I had the oppertunity to get out to london to the Ally Pally to witness some of the top BMX riders in the world compete in the Red Bull Empire Of Dirt. Was an amazing experience and i think i produced my best work ever. Here it is.
Latest
Woodland riders round 2 video
Heres a video i made and cut for the Tavistock Woodland Riders Round 2 a little while ago.
Paper Anchor Bedroom Sessions
Heres a video I shot for Paper Anchor to get some exposure for him by shooting a live acoustic video. It’s the first time I have ever done anything like this s it was a very steep learning curve. I used multiple angles to make it slightly more interesting than a straight forward one angle performance video. The shooting of the video was fun but the editing was very hard. Lining up mouth and hand movements to the music took a very long time but I enjoyed the challenge.
Sometimes those risks pay off!
Last night i returned to the Cavern in Exeter to witness one of the best performances I’ve seen in months. I was expecting a good show but what i saw was nearing perfection.
I took what some would say is a bit of a crazy risk and chose to shoot some of the gig on my film SLR… Armed with 4 rolls of Kentemere 400 and my flashgun i pushed my way to the front and grabbed the rail. With my DSLR on the other shoulder. Basically camera suicide. Started shooting just hoping and praying the metering my film body was spot on and I wasn’t going to end up with a ton of blank or overexposed film. Got some great photos on the DSLR so i wasn’t that fussed when it came to this morning and I was developing 3 rolls of film as what I got locked away on a memory card was great anyway.
What I was greeted with when i opened the developing tank made me very happy though.
The Feel of the photos is very important to me and I really think the black and white rough feel makes these great. This adds a real atmosphere and makes me very proud to say I shot them on film against the odds I guess you could say.
Theres also one of my favourite digital ones from the night on the slideshow.
Loads more to follow when I get a stable internet connection .
So here is the absolutely awesome Canterbury. Cheers for stopping by and come back tomorrow to see some more .
heres a kinda shared piece from a friend of mine. Grace explains it pretty well as to be honest it was my crazy idea and it was a combination of guessing random exposure times and blind luck. If you click the link you can see our gallery and her awesome blog
Cheers for stopping by.
This a project me and my friend Angus decided to attempt. We both have a love for using film, so we decided to experiment by shooting on the same film twice. We shot on the film once each, both times under exposing it. Not letting each other know what we were taking photographs of. We had no idea if the film would come out, so when they did it was rather exciting. Seeing the different combinations of mine and Angus’ photographs was interesting.
Enjoy.
More Dirt.
I got offered the chance to document a downhill mountain bike race for a very large online mountain bike website. Back in my youth i used to race BMX and I’m a keen mountain biker (summer months only). This was a sort of dream job for me. I have a background knowledge of Mountain biking and i would like to think i know what I’m doing with my camera!
I had 2.5 hours of practice to teach myself the ropes of photographing speeding mountain bikers. This turned out to be a full on nightmare. you need the fastest shutter speeds you can get your hands on with full power off camera flashes. I used 2 flash guns one on the camera and one on a tripod behind the rider to back light a rider. this flash behind the rider was running as a slave that flashes when it sees a flash, all very complicated and basically rubbish. Going to have to invest in some wireless triggers.
Heres one of my earliest shots from the day at my 1st location down the track. (Excuse the logos it was to put on some other websites!) Pretty pleased with it on the whole it sharpened up nicely and the rider put on a show which is always great.
The next 2 in this set is one using a reverse slave flash as discussed above. I probably pulled the trigger on this one a tiny bit early meaning the rider isn’t really in a great position but yet again its sharp and in focus. I love the look in a riders eyes on the second pic.
The final one from this set was using a panning technique while shooting to get some background blur with the rider. really pleased with how tight the focus was on his eyes and not anywhere else really. it drags you into the photo.
Was a great experience to get out there and photograph a great bunch of dedicated and skilled people. will definitely be out on the hillside again asap!
Heres a link to the More Dirt article and full set of photos from the day.
Cheer for stopping by and a special thanks to Carl and Greg.
And Finally Crash of the day goes to this guy.
Tom.
This is Tom the drummer from Chasing Hollywood. Heres one of my final photos I’m going to put on this blog from that show but it’s still one of my favourites. I love how sharp the drum kit is even if the focus is slightly off his face, the depth of field sort of let me get away with it. 1/160th of a second gives a nice stick blur and I used my lens wide open at F1.8.
This week the video these photos were taken from during production was released here it is.
Video by Elliot Montello. to confirm i didn’t shoot the video or play any part just took photo of productio from the last scene which is the live scene
The final scenes are where the previous photos were taken.
Cheers for stopping by.
Against all odds.
I need to get to some shows asap! Exam season has really knocked the wind out my sails… Fear not for tomorrow it will all be over and I will be back out again.
For todays photo its one of my personal favourites. technically it’s not great, but how I got it was so memorable at some point it has to go on here. I’m not entirely sure who this is playing but I know it was a support for Cosmo Jarvis at The Cavern in Exeter. This band was great (think White Lies gone punk?) and the room went a bit crazy. I got pinned between The P.A speaker and the support rail and just snapped away for as long as I could bare before the bar called my name. This was also a good time to get some air back in my lungs. Basically this was taken against all odds and somehow it came out as a (barely) usable shot. Excuse the softness and noise. I think the sweat on the lens had an adverse effect.
On the “against all odds” theme yesterday during a break from having a break from revision i popped out to my favourite place in the world. The best view in my hometown Chudleigh by a long, long way. Any true resident of the town would instantly be able to tell you where it is. It’s an amazing viewpoint and it only gets better as the sun sets over the Dartmoor hills and best of all 99 times out of 100 you’d be there alone as it’s a little off the beaten track some might say.
Here it is in all its glory.
Cheers for stopping by.
Technical difficulties of the gig photographer.
My photo for today is one of my favourites depicting movement and energy during live performances. It’s from the video shoot which my last few posts have been from but this time it is the lead guitarist from Chasing Hollywood.
I’ve almost used this as a kind of experiment for practicing sharpening and lens corrections in adobe lightroom. The point i have focused on for this photo is the face and the back of the head. I was facing a kind of battle with this photo as i wasn’t able to use the flash, hence needing the wide aperture of F1.8 but this means a very, very short depth of field on the picture. This unfortunately means it was impossible to have the face and the guitar neck. I couldn’t stop down my aperture because i couldn’t push the iso any higher without causing noise which would alow me to still keep the shutter speed of 1/160th of a second to capture the moment of the hair moving without any motion blur.
Todays post has been a pretty technical explanation. Tomorrow will be back to the pretty stuff.
Cheers for stopping by.
Angus McIntosh Photography 