Neil Danton

This angel can not only fly, but can float too:

It’s time once again for the Irish Wheelchair Association’s Angel-pin day and this year we were lucky enough to have the support of gymnast Jillian Kearns who really can fly:

Disclaimer: she can’t really fly. I was only kidding.

It seems that there is a trend developing here where we have the support from kindly sports people. Last year I went for a high-key approach with Cork Footballer & Hurler Eoin Cadogan:

The year before it was very low-key again with Cork Ladies Football player Nollaig Cleary:

A big thank you to Jillian for her support and the “team” of Margaret (Umnumnum) Smith (guest stylist!), Brown Thomas Cork, Thos from IWA (lighting assistant), and Claudia from Cork Face Painting (make-up).

Angel pin-”day” is actually all week, but the main day with volunteers selling the pins on the streets is Friday 11th.

TTFN

You know how I like to keep you abreast of the news and don’t like to go on about a storm in a C-cup *I’ll stop now*

This was a fun shoot to fund-raise for breast cancer awareness month. I was pleased to be shooting model Brianna Dougher who is the current Miss Cork and also Cork Rose Kathryn Brennan:

This light-hearted take on a serious problem is for ladies to send their old bras to Sean Murray’s in Skibbereen together with a donation to the Irish Cancer Society

The largest lingerie department in West Cork wanted to raise awareness of the Action Breast Cancer Campaign and will be collecting the bras (and possibly hanging some up around the town!).

The store will also be holding a fashion show during October and at the end of the month there will be a tug-of-war with all the bras collected

TTFN

p.s. You can now subscribe to the blog by email and never miss an exciting post about great photography and interesting things you must know. You’ll also get my stuff:

…Hollywood Icon, Legend. So many descriptive words, but that’s enough about me.

What I’m really leading up to, is that I was privileged to photograph Hollywood icon Miss Maureen O’Hara recently:

Star of over 60 movies she is now 90 years young and was launching the Maureen O’Hara Classic Film Festival in Glengarriff, Co Cork where she now lives for most of the time.

Unsurprisingly no direction needed to get the result I wanted. She has that “screen presence” even when meeting her face-to-face.

Still a classy, feisty lady. An absolute pleasure for me to meet her

TTFN

and the winner is…

Oh, before I tell you that, this is how it was done. One essential item I always try to have around is my faithful assistant Tonto**

The problem with letting go a pile of stir-fry ingredients from a tray or bag is that the contents will spread out and not look like a column. It was Tonto** who originally suggested the idea of cutting the end off a 2 litre empty mineral (soda) bottle and filling with the veg.

We had tried actually tossing the contents from the wok, but the column wasn’t anywhere near high enough, and nowhere near enough of it for my liking either

While my subject was trying though, I’d made a mental note of roughly what position the wok was in at the top of the action, so just asking her to put it back in the same place, and a call for “action” and Tonto** released the veg. That’s it.

Still not sure how he got his hand from underneath the bottle, to on top of it, in the 1/250s that it took to get this frame. That’s the thing about Tonto**, he’s a mystery. A bit like a zen master combined with a ninja.

So the winner is Carla from CACM Accountants, and thanks Carla for your guess. I’ll be in touch to arrange to shoot your Facebook landing-page image. I already have an evil plan (or two) for you to consider *mwahaha*

TTFN

Tonto** is Margaret’s husband Alec

Leaf nothing to chance. Yew need willow power to get to the root of the problem

OK I’ll stop now

Quick post about a quick editorial shoot for the business section of a “Sunday”. Treemetrics provide 3D scanning of forests and the software to maximise the yield from it. Saves wastage, saves trees. *Obviously* the pic ed wanted something with a tree in then

Fortunately the guys knew a suitable location and the tree in this shot would have been just a tiny bit spooky later in the day or at night. Looks like something in a Harry Potter film or a cartoon where a tree comes to life (I know, I need to get out more)

TTFN

Alternate post titles:

a) How to shoot to a tight spec
b) How to shoot something creative with the same amount of frames as a roll of film
c) How to shoot something the old-fashioned way, without resorting to Photoshop to help you out

This is Margaret Smith who runs a small cookery school under her business name – Umnumnum (take it slow: Um num num). Margaret talked to me about shooting some images for her website (more tc on that later maybe) but specifically something eye-catching for the Umnumnum Facebook landing-page.

