Damian McGillicuddy visits Stroud Camera Club

Wow! What an evening! Last Thursday, 23 February 2012, Damian McGillicudy visited Stroud Camera Club to talk about his photographic journey and to share some lighting techniques with club members. Stroud Camera club invited guest from neighbouring camera clubs to join them on this evening and we raised £310 for Damian's chosen charity, Marie Curie. Camera Club members were very generous with their donations and I saw several make more donations at the close of the evening, that's how much everyone enjoyed Damian's visit.

Liz, Stroud Camera Club Chairman, welcomes Damian

If you ever get the chance to hear Damian talk or get the chance to attend one of his workshops I highly recommend you don't miss it! Worth every penny!  He's a great speaker, kept us laughing, entertained and interested. He knows his stuff and he knows how to talk about it in plain simple terms which everyone can understand.

Damian with his Olympus E5

Damian talked about equipment and his current favourite cameras, one of which is his Olympus E5 which he's holding above. I've still got my Oly E3, great tough camera. Well technically I guess you could say my husband has it, he claims the E3 as his camera these days. :-p

The camera Damian shot with this evening was his Olympus E-P2. He's been blogging a lot about the micro four thirds system lately and has even had a play in Italy with the new Olympus OM-D. I'm so jealous! I remember when the first Oly Pen came out and I went to London to get a hands on look at it just before it was officially launched by David Bailey to the public. What a day that was! Don't tell anyone but I saw David Bailey drop the Oly Pen camera which they presented him with at the launch. He just casually picked it up and carried on like nothing happened. I wonder if it still worked.

Damian talking about lighting equipment

Damian talking about equipment

After Damian talked about lighting and equipment he brought out some local models for some practical demonstrations. We got to see his images on the back of his Oly E-P2 and the results in camera were amazing. The key to his success is knowing his equipment and knowing how to light his subjects. He told us that he likes to get it right in camera because he's lazy and doesn't like to spend a lot of time post processing his images. I love his way of thinking. Less processing time equals more time shooting. :-D

Model James Artaius with photographer Damian McGillicuddy

Shooting is the fun bit! Most of the images I take I never even processes or do anything with. Capturing the image or that moment in time is the best part of photography for me.

James Artaius

I was given special permission to take photographs during Mr McGillicuddy's photography lesson for my blog. I wanted to try and capture the evening and of course I wanted to have a play as well. There's nothing photographically special about my images from the night as I was shooting with available room light and wasn't able to really control any light....except with my camera settings. I had fun trying though. I took the above photo and cropped it, see below.

Amazing what a little cropping can do to an image. :-D OK OK, I did a bit more than just cropping. I burned the edges for a vignetting effect. I also put a thin black line around it then gave it a large white border.  It'll pass, but sadly the quality really isn't there. Small web quality it looks OK, but I've seen it large. This is where lighting really pays off.

Damian talked about the importance of lighting your subject correctly for the conditions and what you want to achieve, taking into account the ambient light. He also talked about the importance of using a light meter to correctly measure the light.

I use a light meter in my studio but not often anywhere else. I think I'll start keeping my light meter in my camera bag and using it more often. He does make a good point about using one.

Damian McGillicuddy with model Nicki Pixie

Damian briefly touched on posing your model and decluttering your background. I had a bit of fun with post processing decluttering in my next photo. Can you spot what I did? :-D

It was a real treat to see Damian McGillicuddy in action and working with models. It was also great having a makeup artist and a hair stylist on hand as well and seeing them all work together. It was quite an experience for most of us who'd never worked with a crew like this before. Well I have to a certain extent but not very much.

Damian McGillicuddy has designed and created his own line of lighting modifiers and sells them from his website. They are easy to set up and easily collapsible to make traveling with them a breeze. A lot of my work is on location so this is of particular interest to me.

Damian talking about the collapsible beauty disk he designed. 

It was really great to watch the master at work and I'm looking forward to looking him up at FOCUS on Imaging next week. I hope he has some of his light modifiers on display as I'd like a closer look at them. I might even buy a few. :-)

At the end of the evening Damian gave away a couple of his Down and Dirty Lighting Lessons CDs which you can purchase on his website. He also gave a copy to me as a kind of apology for picking on me throughout the evening. I've had a quick look at it and I'm very impressed. I'm looking forward to taking a much longer look as soon as I get the chance.

