Tony Gay Photographer

Around the clock service

2014-04-13T22:27:00.001-07:00

This is the latest video we produced for Yarra Valley Water, filmed around Melbourne using a variety of cameras including the Sony EX3, Canon 5D MKii, and then edited using FCPX.

Wonthaggi 24 hour HPV Grand Prix

2014-03-23T01:07:00.001-07:00

The weekend of March 22 and 23 saw series two of the Victorian HPV Championships being run at Wonthaggi. This sport brings together primary school aged kids through to full grown adults as riders along with a raft of support personnel.

I photographed this event for the MtEliza Secondary College Racing Team, MERT, who had three vehicles entered in the race.

I love photographing events like this, the opportunities for great images are amazing, in addition to the action shots there is so much emotion around the pit area. With people psyching themselves up and also recovering from their ride it can get intense.

Post by Tony Gay Photographer.

2013-11-25T19:36:00.001-08:00

A weekend full of adrenaline and HPV's, nice one to top the weekend off was winning the RACV Energy Breakthrough Social Media Photography competition for this image.

and if you were wondering just what a HPV is...

A three wheeled recumbent trike with a fairing around it.

http://instagram.com/p/hFFK0AQoOY/

2013-06-25T18:07:00.000-07:00

Latest video from our studio, we filmed the interviews and edited together the program with materials provided by Horizon Golf Tours.

Mother's Day Video

2013-06-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

Latest piece I shot and edited for Myer. Half of the program was filmed alongside the stills campaign using the large softbox with modeling light cranked right up, the remainder was shot on location at the Myer head office in Docklands Melbourne, lit this using two Kino Flo Diva's. A great fun one to shoot, EX3, and edit, FCPX.

Chroma key in studio

2013-06-05T17:58:00.002-07:00

Just finished posting some videos of Norah Breekveldt, Author of the book, "Sideways to the Top" to Youtube and Vimeo.

We filmed Norah in a studio against a greenscreen and keyed in backgrounds as required for the eight different videos. A simple two light setup, a Lowel soft box from front left and a small focusable light from above and behind to give some separation and highlights in the hair, the green screen was stretched and lit only with the spill from the softbox.

Material World Behind the Scenes Video

2013-05-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent piece I filmed and edited for Myer, their Miss Shop Material World Collection.

Myer's Autumn Winter Collection 2013 highlights package

2013-02-28T18:00:00.002-08:00

Latest program we shot and edited for Myer.

A great gig, kicking off at 8am and wrapping 22.5 hours later at 5.30am shooting time lapse with the GoPro, behind the scenes, Red Carpet highlights and interviews, parade highlights. Shot by myself, Christian and Dao on Sony EX1, EX3, Sony FS700 and the GoPro Hero 3, edited by Mark Seabrook and myself.

Shooting for Myer

2013-02-26T17:56:00.002-08:00

A few programs I have recently filmed and edited for Myer.

Recent video promo for Myer

2013-01-31T19:14:00.001-08:00

Recently I filmed a furniture promo for Myer, we did this in conjunction with the stills shoot for their latest furniture catalogue. This program I filmed one day and due to another Myer shoot had someone else shoot the second day, I then edited the final program together.

2012-10-28T23:28:00.001-07:00

A behind the scenes video I recently filmed and edited for Myer Miss Shop.

St Leonards College House Music Competition Photographs

2012-08-10T21:56:00.002-07:00

Forster - Images by Digital Image

An Annual Report Published

2011-11-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

Following on from a previous post about An Annual Report shoot, here are some of the images selected by the client and designer and as used in the Australian Synchrotron 2011 Annual Report.

2011 Hockey Shoot

2011-10-02T23:45:00.000-07:00

Each year I shoot images for the Mornington Peninsula Jockey Club Year book, this involves shooting action and group photographs of each of the teams in the club, some 28 teams, but then I also photograph as many of the finals matches that I can get to.

An Annual Report

2011-09-08T21:43:00.000-07:00

I have just wrapped up three days of shooting for the Australian Synchrotron's Annual Report, three very solid days on location, but oh wow! I have had the privilege of shooting there a number of times now, including last years Annual Report, and am continually amazed, everywhere you turn there is something to catch the eye and imagination. I have only myself to blame if I was to come away from an environment like this without the shots.

Major Projects

2011-08-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

Continuing our documentary shoots of both the Northern Sewer Project and Melbourne Main Sewer Replacement, it is a fascinating process. These are a couple of stills shot along the way.

NSP. Steel worker cutting the steel reinforcing in place for the lining of the Brearley Reserve Shaft

MMSR. The Yarra River Crossing, down under the Yarra welding plates in place ready for the GRP linings to be inserted.

