“Sometimes I stay up so late that I have my morning coffee before I go to bed.”

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light."

“No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back”

“A human being is only breath and shadow.”

"Shoot the kids and drown the neighbours! We’ve got a winner!"

"Tempers are wearing thin. Let’s hope some robot doesn’t kill everybody."

P.S. I know I haven’t been blogging as much as I should have been but I am back on it now! Promise!

Link: KymEllis.com ~ Coffee

When 6pm rolled around I don’t think any one was expecting the amount of people that turned up! It was nuts, all the Droplets sold out in 58 minutes! Fifty Fifty was jam packed as was the gallery downstairs.

Anyway, the real reason you are here is to see the photos I took right? Yeah, I thought so. I took around 200 which I will try and get up in some sort of gallery this week, but for now here are some of my favourite shots.

I had an awesome day, & it was good to put some faces to names, I didn’t manage to say hi to everyone but it’s not personal, I was busy taking photos! :P

Keep your eyes on my flickr for more uploads.

• Droplet Launch, Bristol

  Saturday 6th February

  The talented Mr Strange (aka Jam Factory) is launching his second series of the awesome Droplets! I’ll be down to shoot some artist portraits, promo shots as well as generally shooting the launch. If you are there come say hi to me & expect to be shot!

• xBox Man Date

  Sunday 7th February

  I’ll be having some quality Call of Duty time on the xBox with John O’Nolan on Sunday, if anyone else fancies pwning some n00bs with us then let me know.

  I had to include this to stop John from crying like a little girl.

• Photo Shoot

  Sunday 7th February

  I’m doing a shoot with my friend Leah again! Woo! She is absolutely one of my favourite models to photograph such, a natural in front of the camera. The plan at the moment is to do a moody night time fashion style shoot, hopefully that will work out well for me.

  You may have seen some of the shots I’ve done with her before. If not go look. The shoot is for part two of my ‘How I Shoot’ posts, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the not too distant future & if you haven’t read part one, you can do that here.

• My Birthday

  Wednesday 10th Feb

  Yep, I’ll be turning 27! I’m not one for making a big deal out of my birthday, they are pretty irrelevant so I’ll just be spending some time with Kym & having a quiet meal with the family. Oh I’ll also be hitting Coffee Aroma, which is my usual coffee hang out & the only place to get a real coffee in Lincoln!

• Speak The Web, Leeds

  Thursday 11th February

  Yep I’m heading up to the Leeds leg of Speak The Web, it should be great, I’m really looking forward to hearing the likes of Andy Clarke, Chris Mills & Stuart Smith. As well as meeting up with interweb friends Sam Hardacre & Oliver Ker.

  I’m going to head over to Leeds plenty early so I can go grab a coffee from Opposite Café (Blenheim Terrace) (and yes I know it’s a trek out of town) first & take some photos of the city. I haven’t been to Leeds for quite a few years but from what I remember it’s quite pretty. Anyone else hitting this event?

• London Baby

  Thursday 12-14th February

  Weekends in London are fun, especially with Kym. We are planning on hitting 4 of the best indie coffee shops while we are down:

  • Tina, We Salute You (King Henry’s Walk )
  • Monmouth Coffee Company (Monmouth Street, Covent Garden)
  • LJ Coffee House (Winnett Street, Soho)
  • Nude Espresso (Hanbury Street)

  There will also be plenty of sushi consumed & as always photographs taken! If you’re in London that weekend too, let me know. We’ll get coffee or sushi! (As long as you aren’t some sort of a mental freak!)

What’s everyone else doing this week? Let me know in the comments!

I went to get the film processed as soon as I got back, but the labs I went to told me that they would have to be sent away & because of Christmas there would be a long wait. So I waited till post Christmas & took it into the Lincoln branch of Jessops. I thought taking it in after would minimise the delay & reduce the chance of them losing the film (Paranoid).

I kinda wish I hadn’t taken it to Jessops – it took them over 3 weeks to process it, they didn’t have a clue where my film was at any point and the staff were unhelpful when I was trying to get them to chase it for me.

I think it’s safe to say the development process of Delta 3200 has put me off shooting it for a while, back to the Fuji Xtra 400. I think I am so used to the speed and convenience of digital that if I can’t get a film developed & onto my computer within a day I can’t stand it! I think I am mumbling now, just check out the photos, let me know what you think:

It took some doing to convince myself to part with the amount of cash that an L series lens costs. I was eyeing up the 100mm f/2 USM (not the f/2.8 macro) and I probably would have been happy with that lens if I hadn’t tried out some L series glass in LCE. After that I knew I wouldn’t be settling for anything less.

I am SO glad I did make that jump, the Canon EF 135mm f/2 USM is an exceptionally sharp lens, I thought my 50mm f/1.4 USM was sharp, but it is blown away by this. Even wide open at F/2 it just blows my mind with the level of detail it picks up and the depth of field gets silly small. I took the shot below at f/4 and uploaded the full size image to show off the detail picked up, you should definatly check out the face area, you can see the texture in the paint, every speck of dust, all of it! Take note that this image is 2922px x 4386px and about 2mb eek, still go look at it.