Tonight 'Team McGillicuddy' consisted of:
Damian McGillicuddy - Lead Photographer & Photography Instructor (Link to website)
Marcus Green - Assistant & Photographer (Link to website)
Rob Golding - Assistant (Link to website)
Nicki Pixie - Model (Link to website)
James Artaius - Model (Link to website)
Ash Williams - Hairsylist (Link to website)
Marina Harbs Firth-Bernard - Make up Artist

If you'd like to see more of my images from this night you can see them in this web gallery:
Damian McGillicuddy visits Stroud Camera Club (Thursday 23/02/12)

As promised, link to Damian McGillicuddy's blog post about his visit  with a couple of photos taken on the night: 
Just before FOCUS on Imaging 2012

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Camera I used tonight was my Canon 5D II. Lens used was Canon 85mm f1.8. 

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Beyond the Lens - Smoke Gets in My Eyes

Smoke or Ghost of  Dinosaur? 

Tonight, Thursday, was Stroud Camera Club night. It was one of our practical evenings where we bring our cameras and laptops and props and things and have a night of sharing, learning and trying new things. On this evening we had a lot of laptops and post processing going on, including one station doing a bit of HDR. But we also had a little mini studio set up in the kitchen where we were being shown by one club member, Mr Jay Martin,  how to photograph smoke. I'd never done this before so I mostly hung out with these guys.

Camera remotely fired flash

We tried two different ways of photographing the smoke. We used black card for the background and against the wall to help control the light. We used a radio trigger to fire an off camera flash gun. And we used a another remote to trigger the camera. We used all manual settings, including the focus. And our cameras were mounted on tripods. (Note: As we were shooting in almost complete darkness the camera's auto focus does not work.) I'm not sure what Jay's settings were on his camera as I was off running my mouth when he was setting it up, but I think it was something like this: ISO 100; F5.6; 1/125th of a second exposure. Not a bad place to start in any case. The flash gun was set to 1/16th power. For the smoke we used an incense stick stuck in a ball of blue tack.

Flash gun manually fired

The second way we photographed the smoke is the way in which I photographed all three of these images. Basically the same set up only I had my camera set up for a 2 second exposure. The flash gun in this case was fired manually, during the 2 second exposure. As we were in the dark the flash from the flashgun froze everything and correctly exposed the smoke.

I really enjoyed this and plan on giving this a another go when I get some free time. All three images on this page were taken tonight by me with a Canon 5D II with a 50mm 1.4 lens. The camera settings were as follows: ISO 100 at F9 with a 2 second exposure. In the top image the smoke has a blueish tent, I added this in post processing.

Do you see the dinosaur in the top photo? Looks like one to me. :-)

Beyond the Lens - Shooting Fireworks

Written by Tamara Kwan of TammyLynn Photography

Featured on I am Gloucestershire 365's website under FYI Daily Blog on Friday, 29 October 2010

The annual Ebley Fireworks display was this past Monday. I organized a group of about 20 Stroud Camera Club members to meet up and shoot the fireworks. This was an exercise on night time photography and sharing knowledge on the best way to capture fireworks. The previous week we had another practical evening where we all had a go at capturing moving light displays, this was an extension on that.

The best way I’ve found to capture firework displays is to plan ahead and arrive early. Definitely use a tripod or similar support. Long exposures are a must to capture the trails of light. You don’t need a high ISO as you might think you’d need shooting at night and F-stops aren’t all that important when shooting long distances on long exposures. Also with really long exposures you don’t need to worry with mirror lock ups as the tiny vibration the mirror might cause won’t be noticeable with long exposures. A cable release is handy but not necessary.

The shot above was shot with a Canon 5D II, 24-70 2.8 L lens on a tripod with these settings: ISO 100; f/10; for 8 seconds at focal length of 57mm. I left white balance on its auto setting and shot in raw format. Only a few tweaks in photoshop required. It was originally shot in landscape format, I cropped the sides away getting rid of the dark edges and making the fireworks the centre of attention. 

