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Planning a Photo – Landscape

My photography breaks down into two main topics.

  • Studio
  • Landscape

My studio work is very planned. A studio is like a painters blank canvas. When I plan a studio shoot, there is so much to think about.

  • Selecting the model, her shape, size, experience, colour of hair and eyes
  • Clothes
  • The poses
  • The studio set, whether a plain back ground or coloured, or a more complex set
  • Props
  • and of course the lighting, some times just a single light and reflector, other times I have used up to seven flash heads to light a scene.

A studio shoot for me its the ultimate in photography. Everything can be pre-visualised and planned to the nth degree.

Single Light
Complex Lighting Setup

I would like to be able to say my landscape and architectural shoots are planned to the same degree but I am afraid not. Generally these type of shoots are taken on holidays, and I just happen upon these views and try to make the best of them.

This is something I would like to change, and the photography course I am booked on in December I hope will bring more planning and pre-visualisation to this part of my photography.

Isle of Syle

To this end tomorrow, subject of course to the British weather, i’ll be heading out to try and capture an Autumn scene. I have the image in my head, and with good planing, and of course local knowledge and the internet I hope to get the image I want.

So Saturday morning will see the chief photographer of RBPhotograpic heading out with his medium format camera gear and hoping to get the image in his head commited.

Equipment List

  • Hasselblad 503CW Body
  • Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 Planar CFi
  • Manfrotto 055 Tripod
  • Sekonic L-758D Digital Master Light Meter

Sekonic L 758 Light Meter

I may also take a digital compact, or my iPhone to snap a few reference shots to post tomorrow, to show you what I had in mind.

In case your wondering it involves, a lake, low winter sun, and lots of trees. Heres hoping for good weather.

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Commute – The Trip to Work

Commuting to work by motorcycle, and of course the commute back is generally the highlight of our day.

I find the ride really wakes me up, refreshes me, and sets up my day on a high note, while the other commuters in there cages (sorry cars) get steadily more frustrated.

This morning the weather is less then ideal, high gale force winds, always fun on a motorcycle.  Remember car drivers, please give TWV (Two Wheeled Vehicles) plenty of space, a sudden gust can easily take them into the verge or into the middle of the road.

TWV’s are not positioning themselves in a way to deliberately annoy you, but to maximise there visibilty of the road ahead and for safety.

Have a good commute!

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Moving Posts & Going Live

More Blog configuration: Tonight once home I manually moved my posts from my first blog to the new dev blog.  Just cut and paste.  Next time I need to move to a different blog, the full WordPress software allows easy export and inport.

I then backed up dev to my laptop and deleted Live.

If your after a good FTP client for OS X, I use Transmit.  Makes jobs like this very easy.

Then I FTP,ed the contents of dev to Live. Once that was done I logged into WordPress altered the paths to refer to the blog new location.

Everything seemed to work, so now the final part to delete dev.

Wow, its all still works!

Update:

Well nearly works; the picture I had in a post was lost, I suppose I need to read up on how to officially move a site!

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WordPress ios (iPhone) app

How to manage your WordPress blog remotely.

Well I always have my iPhone with me so that seemed the best way.  I had a search on the iTunes application store and soon found a WordPress ios application.  It was free so I downloaded, installed and gave it a whirl.

Well I spent a while not getting anywhere, like many other users.

What they don’t tell you, or at least I never saw it; you have to enable remote access in your blog first.

It’s easy to do, just log in, select settings, then writing, and at the bottom enable the access. Easy when you know how.

Sent from iPhone during lunch.

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mysql

Well, that was easier then I thought.  Between the wordpress help pages and the ease that my web hosting company made of creating the database, within a matter of minutes I had a simple highly customisable blog up and running.

Now to start moving posts from the old site to this.

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Blog Setup

Well tonight after a cold motorcycle ride home (1.5 C), followed by a hot chocolate, it was time to do some more wordpress configuration. This blog which may or may not stay is fairly basic, just the default options with all the hard work done by my service provider. Tonight I started a fresh install of WordPress to give me a more custom and unique look. I have to admit its all Chris B’s fault, his new blog does look rather professional so it was time for me to have a go.

First a new Sub domain to host the test site (if this works i’ll move it over to the blog.brown-family.org.uk).

Then I download loaded WordPress and uploaded to my site, now for the technical bit, mysql. This will be a first for me, never used mysql before. I’ll let you know how I do.

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Landscape Photography Course

Tonight I paid for my photography course.

I have always used small format camera’s; eg 35mm film or APC-C sensor equipped SLR’s.
This year I made the move to Medium format to complement my SLR kit, it certainly slows you down and makes you think about your photography.
I decided to book myself on a large format course, now thats slow photography.
Its being held in December so i’ll update you all then.

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Visit to the Father in Law: or Have a play with his new Sony A55

Tuesday as usual we visited the father in law, Alan.

Normally its a motorcycle ride straight from work to the village where he lives, but tonight we headed home first to get the car.  It was a cold day and neither of us were packing our thermal undies; it was likely to be late night so rather then face a cold trip home on the Bike, the car sounded a better bet.  It would also give me a chance to grab my laptop, I wanted to have a play with the default blog options my hosting company provides.

The reason for our visit,  just the usual Tuesday night visit, to inflict my cooking on him.  Today, cauliflower and home made cheese sauce.  At least thats what I made for Caroline and Alan, for myself a burger.  I cannot stand cauliflower.

There was another reason for making the visit.  Alan had purchased a new Sony A55, a fun little camera which I can well recommend for a beginner or someone wanting a small body SLR.  Rather a unique camera with its fixed mirror, kind of a hybrid between a EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens Camera) and a normal SLR.

Sony EVIL Hybrid SLR

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to WordPress or Not

Hi world.

Well, our first Blog entry.  Normally we have the odd bike related entry on the Motorcyle page, the bits that are family related on the family etc.  These are written in a simple text editor using html and ftp’ed up to our website.

Most people now are using Word Press, a far easier way to publish your thoughts, so this is a simple experiment, to see how it goes.  I am going to keep updating the other pages but also add the odd thought or two here.

Let me also add this is not what I would call a real WordPress site, just the default blog option that uses WordPress, that my web hosting company gives users for free.  Getting the mysql database up and running, and downloading the WordPress application and getting a real site up and running is the job for later this week.

As this moves from Development to Live and possibly back again, and I also repost some old favourites, it might prove a little hard to follow at first, but please bare with me.  Any posts before this date have been moved from the old website.