51 Location portraits

2011-07-18T02:22:00.000-07:00

I have just wrapped up shooting 51 environmental location portraits for Melbourne Water. Every couple of years they recognise their people who have served the organisation for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years with a commemorative book, a great idea, giving something back to their dedicated staff and also creating a tool to promote the organisation as a long term career option for their new staff.

The brief was to capture the recipients in an environment that reflects something of who they are and where they work. I travelled more than 2000km all over Melbourne for this one, including Tarago Reservoir, Maroondah Dam, Sugarloaf Reservoir, Eastern and Western Treatment Plants and a few other locations such as Head Office.

One of the nice things about this assignment was getting to spend some time with each person getting to know them, all spoke positively about their time and experiences with MMBW and Melbourne Water. I felt it was a privilege to photograph these people.

Below is a selection of a few images.

Front Page

2011-05-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

OK it is just a Local Magazine, but given that I am not in the photojournalist side of photography seeing an image of mine as a cover shot is always nice.

This image was part of a series I recently photographed for Albert Park College. This newly opened college is working very hard to attract students and professional photographs have certainly helped with raising their profile in the community.

The initial brief for the photo shoot did not include images for media release, however with a library of high quality images the college has been in a position to do press releases and very quickly respond to requests from media for photographs. My brief for the shoot was quite comprehensive as our studio was also commissioned to create their website, signage and a variety of brochures and documents, with so many end products in mind media was simple for them to accommodate.

Albert Park College being so new is in the enviable position of being able to approach the construction of the school and the delivery of its curriculum with current technology being integrated in all areas. Each of the students at the college has an Apple iPad and content, home work, even blogs are all designed and structured with this environment in mind. Visit their website we designed and manage to learn more about the college and to see some more of my photographs in use.

Shooting digital stills and video? Backup!

2011-05-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

Many an article and post written on this topic, but after today I thought I would just add my thoughts to this.

Now that we are shooting stills and video straight to disc there is no tape or film to fall back on, we have to be organised and backup and archive.

The difference?

Backups
Our back up is relevant to our live projects and is in two forms, an hourly occurrence of our working files and at time of ingestion we back up all our digital image and vision files.

Archiving
Our archiving process, this is our chance to consolidate projects and remove them from the system, they are moved onto two external drives, one kept in the studio for ready access and the other drive offsite in case of the worst.

Does it take long, yes and no, the majority of the process occurs in the background and allows me to work over the top of it, albeit with a hit to performance of the system. The copy process takes a while, identifying what to copy, pretty quick and easy.

Quantity
Well the thing that prompted me to write this today was the fact that I am moving over 1TB of data around, archiving jobs off the system and backing up vision from a shoot. How often do I move this quantity, probably monthly, high definition video takes up a huge amount of disc space. How many drives, sitting next to me are over 30 drives, giving around 40-50TB of storage, this is then duplicated offsite as well.

Where to
We decided on using an external Hard Drive solution, whilst it may not have the benefits of tape it does have other key benefits,
simplicity of implementation;
ease of use;
data is available by simply plugging in the drive;

For us this last point was the winner, for us being able to access material quickly is critical, clients will often call asking for a job to be accessed, for any number of reasons, and for it to be turned around quickly. In reality even if they were not asking for it quickly the fact that the jobs are on hard discs reduces the amount of time it takes for us to reinstate a project making better use of out time.

Is this system infallible?
NO, NO, NO, hard drives will fail, note that I said will, that they do is not questionable, it is a matter of when not if. This is an additional reason for the offsite drive, when the drive in the studio eventually does fail we will bring in the offsite and make another two copies immediately, discarding the second drive.

Cost effective?
Yes it is, now, when we were tape based for video, no it was not, but then all vision was backed up on the original tape anyway.

The future
As network speeds and capacities increase and costs reduce I will move the backup and archiving to a cloud solution, this is already a viable option for the average home user with a few GB to look after, but the video that we now all shoot to disc based cameras, well that will still be a couple of years away.

New website

2011-05-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

A website at a minimum is a brochure for a business and like a brochure needs to be updated regularly, at Digital Image we have just updated our site, new work, clients and services. Head over, have a look and let me know what you think.

The site has been planned by Wayne and Mark, with Mark doing the design and programming for the site and the majority of the imagery being mine.

For us the public side of the site is there to promote our services, though the behind the scenes gets far more traffic and use. We have set up secure upload and downloads areas for our clients and this service is invaluable being able to deliver design, video and photographic work through this interface. For our corporate clients to also upload material to us in a simple secure environment is also essential.

In the studio we all have dropbox accounts and use these to sync between our different machines, this system could work with our clients but for many of them in the corporate environment, in addition access to this type of service is restricted by their IT departments there is concern about the security of their data.

