Wet ´n´wild

I´m sure many a photographer out there has gone the extra length to get that image they so desperately want to have just right, wether its trekking through rain, hail, sleet and snow in alaska to caputre polar bears, or hanging upside down from a lamp post so that your subject is not framed by other people taller than you when youre hundreds of meters away, or running around avoiding local security and attempting to setup, shoot and take down an on location fashion shoot before they return, a true photographer will do what me must for that image.

Although my stories dont quite compare, i think beeing chest deep in the sea, in one hand my flash gun, wrapped around my neck so that i can support my telephoto lens and camera on my elbow to shoot shoot and light my model on some rocks in the sea deffinetly constitues as a dangerous adventure!

Of course most people at this point start thinking what kind of a nutjob runs into the sea with over a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Well my only answer to that would be a photographer. And for the most part, if things go as planned (or even if they dont) the pictures that end up as a result of the shoot will have any photographer tell you that the risks are always worth the picture.

(i´m still processing the pictures i took on the rock, but i will deff include one in my next post.)



The picture below was another one that i took on the beach, however there was an old house nearby with some interesting grafiti which i thought would contrast well with the outfit my model had chosen, although more details on that in my next post)

And as for the lighting the top image was natural light from teh rising sun (this shot was done at 8am)

and the one below i had a canon flash right next to the model camera right

and a flash next to me camera left toned down to just complemetn the natural light as fill.

updates updates updates...

So even though i have been doing photography, and posting up a couple on things on flickr my general workflow has been stuck at a bottleneck in attempting to get my website LIVE and working. I think ive more or less got it spot on. For those of you who are interested it can be found at

www.sbalaniphotography.com

The main page is a basic portfolio page with two albums, one of my fashion and art pictures and another for my travel images. However that is only temporary as i may be expanding the albums into more mini albums with more pictures, or scrapping the whole system altogether for a flash one. Aditionally this blog will also cease to be its own seperate entity and will be incorporated into the sbalaniphotograhpy website, however the pandamonium-arts url will be forwarded to its new home when it moves.

As many of you also know it was recently the WWCD 08 where the IPHONE 3G was announced along with OSX SNOW LEOPARD, however i wont bore you with the details since various other blogs such as Engadget have written extensively about it, and you can even watch it on the apple site.

However! enough about the tech talk! on teh next post i will be talking about my latest escapade "cough cough" i mean photoshoot! Which i think is by far my best one yet!

Photoshoot in Hyde Park

Jenny Nandwani Nature-58
Originally uploaded by sbalani

So this shot right here is one of my fave's of all the ones ive uploaded so far. I just love the lighting, pose framing, colour! everything about it! Of course now when i look at it I also think of 20 different ways i could have taken the image, different lighting scenarios, different camera angles, etc. and even though this was my first shoot outdoors, in the sun, and was suppossed to be an educational venture into high speed flash photography, I still managed to be reminded of how a simple change of angle or lighting can alter a scene completley despite the model not having moved at all.

Now, as I mentioned earlier shooting in Hyde Park was EXTREMELY experimental for me. I not only had to account for the flash, but in addition i also had to account for the natural light from the sun. In most situation sthe sun would have overpowered my meager flashes (if any of you follow the strobist youll see the lovely setup that Joe Mcnally had for just ONE directional light so as to overpower the sun. Thankfully it was evenign and overcast when i did my shoot, which as like Mcnally says, just makes one very big diffused light! :D. So attempting to use that as my fill in light, i attempted to place my other flashes accordingly to light up the scenes and VOILA!

P.S I also learned another valuable lesson which mcnally emphasizes OVER AND OVER in "the moment it clicks" WEIGH DOWN YOUR STANDS! even the smallest breeze will wreck chaos on your equipment (it was such a teeny weeny breeze taht knocked over my stand and totally killed one of my brollies! :( thankfully it was the cheap one.....i think...)

well hope you enjoyed today's post :) as usual, the rest of my images can be accessed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbalani/sets/

Experimental

_MG_8199-Edit
Originally uploaded by sbalani

So most of the photos on this shoot ,have been with pretty standard lighting, considering the meter by meter space i had to work with, two canon flashes + pocket wizards and my first time using them together! After playing around with them for a bit, as you may have seen in previous shots, and an outfit change, i decided to play around a bit with the lights, get a bit more moody. I know its often said that in any portrait shoot you should always focus on the eyes, however as you can see here the eyes ar hardly lit at all. I had her overlit (extremely) and opted to not put a reflector or fill flash to kill off the shadows because i wanted to see what it would look like and voila! i got the image you are more or less looking at. Of course after retouching the light a bit and a couple of more shots and photoshop, htis is the final version. however I could have probably put a reflector around there somewehre and bounced some light back into the shadowy areas and still mantained the general mood of the picture.

Well as they say you always keep learning as a photographer, next time i try a similar lighting scenario ill remember to keep that in mind adn see if i cant replicate this mood with a little more light in the shadowy areas, however i find that the lack of light in the eyes gives it the darker tone that I at least seem to be picking up and enjoying in this image

A change of pace

Notre Dame
Originally uploaded by sbalani

So, in the last couple of posts ive mostly put up pictures of my photoshoot with my cousin, so as a change of pace, ive decided to start uploading shots of my trip to paris a few months ago. It was an amazing trip, went crazy with my camera one of the few times where ive actually run short on battery during the day. I had always had a negative impression on Paris, and this trip was deffinetly an eye opener. I'm quite ready to go again. Ive only uploaded this pic for now, but more will be up shortly :)

Roshni Shoot 10

Roshni Shoot 10
Originally uploaded by sbalani

SO this is my first shoot after returning from photoshop world. After having met the man himself (Mcnally) and having finished his book, I eager to play with my new hoardes of equipment, so after finding a model (my cousin) we setup and tried a couple of different shots, and played around with my new pocket wizards and flashguns, i attached a snoot onto one of the flahses in an attempt to get a hairlight, and voila! i had a shaft of light! so after doing some finetuning i got this shot, which somewhat reminds me of the ballerina shot in the book where theres a shaft of light comming down onto her.

P.S the fluffy thing shes leaning on, was what started out as a photoshop mishap, but i liked it and spread it around, its like shes leaning on something smoky, or a cloud, gives it a slightly unreal tone to ti but hey! i like it!

More of Roshni's Photoshoot

Full album can be viewed here