Shadows are as interesting as the light. Chiaroscuro is a term used in photography, as well as cinema and painting, that literally means “light-dark” and originates from the Italian Renaissance. The shadows help define the image, making the two dimensional appear three dimensional.

The idea for this shoot was to have the model, Saori, emerging into the light from the shadows. To get that effect, I used a black seamless background, making sure that the key light did not spill onto it by keeping them well-separated. I started with a large gridded softbox close to Saori, on camera right to light the portraits and close-ups, highlighting Julia’s makeup work. By moving the softbox in very close, the light falls off quickly so the opposite side of her face is quite a bit darker than the side with the light. To control the shadow’s darkness I used a large white foamcore panel and a silver disk reflector for fill light.

For the full body shots, I really wanted to get the shadowy look, so I used a more focused light – a gridded strobe on a boom in front and above Saori. For an interesting background, I put a fog machine and another strobe to backlight the smoke/fog behind Saori. For some of the shots, I used a blue gel on the strobe to make a blue smoke effect. With this set-up, Saori’s face was well lit and her body gradually became darker, fading into blackness.

Post-processing was done with Lightroom 3.3 and Photoshop CS5.

Credits:
Inspired modelling by Saori Sloan
Beautiful peacock themed makeup by Julia Lockley

I have since stopped tethering whenever possible, mainly because I do not like the restriction of being attached by the USB cable during a shoot. There are also a few other reasons for not tethering. I had an incident with my E-510 when it was tethered. I stepped on the cable when it was attached to the camera and the force bent the pins of the camera’s USB socket, rendering it unusable. The same socket is also used for downloading images from the camera, and for operation of the remote control. I could have it repaired, although the expense is probably not worth it because the E-510 is an older camera body.

I now own an E-30, which also has a similar USB socket and must use Olympus Studio 2 for the Mac for tethering. I don’t want to risk damaging the body, so will only tether using something like the JerkStopper or other device to protect the camera.

Another problem that I encountered with Olympus Studio 2 was software crashes. During nearly every shoot, at least once Olympus Studio 2 would freeze and only work again after rebooting my Mac. As a Mac user I rarely encounter this situation — normally it’s easy to force quit and restart the application without rebooting. Rebooting and initializing everything takes some time, and is not good during a studio shoot with clients and models on set! I generally take a break to sort it out, but it does waste valuable studio and talent time, and stops the flow of the shoot.

Olympus Studio 2 has a great time lapse feature, however, I recently discovered that time lapse does not work with Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or OS 10.7 (Lion). It does work with 10.5 (Leopard). I checked with Olympus customer support, and they responded:

Unfortunately the Time Lapse function in the Mac version of Olympus Studio 2.3 no longer functions. This occurred after an APPLE OS update awhile back. But because Studio is officially discontinued there is no patch to address this.

Time lapse is not built into my camera, but I can do time lapses with an intervalometer, or using a clever hack with an eraser and rubber band!

There is a big need for better tethering support for Olympus E-System cameras for Mac users. According to the forums that I’ve read, it would require Olympus to licence the software development kit (SDK) to third-party developers which they have done for Windows but not for Mac. That could allow the Olympus camera tethering with other applications such as Lightroom or Capture One. But at this time that does not seem to be likely.

Here are some photos of model Kristy with ganguro makeup by Mika Does Makeup. The outfits were provided by stylist Joanna Keller. Kristy was perfect for the shoot and is very familiar with the Harajuku fashion scene. The makeup was also perfect and the outfits put together by Joanna were great. The shoot was a lot of fun!

We did a couple more Harajuku inspired looks, which I will post soon!

If you are interested in trying the ganguro look, here is a very good tutorial on YouTube:

For more more information about Ganguro, check out the always informative Wikipedia!