That said, the vast majority of our photographic work goes up onto our dedicated photographic site hosted by Photoshelter. We worked for a few ears with having images on our website in a gallery format, the restriction being the inability to search these images. For us Photoshelter is the ideal solution for delivery to our clients and our clients love it. In addition to our own site we have also set up two client dedicated sites one for Melbourne Water and another for Goodman Fielder. More on those another time.

Late night shoot

2011-05-03T23:03:00.000-07:00

Monday night I was on location from 10.30pm through to about 1.30am at the South Wharf site of the MMSR project filming the lifting out of the TBM from the shaft.

Lifting a 50 tonne piece of equipment was made to look easy by these guys.

Shooting in such low light conditions is challenging for both stills and video and when asked to shoot both on the one night, well something has to take priority. Working with Andrew we set up a locked off video camera with a wide shot of the location and let it roll for two hours, the idea here being a sped up shot in post.

Between the two of us we then shot a variety of stills and video, I ended up on top of the crane for the lift to the truck and was able to shot full HD video on the Canon 5D mkII. Fantastic having this flexibility.

Whilst the video is do-able handheld in these conditions, shooting stills with a low ISO requires the use of a tripod, this just meant discussing with the engineers what was going to occur and then planning out where to be for the best angle. Moving quickly with tripods around a construction site is not particularly safe, better to be deliberate.

On location, group photos

2011-05-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was filming down the bottom of a shaft where a Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM, had broken through. The precision that these guys work to is fascinating, a 3.2m cutting head, driven about 800m underground, through silt, clay and rock, and they are then able to place it within millimetres.

I was there to film the breakthrough team photographs being taken by local photographer Christian Pearson and to shoot an interview with one of the tunnellers for the documentary.

A few tips for photographing large groups.

1. Bring artificial lighting, in this environment using two remotely operated speedlights mounted on stands set one on each side is the only real option. Flash on camera is not an option!

2. Have an assistant. As the photographer you can do a bit of organising on the ground but after that you wan to be up at camera position. An assistant who understands your language and what the final product is to be will not only speed up the process but also give a more professional image.

3. Have something for the back row to stand on and a row of seats. As this shot shows quite often location will prohibit either of these, the best thing to do here is to have everyone standing turn side on slightly, so they are facing in towards then centre. Doing this allows you to make a more compact composition and to fit more people in to a limited space.

4. Shoot more than one, start safe and then get some emotion.

As I was shooting video I thought I would show you a grab from the edit suite.

Show Reel

2011-04-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

An overview of some of the corporate video work we have done for a variety of past and present clients.

AIPP VPPY Print Award Judging

2011-04-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

I have always loved going along to the judging of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) Australian Professional Photography Awards, (APPA), being able to see so many quality images in the one place and to hear well educated discussions on those images is great. Of course with the awards being moved from state to state the opportunity to attend is not always available.

This year the introduction of live streaming of the Print Judging has taken things to a new level. Rather than sitting in the room with a small pair of binoculars trying to view the print, we now have full screen viewing with clear audio, nice. OK there is the occasional drop out, but then I have been known to "drop out" of the room during judging anyway.

Working as a photographer we do not often get to work with other photographers, yes we see many images every day in the press and on the web, but the opportunity to hear our peers speak is wonderful. The debate between judges is healthy and reflects that there is a healthy respect for good work and constructive criticism for those developing.

Faces in Apple's Aperture 3.1

2010-11-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

Wow, I have read a few negative comments on this feature and only turn it on to update when my machine is not in use, so I thought it was about time some positive was fed back.

Faces is a feature of Apples Aperture software that analyses every photograph for faces and then categorises them, allowing you to tag people and then have it find more faces that it believes matches your tags. It takes a fair while for the software to analyse the images and fair enough, I mean I have some group photographs with 50 plus people in them.

Well twice within the last week I have been saved hours by the faces feature. One company I shoot for, 44,000 images over the last 6 years, contacted me asking for all the images of two of their exec's that I have.

Now to manually go through each image looking for faces, including groups, general shots of audiences and so forth would take forever. Faces allowed me to find all the images, and I do mean all, from the portraits to the out of focus and side on in the background. Awesome, especially that I was able to do each within three hours, manually to do this in three hours, I would have had to view 244 images per minute!

From the obvious where the name is in the shot...

To the not so obvious...

The nice thing is that next time I need an image of either of these people, the metadata is now embedded and the search only two or three seconds!

I am impressed, okay it may take a machine with some serious grunt to achieve this, my guess though is that in another two generations of computers this task will be even quicker and achievable on the most basic of new computers.