This lens suites my style of shooting so well, if you have ever ventured onto my flickr you’ll have seen low DOF portraits with a healthy helping of bokeh, this lens is already helping me take that to the next level. I’ve only had it week but it has quite possibly ruined me for all other lenses. Telephoto Primes Rock My Socks!

My Tools

So these are the core tools that I have in my bag when I go out to do these sort of shots. I found it really hard to know what bits to pick up when I was getting into off camera flash photography so I wanna explain some of the options you have.

Lights

Aside from the camera arguably the most important part of the strobists tool kit. There are loads of options here depending on budget. I use the Canon 430ex, other options are the Canon 580ex, Nikon SB-900 Nikon SB-600, Nikon SB-24… the list goes on. Vivitar & Sunpak make some cheaper flash units that might be investigating if you are on a tight budget but you do get what you pay for. The key things you are looking for is that the power can be adjusted, you don’t need to worry about a flashes automatic capabilities, unless you are willing to part with some serious cash for the new Pocket Wizard ControlTL triggers, I shoot with all my flashes on full manual.

Triggers & Receivers

So really good triggers are really expensive, the real industry leaders here are Pocket Wizard – they are reliable & have an insane range. But they aren’t for me. I just can’t justify spending the amount of money on them that I would need to. A set of two go for £320 and you need one per flash and one for the camera, that would put me out £640 for me to run my current set up! I can’t justify that. I currently use the very cheap but popular PT-04 triggers, you can pick the newly designed ones up from amazon around £20 for a trigger & receiver kit. They do misfire some times & the range is no where near as good as the PWs but for the price they are great.

I have recently been looking at the Seculine Twinlink T2D kit, which seems to be something that fills the gap between the cheap triggers & the expensive ones. I think some time in the near future I will be making the upgrade to these.

Hotshoe With PC Port

I don’t connect my flash directly to the receiver, I actually sit my flash into a hotshoe with a PC port on the side, I then velcro my receiver to the top of my flash & run a cable. Mainly because I don’t trust the cheap plastic that the receivers are made from, I have already lost one flashgun because of it falling off a light stand, I don’t want to lose any more thank you very much. The hotshoes I have are made of metal and hardened plastic they also have a locking nut on them which means I can get them really tight on the light & umbrella bracket. They aren’t going anywhere! Mine are pretty similar to these bad boys but I sure as hell didn’t pay £10 each for them! I think they were around £2.50 each, totally worth it!

Light & Umbrella Bracket

This one is pretty easy, there are a few on the market, they all the do the same thing really. I have these ones, they hold an umbrella & a flash in place nicely but they do require that the flash, or hotshoe if you are using one, screw/lock in to be held securely in place.

Light Stand

Another straight forward one, you can’t really go wrong. As long as they go up to a decent height & aren’t going to fall over you are safe. I use the Konig brand ones which are available from Amazon for just under £12. But there are plenty of other options.

Update: This evening I put together a diy light stand out of some old bits I found in my dads garage, you can check it out here.

Umbrellas

Umbrellas get a little more complicated. Firstly the bigger the umbrella the more diffused the light will be. Secondly the bigger the umbrella the more power you will need to put through it. When using speedlights a good guide size to go for is between 60-100cm. There are 2 main types, shoot through and reflective, I like to keep both handy they are pretty inexpensive so it can’t hurt to have a seclection.

Shoot throughs are the white ones, you point the umbrella at the subject and pop. They also spill light everywhere though, so you don’t have quite as much control over the light, but it will spread it out better. This one would do a fine job.

Reflective umbrellas are the black ones, you point the umbrella away from the subject and the flash into the umbrella. Then the flash fires into the umbrella and all the light shines out, these will still give you the same soft light as a shoot through, but you can control where it goes a bit better. Something like this should do you.

Actually there is totally a third type, this is the kind I use pretty much all the time. I call them umbrella boxes, because they are sort of a softbox & an umbrella all rolled up into one – seriously awesome. I picked mine up from ebay & never looked back.

Camera & Lens

Use what you’ve got… that’s all there is to it. Nikon, Canon, Sony – whatever, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you’ve got a hotshoe on the top that you can get a trigger into then you are good to go. If you want to get a really dramatic bokeh effect though you are going to need a lens that hits the right sort of Fs! The lower the number the better the bokeh! Both Canon & Nikon produce a lens dubbed the nifty fifty, these are 50mm prime lenses that go down to F1.8 & retail for around £100. Really worth having in your camera bag.

Did you find this useful? Let me know by leaving a comment. Or maybe you use some different kit, I’d love to hear about it so get involved.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series ~ “How I Shoot, Part 2 ~ The Shoot”. Find out when it’s published by following me on twitter.

On the 2nd of January 2009, being freshly paid for a freelance project, I wandered down to my local branch of LCE to see what they had on offer. Lucky for me they had just the camera I wanted, a Canon 450D with the 18-55 kit lens, I also managed to get them to throw in a Canon 430ex Speedlite for a very reasonable price. It wasn’t until this day that it crossed my mind to do a 365 project. I thought it would be a great way to keep the camera in my hand & speed up the learning process. Conveniently I had been taking some photos the day before on my FX-30, meaning I could run my 365 from January 1st to December 31st (It just felt right).

