A fashion shoot for a men’s clothing store introducing a new men’s clothing range. This shoot was taken in Newbury  among the air conditioning units at the back of a recently constructed shopping centre.

The setup used three flashes. Two flashes in umbrellas in front of the model and just either side of the camera. I was after clear even lighting rather than any shadows or excessive textures. The third flash was bare and directly behind the model to give some separation rim lighting around the model.

The ambient lighting was trickier than I first thought when I spotted the location. As clouds obscured and revealed the sun, the slats did nothing to distribute the light. It was either full on glare or subtle gorgeous strips of light.

We have been staying with friends in Melbourne who have a summer place in Moggs Creek on the The Great Ocean Road between Aireys Inlet and Lorne. It joins up with Fairhaven and to make a total population of about 350 people.

Our friends spend Christmas there and we try to visit them as soon after Christmas as possible. It’s a fantastic spot and the local Surf Club bar has the best beer garden I’ve ever come across.

This shot is a Brenizer Method image comprising over 30 individual images and has been stitched together in Photoshop. Our friends house is a block back from the beach at the bottom of the hill.

We had no eclipse viewing glasses so, stopping the camera down and looking at the eclipse on the live view screen gave us a great view of the eclipse that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

The installation has had an amazing amount of attention:

• Ai Weiwei fills Yorkshire chapel with symbols of his persecution
• Iron spirit: Ai Weiwei’s Yorkshire Sculpture Park takeover – in pictures
• Ai Weiwei in the Chapel, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
• Three current Ai Weiwei exhibitions display his wit and courage

Just like last time, I took as much video as I could in between listening to Trey’s commentaries and grabbing some HDR shots of my own. Watch the video below to see how Trey runs his photowalks and to see just how popular they are, even though London was its usual wet and cold best.

You can see Trey Ratcliff’s 2011 PhotoWalk video here, or watch this year’s below.

This year’s video has Trey Ratcliff singing along to Everything Is Awesome from the Lego Movie and, at one point, informing us that he has many enemies!?!!??

Thanks again Trey for all the time you spent with us on Saturday.

I spent far too long walking in an ever increasing spiral around this building.

I’ve been taking some catalogue shots for an online retailer that is expanding the range of clothes that it sells. After a couple of practice shoots it was clear I wasn’t getting the depth and dimension in the clothes that was needed to make them stand out. The problem, after moving the lights, adjusting the lights, increasing them, decreasing them, feathering them and directing them, was, that they were too big. I gradually moved from a 135cm Octabox down to Portalite softboxes, and then removing the diffusing material from the front of the softbox and using a silver deflector disc to bounce the light back into the bar silver softbox interior.

Using this harder light gives the contours and folds of the clothes shadows, that give the clothes depth. Moving away from the thought that the clothes had to be lit evenly and all over to show the viewer all of the details was the key. I was trying to give the best view of every part of the garment. Nicely, evenly lit. Clothes don’t look good like this.

This shoot was particularly easy, however. The family started off only a little reserved, but, they quickly got into it, and once they did almost every shot was a winner. Thanks for making it easy for me.

Glyn had set the task of “Best Bike Shot” for the Oxford, UK competition entry. I was actually quite disappointed when Glyn announced this. I studied photography in Oxford and my lecturer had two rules for all photography assignments, no graveyards and no bike shots. I honestly don’t think that much else stuck with me from this course, but the no bike shots rule did. It’s just too clichéd when you live in Oxford. What I did think I could do was turn it into a “Best Bike Shop” photo and see if this would impress Glyn. Oxford has a lot of bikes and a lot of bike shops, but, there’s a brand new shop just opened in the centre of town and it’s a big hit with the cyclists.

The shop has taken up the space of the old bookbinder’s workshop that has sat empty in St. Michael Street for years. It’s also looked like a great building and The Bike Zone have made a great job of it. I wandered up to the Cafe upstairs and it was packed full of yellow jerseyed, Lycra clad people with calves of steel sipping on cappuccinos before continuing their Saturday cycling.

It’s perhaps fortunate I couldn’t get a seat. I wandered back out into the street and immediately thought of the coffee craving Lycra clad cyclists dashing on their way, which made think of the slower shutter shot I could take. A motion blur panning shot of all the cyclists that dart about Oxford. I took a couple of test shots of the first cyclists that passed and then headed for sunnier spot with a better background. I made my way to Broad Street which is almost pedestrianised and would allow me to sit pretty much in the middle of the road. It is, as its name suggest very broad and was guaranteed to have a lot of sun one side or the other, and, I would probably be able to get some part of Balliol College in the background.

I sat myself in the road outside Castell & Sons, the Varsity Shop, which is just at the end of the public road and were the pedestrianised part of Broad Street begins, and made sure I was as close as possible to the people that cycled by. My motor drive would get 3 or 4 shots as they passed through a particularly sunny part of the road. My shots were taken at f16, 1/20 sec, ISO 100. I was using a 10-22mm EF-S lens and zooming a little depending on how far away the cyclists kept from me while I was practically lying in the road to get a low angle for the shot.

It was fun. More fun than I had first thought a “Best Bike Shot” task would be. And, a week or so later, the walk organiser choose my photo as the day’s winner. You can see his blog post announcing his selection on his blog here. This means my photo goes through as the regional winner as an entry in the main competition.

FYI, you can see some of the many other shots I took trying to work out the right angle, the right position in the frame and right focal length for this shot.