Stroud Camera Club Christmas Social

Tonight was the Stroud Camera Club Christmas Social. I baked a chocolate cake and took in which everyone enjoyed. Well they said they enjoyed it anyway. :-D Wish I took a photo of it as I think it looked better than it actually was. ;-) I really enjoyed the evening and there were two fun contest. The first was a Humour photo comp and I entered this shot:
I didn't win but it got a few chuckles. :-) In the photo above are my Mom and Dad and my daughter Alyssa.

New Year's Resolutions

Look at me!!! Typing in my blog for the third day in a row! :-D

Anyone else thinking about next year already? I am. What am I going to do next year? What do I want to do differently next year? What do I want to accomplish? What do I want to change about myself? So many things to think about. Lord knows there's lots to improve upon! So many things to do! Could be an exciting year. :-D <---there I go again, with those dang smiley faces. :-D

New Year's Resolution List....work in progress...

1. Must not be late any more! I'm always late. I think it's in my genes. :-p
2. Must loose weight. I really must. Not because I'm vain, but because I want to be healthy and mobile. I'm no spring chicken anymore! :-)
3. Must finish projects that I start. I've got several in the works now.
4. Must work on Photography Portfolio. Maybe even make a book of my work. That would be cool to have.
5. Must work on new Tutorials for my Tutorial pages. I've only made one and from that received several request for more! So I'd really like to do more. I really enjoyed making it.
6. Must get out with my camera more.
7. Must get out with both cycle clubs more, would help with number 2 above. :-D
8. Must do more with my photographs.
9. Must work on this list later, work to get done today!

Stroud Camera Club Christmas Social tonight, and I'm baking a cake for it. I have some photographs to get ready for the club for upcoming competitions that need to be turned in tonight. I'm sure there is lots of other stuff I need to do as well, better go find out what they are. :-D

Until next time...

Must Try Harder :-D

I'd really like to make a go at this blog thing and have it be apart of my website. I must try harder. :-D

The thing is I have so much on my plate right now, and I make it worse by avoiding things. I guess you could say I'm making it worse now by typing this. Or maybe it's just because I know I do my best work under pressure. Or maybe it's just because I've got Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and I'm easily side tracked. :-D <---I also type way too many of these! I've deleted 3 or 4 since I started typing this. You'd think I was some over enthusiastic teenage cheerleader or something. :-D

What am I up to today? Let's see...

• Tonight we have friends from the cycle clubs coming around to sing carols around the organ. It's a warm up for this Sunday's Annual Cycle Club Service where Cycle Clubs from all over the region gather for this event. Peter, my husband, will be playing the organ again this year for this. I usually sit with him and help count verses and pull a few stops for him. Mainly it's an excuse for me not to have to sing. Trust me, you don't want to hear me sing. :-D Anyway, tonight people are coming around so I must tidy up the house and go shopping because they will want tea and coffee and mulled wine and cakes and so on. I actually enjoy all this and love it when people come around. Peter enjoys it too as the house gets cleaned up. :-D
• I've got some Wheelers business to take care of. I'm the secretary of the Stonehouse Wheelers Cycle Club, in case you didn't know or didn't remember. I've got to get some stuff in the post for them and errands to run as well.
• I've got a deadline to meet for a Photographic Competition. This one is part of Andy Rouse's 'Visions of Light' seminar that I'm attending next Sunday. I'm really excited about it and looking forward to it. I've got one more day to enter something in the competition. Hopefully I'll have something to enter before I go to bed tonight. Wish me luck!
• I've also got to get ready for Thursday's Stroud Camera Club meeting. It's their annual Christmas gathering and I've got to bring a cake and get some images ready to enter in a fun competition. Probably some other stuff too that I can't think of right now.
• TAXES!!! **deep breaths now** I will do my taxes; I will do my taxes...soon. I promise.
• Stonehouse Wheelers Calendars...I must make some more for tonight. Malcolm, our Runs Secretary designs the calendars, using photos submitted to him by the club, and me and Peter produce them. Peter is responsible for printing and I'm responsible for binding them. YaY fun! :-D This year Peter and I were the only ones who turned in any photos. Poor Malcolm.

Well my coffee is cold now, time to nuke it and get some work done. **looks outside** Darn it's another grey day. I was hoping to take a walk down to the river and maybe get some lovely shots of the sunlight coming through the trees and reflecting on the water for my 'Visions of Light' photo. Guess I'll be looking through my archives tonight.

Now, where did I hide the envelopes?