Monday, December 29, 2008

Inspiration

I went to London to attend an off camera lighting seminar given by David Hobby who writes the Strobist blog at www.strobist.com at the start of December and in the pub afterwards some of the guys from the London Strobist group had a copy of 'Platons Republic' - a big book of the work of a guy who has shot portraits of some seriously famous people, I only got a minute or two to browse the book but got myself a copy second hand from www.amazon.co.uk last week. In the last few pages of the book Platon has added handwritten notes telling the reader a little about how the shoots went and it's interesting stuff.

American photographer Vincent Laforet recorded Platon speaking at the Eddie Adams Workshop in the States recently and it's a great listen - click here to enjoy it and here to visit Platon's website.

BTW - the pic is mine - it's 14 year old World Champion kickboxer Chris Weir of TNS Dundee - shot with off camera lighting.

Nutters


Nutters
Originally uploaded by dundeeladdie
Shot Dundee's visit to Queen of the South for a couple of newspapers and it was freezing, which wasn't the best of situations as I'd awoken on Saturday morning with a severe doze of 'man flu' - Thankfully my mate Jim had offered to drive Tommy and I the 150 miles from Dundee to Palmerston Park as I'm not sure I would have handled driving that far too well. The cold didn't affect these lads though - they were going through their karaoke routine at full volume.

A visit to Palmerston is always a pleasure, nice friendly people and a 'proper' football club - they treat visitors well. There's a car park in front of the main stand and it's got plenty of space. Photographers at Palmerston get the use of the players lounge to edit and transmit their pics, which has the added bonus of a little food being available, they are quite accomodating on shooting positions - you can shoot from the sides as well as behind the goals, which isn't always the case at First Division gounds - St Johnstone and Airdrie for example restrict you to behind the goal-lines.

On the down side I learned to take the batteries out of the cameras and keep them warm when traveling - I started the day with five fully charged batteries - the first two I tried just wouldn't work at all - the third worked for around 30 shots and I was lucky that the last couple kept going for the full ninety minutes.

Had to send my pics to the first paper from the ground and had them edited, captioned and transmitted by 5.05pm - in fact we were done and dusted by shortly after that and back on the road back to Tayside by half past five.

Tech note: My 3 dongle got a good signal from inside the ground, in fact it seems to work well at all the First Division grounds.

Here's some pics