The event was limited to 24 photographers, so we were split into 4 groups and spent some time with each couple. We had 2 indoor sets where we took advantage of the studio’s cool backgrounds and beautiful natural light. We also had 2 outdoor shoots where we used strobes as well as the natural light. It was a cloudy, cool day but there was some nice light later in the day. It was pretty cold for the models, but they did a great job and were a lot of fun to work with.

Thanks to Jason Ho and Derek Cheng (Pure White Studios), Dan and Kat Stone (Stone Photo), and Chris and Gina Chong (Butter Studios) for organizing the event and for providing excellent tips and advice during the shoot. This was the first time for this event and it went very smoothly. I’m hoping there will be another one soon!

Here are some more blogs with photos by some of the other photographers who attended the shootout. It’s interesting to see the styles of the different photographers who were photographing the same models under the same conditions.

Cecilia Flaming Photography

Denise Lin Photography

C. Williams Photography

Vivid Moments Photography

Aaron Aubrey Photography

Neighborhood Demolition, Fangbang Lu, 2006

Langara College hosted a presentation by Greg Girard on October 14, 2011. It was fascinating to see the work of four decades of his photography and hear the stories behind the images.

Greg Girard is a Vancouver-born photographer who moved to Hong Kong in the 1982 to work for the BBC News. Prior to moving to Hong Kong, he spent his early years in Vancouver and recently published a book of his work from 1973-1986, titled In the Near Distance (2010). In 1987, he left the BBC and became a freelance photographer. He moved to Shanghai in 1998 to cover China for news magazines. Girard has photographed on assignment for National Geographic, and his work is shown in galleries in Toronto, Vancouver and Berlin.

The presentation covered his early work in Vancouver, Tokyo and Hong Kong, his coverage of the civil war in Sri Lanka, as well as fascinating stories from China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

A couple of the highlights for me were the Phantom Shanghai and Kowloon Walled City projects. Each project took about five years to complete. The photographs were taken in his spare time between assignments for magazines – true passion projects!

Phantom Shanghai

While he lived in Shanghai, he photographed the rapid modernization of the city. Shanghai had many old European-style buildings from the colonial era, and in the 1920′s was the financial and cultural capital of China – known as the Pearl of the East. However, after the war and the revolution in 1949, the old building were taken over and converted to public housing and government buildings. After the cultural revolution, the city started to become modernized and the old districts were demolished to make room for development projects. Girard’s book Phantom Shanghai (2007) documents this massive change over a 5 year period. His work shows the wear, decay and textures of the old buildings juxtaposed against modern architecture. Many of the photographs were shot at night and capture the lights and colours of the neon signs and city lights. Most of the old buildings are now gone, but are still preserved in the photographs.

House on Yuyuan Lu, 2001

Lane 195 Urumuqi Lu, 2004

Kowloon Walled City

Another amazing project that Girard worked on was City of Darkness; Life in Kowloon Walled City (1993), which documents the incredible densely populated autonomous section of Hong Kong. For a few decades, the Walled City was dominated by triads which controlled prostitution, gambling and drugs. The Walled City was demolished in 1993-1994.

Walled City Exterior, 1987

West Side Street, 1989

There are many more images from these projects, and four others, on Greg Girard’s website to check out if you want to see more.

Credits:

Makeup & Hair: Rhi Yee

Models: Sandra Dario and Charlene Sierakowski

It’s October and summer is long gone in Vancouver, but here are some reminders of the warmth of summer from a photoshoot that I did in July. The shoot featured bright colours, sunglasses and wigs and the beautiful and talented models Sandra and Charr with makeup and hair by Rhi Yee.

I also used the opportunity to test out my Olympus E-30′s multiple exposure mode:

The multiple exposure mode gave some pretty cool images, so I will be doing more of them in future shoots!

Here’s a gallery with more images from the shoot if you want to check them out.

The body painting included UV fluorescent paint as well as non-UV paint. To capture both types, I used black lights mixed with strobes. To make the UV paint glow, I used six 40 watt fluorescent black light tubes, and a 400 watt UV cannon. I surrounded Claudia with the black light tubes, and positioned the UV cannon to the right of the camera, in front of the Claudia.

