Neil Danton

Sunday newspaper supplement: “Could you take a trip down to West Cork tomorrow?”

Me: “Sure, what do you need?”

Them: “A whale skeleton”

Me: (thinking): WTF?; (saying): “Oh,… OK. Um, no problem”

Very tricky lens selection as the whole thing is so long. Pic above is with a 15mm fish-eye. You know, fish, whale, fish-eye lens. Didn’t happen to have my whale-eye lens with me (and yes I do know a whale isn’t a fish!).

There’s also too much negative space in the image with a 24mm:

The feature the images (actually one in the end) were for was on community projects. Some time back the poor creature had been washed-up and stranded on the nearby beach and despite a lot of effort in trying to save it, had died there. The local community decided that rather than burying it, they would clean up the skeleton and create a marine artefact.

So I arrived at the location and very quickly started to hate the whale.

Poor creature hadn’t ever done me any harm, whales don’t tend to harm anyone really. OK so if you were a shark you might keep your distance, they’re not overly friendly to sharks, but that’s about all. Oh, and seals & penguins I suppose. They’re just unfortunate to be on the menu.

The reason for my dislike was purely the location. The skeleton had been placed into a concrete “bunker”, so shaded from above, and the way the sun was positioned, just creeping around a line of trees, the front third of the skeleton was in really strong sunlight and the middle and rear thirds in deep shadows. This is going to be a nightmare to light.

There’s only one way this was going to work and that’s kill-off all the ambient light and light the whole thing myself. Piece of cake when it’s just the skeleton, not so easy when there are people to light as well. Got away with it though:

Stayed with a 24mm lens for that image. Using a 15mm with 3 people, especially if they are anywhere near the edge of the frame would produce horrendous distortion. It’s not too bad to use though when it’s a younger person, and you can keep them near the centre of the frame:

In two of the images it’s possible (I now realise!) to spot one of my lights. Can you see them?

TTFN

So, 3rd in the series and this one features a business. What’s more, much to my delight it involves beer!

There’s music if you’re maybe at work and not really supposed to be reading this just at the moment, and it’s in monochrome. Yes, really it is. Don’t be fooled by the start, or.. er, the end. Worth waiting for the end though, makes me laugh every time, and I know what’s coming.

Permalink to the Day In The Life Of: Dungarvan Brewing Company on my website.

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories. Years ago Decades ago Eons ago, when I was at school, they were often called lies though. “Please Miss, I did my homework but the cat ate it”. Didn’t have a dog, but the creative lying didn’t extend to inventing one. There were also non-lie stories, essays and such like which I really enjoyed, but telling a story with a camera is a different kettle of fish all together.

As I said when I started the idea of Day In The Life Of back at the beginning of the year, sometimes there’s a story to tell that has to be summarised in a single image as best as possible because if it’s an editorial assignment, one image is probably all that will be used. If it’s a magazine spread it might develop to 6 – 10 images which allows more flexibility, but even that can’t always show the whole story.

With Day In The Life Of there is pretty much an unlimited amount of images I can create to tell a story. The two DITLOs I have posted so far are a story, but also a collection of single images. This one though (I hope) is a complete process, that walks the viewer through from raw material to a very interesting form of re-cycling!

The Dungarvan Brewing Company is Ireland’s latest micro-brewery located in lovely Dungarvan in Co Waterford, which I think is a fabulous place (I think Cork should annex it). They make a range of bottle-conditioned craft beers, primarily Black Rock Irish Stout, Copper Coast Red Ale and Helvick Gold Blonde Ale (all the bases covered there then), but they also make “specials” for different seasonal or festival times.

When I first approached Jen their Marketing Director about telling their story she was very helpful and everyone was a joy to be around on the shoot. Unlike an Editorial or Commercial shoot, there are no set-up or staged images in this story. Everything was shot as it happened (OK, I think that twice I actually said, “hold that a second” or something similar), but for the most part I just tried to not get in the way too much! Having spent so many previous years shooting sport, if I can’t catch a bit of action by now I ought to give up.

On the techie side: the only time I used some lighting was the modelling light from a Ranger Quadra, which isn’t very powerful, but just helped enough with the images in the fermentation room. For everything else, no big lights, no flash, so some images were shot at 1600 or even 3200 ISO, which shows as a bit of “noise” in a few frames. I can live with that for a documentary.

Many thanks to the Dungarvan Brew crew of Jen & Claire, Tom & Cormac for letting me tell their story.

I sense they are going to get bigger as word, and their product, gets around.

TTFN

…is not a camera setting to be used when shooting Caucasian people

This is one of the settings that a lot of people ignore, leaving a camera on “Auto” because they don’t understand it, or are just a teeny bit frightened of it.

I have no intention of going into too much detail about it at the moment, as it’s just a way of quickly referencing a couple of tricks I use on occasion, to jazz-up an image when I’m looking for something a little different.

Truth be told, I forgot to write today’s post, and so this is being done in a panic, waaay too early in the morning, before I head out for a busy day.

Before I go on then, a quick explanation of white balance (WB):

Light has a colour temperature. You might not think so, but that’s because the human eye is a wonderful creation, far more intelligent than all the electronics that camera manufacturers can jam-in to the latest cameras. When, for instance, the human eye receives a scene that isn’t natural daylight, it compensates for any colour shift and still displays white as white so it appears that the scene is “normal”.

Cameras can’t do that. Adjusting the WB setting on the camera tells it what is really white. The “auto” setting can do it to a certain extent, but not completely.

Light varies in colour temperature from warm to cold, with different types of light in different situations giving a different temperature. Even outdoor daylight varies, depending on whether it is sunlight, cloudy, shade etc. The “value” of the light is measured in Kelvin, with daylight being very roughly 5,000 to 6,000. Camera “Auto” can usually cope from about 3,000 to 7,000, but can still give differing results between one shot and the next. That’s why about 90% of the time it’s better to set the WB manually. At least then, even if the setting is slightly wrong, all the images are going to be wrong in exactly the same way, and can be easily fixed in post-production. Manually setting the WB allows a far greater range, from about 2,000 to 10,000.

An added complication is artificial light, tungsten & fluorescent, have a tint to them. Un-corrected, a scene lit with tungsten lighting will appear to the camera to be yellowy-orange, while a scene lit with fluorescent lighting will appear green.

When using flash as a primary light source it doesn’t matter an awful amount. Portable flash (strobes) are daylight balanced, so that will eliminate much of the problem.

Oh dear, I said it wasn’t going to get techie, and it’s starting to, so I’ll head myself off at the pass and move on.

The whole (original) point before I got distracted, was that occasionally I use a little trick to change the background of an indoor scene. This little trick (and the 2nd one I’ll mention in a moment) have to be used sparingly otherwise they start to look ridiculous.

Trick 1 then is to set the camera to tungsten WB when in daylight, or a mix of artificial light and daylight, which has the effect of turning the scene blue. Of course any people in the scene turn blue as well, even if it’s not very very cold. The solution to that is to light them with flash, and fire the flash through a coloured gel. In this case it’s a CTO gel that I use. CTO = Colour Temperature Orange, orange being the opposite end of the colour spectrum to blue. Oh dear, getting techie again.

So, turn an industrial scene with dubious lighting blue, light the subjects with a gel-covered flash shooting through a white umbrella, et voila:

Used sparingly it gives another option to change a scene.

Another trick, again occasional use only, is to use a wacky lens. In this case I mean a fisheye. You can usually tell when someone gets one of these as a new toy, because every image they produce will look like someone has bent every straight line in the world. I use mine 3 or 4 times a year I’d say, no more, but sometimes it works:

That’s it, got to run…

TTFN