This is where a) above: “How to shoot to a tight spec” comes in. Margaret wanted some type of image where “something” was lined-up with the “Like” button on the FB page. It might have taken all of ten minutes before I suggested maybe using a wok and throwing the contents up in the air towards the Like button. Not just a normal amount of content though (hey it is me, you expect normal? You’re in the wrong place). I wanted a RIDICULOUS amount of content that couldn’t possibly really fit in the wok and be cooked, just to add to the fun of the image.

Even though she is a friend, Margaret in this case was also the client, and *sigh* if only I had more clients that were as game-for-a-laugh as she is. There was no hesitation in agreeing to my dastardly plan, so we arranged the shoot day.

This is where b) above: “How to shoot something creative with the same amount of frames as a roll of film” comes in (can you see a theme developing here?)

The whole shoot took just 37 frames (I counted them when I did the post-production). 30 of those frames were light-tests. OK, so that’s a little dig about photographers who use a camera like a digital-Uzi and can’t seem to lift the finger-pressure off the shutter button. The “spray and pray” merchants, or the “shotgun principle”. Dig over

Here’s the lighting set-up:

Four lights: two Elinchrom d-lites with softboxes on the background, one 580EX into an Ezybox softbox for the subject, and another 580EX with a snoot behind the subject, similar principle to a hair light, but just to darken the chef’s hat the tiniest fraction by putting it into shadow, so as to allow it stand out a little from the background (a lot of white floating around).

The image was shot against white-seamless, one because I just l-u-r-v-e white-seamless and two because the landing-page is white. Oh yes, and three, because there’s a little trick you can pull-off when using white, or black, or indeed any solid colour as a backdrop – you can add space around the image afterwards using Photoshop (or as I do, using Pixelmator), so SHOOT TIGHT. Pointless adding the white around the image as you shoot and wasting all that space. I can do a run-through on that if anyone would like to find out how, but you’ll have to let me know via the comments section here on the blog, or on my facebook page, or on The Twitter of course.

Lastly, this is where c) above: “How to shoot something the old-fashioned way, without resorting to Photoshop to help you out” comes in. The food is really there for the shot. ALL the food. None has been added or cloned in. I’m old-school enough to believe that I should be able to create something “in-camera”. I’m not a graphic designer and that’s who Photoshop is for. Either that, or it’s used to get-out-of-jail by being lazy, or shooting crap, and hoping to fix the problem afterwards.

I’m not saying there was no post-production on the image. There was. The white had to be tweaked from around 240 to 255 (the white point). A small amount of white had to be added to the left of the image as I shot a little too tight to the left margin to line up with the Like button.

I won’t go into the half-dozen variations of the image that I had to produce in post-production, including flipping the image from left-facing to right-facing before flipping back, just because the frigging Like button moves, depending on whether or not you’re already a fan of a page. That would make another blog all on its own.

Finally then, a little fun:

If you have a Facebook business/fan page and would like your own personalised custom image, here’s your opportunity.

I’ll shoot an image for you for free, anything within reason, and licence it to you for use on your FB landing page. The catch? It’s a competition. The restrictions? You have to be in the Republic of Ireland (unless you’re willing to pay travel expenses. Then I’d be delighted to come to the Bahamas).

Here it is then: the first person to tell me EXACTLY how I shot the food detail of the image wins. Answers in the comments here, or on my Facebook page (the link’s over there on the right). No twitter entries, only because I might miss the winning answer in the stream. Final decision on the winner will be decided by Margaret, myself and one other person. There are a few people who know how it was done, but we know who they are, and naturally they’re excluded.

Competition is open until another blog post appears here, which should be next Thursday, 21st April.

Best of luck. Get guessing!

TTFN

…not the mythical ones that breathe fire, but the ones that have (different) TV series in the UK & Ireland – Dragon’s Den

If you’re not familiar, the shows feature people with an idea or concept that try to get funding from a panel of “Dragons”, venture capital for an equity share in the business

I got to create some publicity images for Diarmaid Twomey from Cork whose company Expresso Ads was the last to receive backing from two of the Dragons in the last programme of the Irish series

The big coffee cup prop was made by Made in Hollywood. It’s nice to have a great prop for a shoot

Curious onlookers at the early morning part of the shoot:

The first part of the shoot featured one of the Dragons who backed the idea – Bobby Kerr, who is the Chairman of the Insomnia coffee chain:

Well done to Diarmaid on getting his funding, and best of luck for the future:

TTFN

In the portion of my life where I still shoot as an Editorial Photographer, I’m often shooting business people, mostly for a couple of sunday newspapers.

