Purified In Blood

Last night's entertainment was a heavy trio of metal bands, Nottingham's Merciless Terror, Sheffield's own Opinicus, and Norwegian metalcore band Purified In Blood. We first got wind of the gig through Plusnet, where both I and two members of Opinicus were working at the time.

It was tough going, photography-wise. There were a few other people with bigger, fancier cameras than mine who were having equal trouble with the almost non-existent lighting. Even at ISO 1600 or higher it was still taking a half second or so to expose, which is no good when the band is thrashing about like lunatics. For instance, the picture on the right here is Dale Linsdell of Merciless Terror mid-windmill.

Fortunately the lighting improved somewhat for Purified In Blood, but not greatly. I will still shooting at a range of ISO settings from 400 to 6400. At the 6400 end the image was so grainy as to be unusable, so I stepped down to 800 and 1600 just to try and make the best of it.

So really it was all down to timing. I was destined to have a dangerously slow shutter speed no matter what I tweaked, so it was just a case of waiting for ideal lighting. On very few occassions, it actually happened. Today's picture of the day is Glenn Cato Rasmussen of Purified In Blood in full swing. 1/4 second exposure at f4.4, approx. 35mm focal length (35mm equiv. Actual 14.7mm with 1/2.3" sensor).

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Another canal walk

The sun has started being a little more present lately, so some mornings are actually quite pleasant. On one such morning I decided to have a wander up the canal.

The clouds made everything look a bit Toy Story, and the low sun gave a lovely light and contrast to everything else.

Of course, it wasn't sunny everywhere. But even in the darker places, such as right underneath Leeds railway station, the sun had a go at peeking in.

Leeds Hyperbeastly

It's been five long months since I posted anything to this blog. Including this post here, I have posted no less than three times in 2014. As you can tell, I am nothing if not prolific.
A lot has changed since the last time I posted anything. I sold all my SLR gear, for a start, and switched to micro four-thirds. I got a lovely, lovely little Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a small selection of lenses including the must-have Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake and the stunning Olympus 45mm f/1.8. Marvellous, and the camera, four lenses and spare batteries and SD cards in a bag that wouldn't fit the SLR and a single lens. Cracking stuff, because it's now small enough to carry all the time. In fact the body and pancake lens is barely bigger than my Fuji X10 compact!
Anyway, the point of this post; I've taken several walks through Leeds while I've worked there over the past few years and I've been finding it more and more difficult to find non-boring subjects. Everything is so dr…

Shooting the Enterprise

I was recently asked if I could help out providing an image for a magazine article about stress management. For reasons as yet undiscovered the requested image would be of the USS Enterprise flying through a storm in space. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time (just a couple of hours), but I did have a very nice model of the Enterprise D I could use to build the image around.

Thinking fast, I rigged up a rather slapdash rig consisting of a black reflector backdrop, an umbrella and stand from which dangled the model by a thread, and a couple of strobes. One light above, diffused, to provide the key light, and another, reflected and lower power, to fill some of the very dark shadows. It ended up all looking something like this:

Using a fast shutter, f/16 and cunning flash positioning I managed to keep the background black and give the model suitably textured lighting so it didn't have that flat, uniform, shadowless appearance of, well, a model. The narrow aperture obviously…

Lazy Robot

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