together here than anywhere else we had seen in the gardens.

I ball-bungee’d my flash to one of the branches, camera right, about 4 or 5 feet away from the subject and set it at about 1/8th power. The rest wasn’t very difficult as the different pools of light in different spots along the avenue were created naturally. I think every photographer tells the same story about many of their pictures, but this was another one for me that I would have missed, and very nearly did miss, as I questioned whether I should pull the camera and the flash and the triggers out of the bag again.

Some other shots were taken that day including this flash shot where I was able to stick the flash in the hedge, camera left. The flash was at half power in order to get this light and the blue sky in very bright sunshine.

The flash head was visible in this shot and I’ve removed it in lightroom by reducing the exposure in that area of shot.

St. Mary’s Church in Churchill was Designed by James Plowman of Oxford, the tower is a two-thirds copy of the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, its hammerbeam roof a copy of the roof of Christ Church, Oxford, its buttresses are versions of those of the chapel of New College, Oxford, and its windows are based on those from various Oxford Colleges.

In a restoration appeal for the tower in 1975, Sir John Betjeman (see my photo from Sir John Betjeman’s grave here www.flickr.com/photos/iboogaloo/2540401761/) wrote of it:

“It is a beautiful landmark and has [...] been an eye-catcher for miles around, and a delightful one. I am sure it was built with this object in view. Although the style is English Perpendicular Gothic, the Tower is in the great tradition of English landscape gardening. Its disappearance would be a grave loss to a rolling wooded landscape.”

The tower has external stairs which lead to the bell-ringers’ chamber, the top of the staircase being in the form of a pulpit. In imitation of the May morning celebrations at Magdalen College, villagers gather at sunrise on 1 May every year and sing from the stairs and pulpit.

myweb.tiscali.co.uk/tonycannon/page13.html

You can see the original image that came out of my camera. It was because I found the image so disappointing that I started to make such dramatic changes to it. I probably would not have ended up with the high key, black and white conversation at all had I taken a better shot in the first place.

I’m attending an off-camera flash course in a couple of weeks time and I needed to take a still-life shot showing a background light and a main subject light. The shot above has one flash in a shoot through umbrella to camera left, a silver reflector to camera right and second flash with two different coloured gels at camera right and positioned to rake its light across a green card background. The two gels give some more interest to the light on the background.

This set up shot shows the location of the lights and equipment. You can click on it to see a larger version of the shot.

Everything is kept very close to the subject in order to minimise the amount of light coming from the key that falls on the background which is being lit by the second flash. If the key flash was further away, more of its light would have polluted the background and reduced the effect of the coloured flash raking across the green card background.

The final series of Lost starts this Friday on Sky 1 and I have to admit it, I have stuck with Lost all the way through. Every time it got more confusing and every time they manages to spin out the story longer to fit one more season in, I kept coming back for the double bill as the new season started, racking my brain to remember what on earth happened in the last series.

Season 5 of Lost even had us inviting around the neighbours for a Lost Season Premiere Party which involved replacing all of the food in our fridge with food we’ve seen supplied by the Dharma Initiative on the TV show. Once the fridge was full, I couldn’t resist a photo (it had taken us hours to create the labels in photoshop, cut them out and stick them on the food).

The shot above is lit only with the refrigerator’s internal light and the regular lights in our kitchen. It was taken handheld at 1/25 second, f3.5, ISO 400 with a 50mm f1.8 prime lens. The internal light is located at then centre, rear of the fridge. The raw image had its white balance adjusted in Lightroom and the exposure was increased to move it toward a hi-key look I couldn’t have got shooting this handheld.

Additional Lost Party Requirements – Lost Party Posters

I also love these Lost Party Posters created by Ty Mattson, they are something very different for the Lost world, but very symbolic. If you know Lost, these posters speak volumes.

http://mattsoncreative.com/blog/2010/01/18/lost-posters/

I first read about them at another cool site by James White:

http://blog.signalnoise.com/2010/01/26/lost-posters-by-ty-mattson/

I managed to catch this sunset portrait just as the last of the sun was fading away. I had already been to my first choice sunset location and wrapped up when I thought the sun had give all it could. It was so cold, I just bundled the camera kit into the back seat of the car. My fingers were so cold I couldn’t zoom any longer. As I left the site and headed home, a couple of junctions put me at the end of a dirt track leading to the top of a hill with an orange glow behind it.

60 seconds later I’m pulling all of the still assembled kit out of the back of the car trying to make the most of a second chance at the sunset.

This setup shot shows how the shot above was taken.One bare flash, camera right, triggered by the new Pocket Wizard Control TLs at 1/8th power on a light stand at full height (about 3 foot above the subjects head).

Exposure was 1/60 at f13, ISO 800 using a zoom lens at 77mm on a Canon EOS 7D.

I had time to fit in this second shot as well.

By this time it was so dark I could hardly see where things were and it was taking ages between shots as the camera struggled to focus.

The cold was again making me shake as I took the shots.

The Original Location

I’ve attached a couple of the shots that were taken at the first location.

I was pretty happy as the day progressed and I could tell it was going to end with a clear sky and a very useful sunset. I had been to this spot before and made the mental note that sunset shots here would definately be worth coming back for. Right place, right time. I’m never this lucky.

And on top of my right place, right time serendipity, I had the snow to add to the shot. Unfortunately, I was lying down in it to get this shot and although Adam is holding up pretty well in front of the camera, my hands were shaking as I was taking the photos.