It’s always a challenge to avoid the man-in-suit-with-laptop, or man-with-folded-arms type portraits, which need to be saved up for emergencies, as sometimes they really are just about the only thing it’s possible to do! However, I try my damnedest to avoid them.

So here’s a quick business portrait shoot where I managed to create a couple of images without using the “last resort”.

This CEO has a business, which although based in deepest, wildest West Cork is a global operation and there are clocks on the wall showing the various time-zones with some of the countries where they operate, so the first image I wanted to create was going to include those.

This was the starting point light-wise at the aperture, ISO & shutter speed combo I wanted to shoot at:

First thing to fix is the light on the background. Nothing too directional, just a 580EX flash firing into a white shoot-through umbrella, camera right (probably around 1/4 to 1/2 power, sorry, I’m a bit like a chef that cooks “by taste”, there’s not too many rules!).

That takes the background from this:

To this:

Next is to light the subject. This would be a 60cm (2ft) Ezybox soft-box, again with a 580EX fired through it, camera left:

In order to get the right perspective I used an 85mm lens, which meant I was pretty much jammed up against a wall, on my knees, but using any wider-angle lens would have “lost” the clocks.

Here’s a very approximate lighting diagram:

Still trying to avoid the “last resort” we managed to find another location for a 2nd image. Just the soft-box for this one. Get it back far enough and it’s going to light plenty of the general area as well:

Nice and relaxed. Nothing worse than business portraits that are too stuffy, or where the subject looks wooden (usually because they’re scared stiff of having their portrait taken!).

Oh, I didn’t leave the CEO sitting there all the time while I set up lights. The first image wasn’t actually shot first. It was a misfire from the Pocket Wizard on-camera when I started shooting for real.

*That’s because you hadn’t switched it on Neil*

Sshhhh

TTFN

That’s wind as in Mistral, storm, air movement due to weather. Nothing to do with the chocolate. *just saying*

So how to promote a food forum?

Simple. Go to beach, get a chef, get a chocolatier, get kids.

In my case the problem was getting down to, and back up from the beach, with what seriously felt like a dislocated knee-cap! Besides, I was working with a great PR consultant who does all that organising stuff, so I don’t have to

Always nice to get a bit of animation into an image when possible:

This is Isabel from Issie’s Handmade Chocolate (yes, yummy. Take my word for it. No don’t. Buy some and try it yourself) with twins Paul & Grace:

Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, PAUL. Just saying that over a few times, as I originally captioned and released some images with the wrong name, like John or something. I was obviously confused with the names of the Saints, or the Beatles. Very rare I get a caption wrong. I blame it the fact I was biting on a piece of wood at the time because of the pain in the knee. *Sorry Paul*

This is Henry from Wokabout (delicious sauces. Love shoots involving food – sometimes I get samples!). This is a one-shot take. With the wind that was blowing that’s all I was going to get, after that the stir-fry contents were all over the beach:

Then there were a couple of images with just the twins & chocolate. It was a Take 2. It was so cold the melted chocolate had solidified. Good job I had a runner (er PR) with me to go back up the cliff to the hotel and reheat it. Would have been pointless me going, it took me about 10 minutes to get back up from the beach when we’d finished the shoot. The chocolate would have solidified again if I’d gone!

This one was used quite a bit:

Actually though, I really like this one as well. Something about the look on Grace’s face. I think it says Mischief :

I hope the hotel waiter got that table off the beach before the tide came in. It was moving fairly rapidly!

TTFN

I could do this once upon a time:

Like I said, “Once upon a time” Not too sure I could do it now without a month in hospital afterwards…

This young lady has a bucket-full of medals and awards as a gymnast and was one of a series of images taken recently of Sports Bursary recipients.

I just like the balance between daylight and fill. Always tricky when the clouds are racing across the sky and lighting conditions change by about 4 stops every minute or so, going from very overcast to bright sunlight.

Another lucky shot then…

TTFN