I instantly fell in love with my new 450D, she went every where with me & it didn’t take me long to start picking up extra bits for her, like the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens & grip. Around February I found myself getting a hunger for a film camera, I got a 35mm Fisheye Lomo for my birthday & on the 20th of February I picked up a 1983 Canon AE-1 from a camera stall at a local market. Shooting film is fantastic, I realised how much it makes you value each photo. I think I soon translated that, at least to some degree, to my digital photography.

It also didn’t take me long to get interested in off camera flash, aka Strobist photography. I’m a bit of a control freak, so being able to set up all the light in a scene really appealed to me. But holy shit, that stuffs confusing for a n00b! Seriously, I spent hours & hours reading EVERYTHING I could find on the internet trying to make sense of any of it. There is certainly a lot more information about it on the web now than there was 10 months ago. The first product to aid my strobist adventure was the Canon ST-E2, which is an infrared transmitter capable of firing any of the current range of Canon speedlites while retaining the ETTL system. I quickly found that the ST-E2 (That name just rolls off the tongue) was quite limiting, being infrared it relies on line-of-sight & it doesn’t have a huge amount of range.

So I did some more research & got some radio transmitters, these gave me range but meant that I had to run any flashes on manual. That was ok, at this point I was already making sure I was taking every photo with my camera on full manual. Manual equals control, Rick likes that, in fact now when I use my ST-ET I use the flash on manual just to get that extra level of control. Light stands & light modifiers were the next logical step for me, umbrellas made the most sense as they were easy to get hold of & affordable. Since then I’ve had quite a few different umbrellas but recently I picked up some pretty large umbrella boxes which I really love. They like a softbox, but in umbrella form — awesome.

At the beginning of June an old family friend, who just happens to be a photographer, invited me out to a studio shoot he was doing. He also said that if brought someone pretty there would be time to set up the studio lights & shoot them. I knew just the person, my friend Leah, she’d done some modelling in past & one of her friends is a make up artist. They both came along & we had a really great time. I learnt loads & got some nice shots. It really whet my appetite for portrait photography – who would have thought, someone as antisocial as me would love taking photos of people as much as I do.

I never really intended to shoot live music, the thought hadn’t even entered my mind, until my friend Sarge rang me about Groomfest (An annual Lincoln music festival). He was quite insistent that I would shoot it… & you don’t say no to Sarge. It was a two day event at a local pub, a big marquee was set up in the car park with a stage. Some 25 bands performed – I shot them all. For my first time shooting music I was pretty happy with myself, or as happy as I get, I actually really enjoyed it & since have shot quite a lot of music locally.

About two thirds of the way through the year things started to become very hard work so I tried to give the project more structure by mixing in smaller projects, the first of which was Project 50 which I did with one of my bimbo gal pals we even made a website after we completed it – Fifty Of Fifty. I also did a week of self portraits. Which was harder work than you might think, not only was it a challenge to set the camera up, with lighting, focus etc… but it was also a challenge for me to step to the other side of the lens, I wasn’t the biggest fan of having my photo taken but now I’m pretty ok with it.

I also started a non time line based set which I am calling “Quotos“. I love photography & I love typography combining the two made a lot of sense. I was planing on doing a Quoto for my final photo, but it didn’t work out. A set I will be continuing to expand, at a steady rate, for the foreseeable future.

In October I made the decision to swap my Canon 450D to a prosumer level Canon 50D. Don’t get me wrong the 450D is a great camera & I would recommend it to anyone getting into photography but I felt I would benefit from the upgrade. The 50D has a much better sensor, handles low light better, bla bla bla the list goes on & I am really happy with it, well until I can get my hands on a 5D MkII.

The whole project has been incredibly hard work, motivation has probably been my biggest enemy in this. It is so hard to take a consistantly good photo day after day, it’s even harder to come up with that photo. My 2nd has been time – when I am busy with work, or have other things on it’s amazing how quickly the day can escape you. Sometimes I ended up with a slightly sub par photo, but I still somehow managed to hit that shutter button every day.

So over all I am very happy I’ve done the project but it’s no secret that I’ve got pretty sick of it. I have learnt a huge amount over the year, I think you can see that if you look over photos as a whole. The question is where do I go from here? What frequency will I be producing photos now that I’m not forced/required/committed to doing one daily? Honestly – I have no idea, all I can tell you is that I am in love with photography & I have more projects planned for myself. But from now I will be taking on non-time-based photography projects for example – I will be carrying on my Quotos & I also plan to start a project called 50 Strangers. So I might have a break for a little while, but keep your eyes on my flickr because it doesn’t end here.

This is also my first post as part of Project52, so I will be trying to do 1 blog post a week for the whole of 2010… yes I know I’m a sucka!

If you want to keep up with my photos & my bloggings I’d thoroughly suggest following me on twitter.