I also used strobes to light the fog and Claudia’s face or highlight the body painting. The strobes were White Lightnings with grids and reflectors, triggered with CyberSyncs.

To see more photos from this shoot, check out this set on Flickr (Warning: some of the photos are marked as “moderate” on Flickr due to partial nudity). Here is a video slideshow from the shoot (Warning: partial nudity – not safe for work).

Click to view video slideshow (Warning: partial nudity)

Credits

Soundtrack: Dreamland 2011 by Crock - check out their psytrance tracks on Jamendo.

Meghan Thomas:  I have worked with Meghan many times and love her creativity and artistic skill. She always comes prepared to the shoot with lots of ideas, designs and plans for the body painting, as well as being an easy going and fun person to work with.

Claudia Riley: Claudia is a skilled model and she is also a dancer with excellent body awareness and control. It is especially challenging for black light body painting photography. First she was required to sit through about 4 hours of body painting, then pose during variety of unconventional lighting set-ups, many requiring her to to be very still due to the slow shutter speeds. She was great to work with, patient and collaborated to get some amazing shots!

A photographer friend of mine, Jenny Chen, was visting Vancouver so we decided to collaborate on a photoshoot and use the opportunity to try to create some cinemagraphs. It was the first time either of us had tried this. I followed an excellent video tutorial, which demonstrates how to create cinemagraphs using Photoshop CS5 Extended.

Here are 4 cinemagraphs from that shoot:

Credits:

Models: Taryn Emelia and Marina F Mendes

Makeup: Megs War Paint

Have you tried creating a cinemagraph? Feel free to post a link in the comment section!

Each year the Vancouver Zombie Walk gets bigger and more popular. According to the Facebook event page, there were over 6,000 confirmed attendees. I don’t know how many zombies actually showed up, but I suspect more than that!

Many of the zombies also had cameras and smartphones, but with all the amazing costumes and special effect makeup, the event also attracted a lot of photographers and videographers. I was very interested in the gear that they were using! I saw a few people with HD-DSLR rigs and several with off-camera flash set-ups. Others had speedlites with various attachments to help diffuse the light. The flash set-ups were a good way to reduce the contrast by filling in the shadows. I saw one photographer with a vintage twin lens reflex camera (a Rolleiflex I think). There was some very impressive gear!

For those who may be interested, here’s some information about the photos that I took:

I used an Olympus E-30 with the Olympus 12-60 mm lens for wide angle and the 50-200 mm for zoom.

It was a bright sunny day, so I tried to find shady areas and expose for the shade. I also used backlighting and exposed for the shadow side of the zombies using centre-weighted mode. I had the in-body image stabilization and face detection on. I haven’t used face detection very often. I found that it sometimes focused on the wrong place, so I probably will avoid it in the future.  I set the camera to continuous (burst) shooting mode and continuous autofocus. That way I could fire off a bunch of action shots when a zombie started running towards me!

For lighting, I wanted to keep it simple so went with available light only. I used ISO 200 and a wide aperture (around f/2.8 to f/3.5) and a fast shutter speed to minimize the motion blur but also isolate the zombies from the background due to the shallow depth of field. I used the fastest shutter speeds that I could to minimize any blur caused by camera shake.

Here’s my gallery of Vancouver Zombie walk photos on Facebook. If you were at the zombie walk, you might be in the gallery – so feel free to tag yourself and your friends!

Also, feel free to share any links to your zombie walk photos as well as any tips about how you photographed the event. I’m looking forward to Zombiewalk 2012!

The Cos & Effect anime cosplay convention was held at the Student Union Building at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver on August 13-14, 2011. I was there on August 14, 2011 to take some photos of the amazing costumes. To see more photos, check out this album on Facebook and the  Cos & Effect forum on IRLEvents.