And Violet.

This is Writer Director of And Violet, Paul Gray at its UK Premiere, standing exactly 518m 11cm (give or take 7m) away and 1 year, 9 months, 26 days, 3 hours and 50 minutes (+/- 1 hour) from this next picture.

Making an independent feature film is not easy.

At the time of the second picture, I was working on And Violet too, doing BTS stills, sketchy 2nd AC work and some other odd things. It was a major passion project, being slaved over by Paul, his DoP Alkistis Terzi, the 1st AD Kristine Mørkved alongside seemingly everyone I knew or would know in the Edinburgh short film scene. The film spent sometime in the edit and finally had its world premiere at the Arizona International Film Festival in April 2017, picking up Best Dramatic Feature and a Special Jury award at the same festival.

I’m so happy to have been involved and it’s wonderful that all the work everyone did is coming to fruition. I have a few other foggy memories of the film that I’ll post in the new few weeks, in the meantime, this is one of my favorite stills from the shoot.

– R

Picture Story: Blackout

The 4×4 paused a moment, gasps were exchanged as we looked to stars sitting on perfect blackness. With engine halted we sat, admiring the sky and with the nearest streetlight probably 250 kilometres away, it was a breathtaking view. Our guide started to share his knowledge of the constellations. He gestured to them with the high powered torch he’d been using to illuminate wildlife, before night safari turned to quiet stargazing.

But, this isn’t a picture of 5 tourists staring at wondrous sky, the story about this photo starts moments later, when we tried to start the Landcruiser. The torch flickered and the starter turned the crank over a few times, but it wasn’t quite enough, soon the battery went completely. Somewhat suddenly, the silence of African plains felt very loud. Every distant animal call or branch in the wind, was transformed into a feeling of mounting foreboding. My Mum, naturally, took this opportunity to extol the virtues of cars with starting handles, someone else noted we probably shouldn’t have used the torch and the guide happily mentioned that this did not normally happen.

We jumped out, myself, my mother, a robust dutch tourist and our guide, all now behind the vehicle pushing. The men politely grumbled about Mum helping, she retorted with half a story, having push started a truck in africa before. The first attempt was a great opportunity, to learn the weight of a Land Cruiser, the potholed nature of the road and the momentum actually needed to push start a car. One person fell over and at we didn’t get it going. The Second try was a winner, we all ran down to the now running car, hopped in and began laughing.

It wasn’t quite over yet, the headlights were out, so the torch route of all our problems, was the only light. The guide illuminated the road with it, but every so often gestured at a tree or roadside feature, plunging the path ahead into total darkness, to the terror of us tourists but the complete indifference of the driver. I took this picture sometime on that bumpy, dark journey back.

We ate together that night, as firm friends.

Selfie

I recently took this self portrait, in this blog I’m going to do my best to tell you how to do it and how to adapt the technique further. Firstly, I want to talk about the idea, I’ve had the slider for a while and aside from some timelapse and dolly type shots I hadn’t done that much with it. I’d just picked up a wireless flash kit and was experimenting with it, the idea of combining the two things came quickly and soon I was using the majority of my camera equipment for one picture.

One of my favorite things about the result is that it highlights how distance from the subject affects how they look, as you can see the foreground me is noticeably more distorted by the wide angle lens than the background ones.

The diagram below should help explain it a little better.

1) The camera that actually took the photo, I set it at the longest shutter speed, 30 secs, I would have used bulb, but I was using my remote for the other camera! Its set on a motorized slider, that I’ll mention later. 2) The single flash I used, on full zoom set to lowish power,  it’s aiming into a black surface on the far side to avoid fill on the other side of the face. 3) Your subject obviously!

Now the control side, 4) the wireless flash controller attached to a second camera, it’s only being used as a bridge between the intervalometer and the flash controller, not for picture taking. 5) An intervalometer, this fires the flash every 4 seconds, giving you the multiple exposures as the slider moves back. 6) The speed controller for the slider, set to a low speed, slowly going backwards, giving the change of perspective and movement of the subject in frame.

For this second image, I used a similar setup with the slider, but used a phone app that changed colour of the screen slowly from green to pink as the only illumination. The trailing effect is very abstract and I like that it’s not immediately obvious what the image is actually of. I want to experiment with using this technique, or variations of it, on other objects and subjects. Changing light and perspective is an interesting way of exploring a subject, it can be interesting and creative to see thing things in a new way like this.

That’s all for now! I have some other self portrait work and some more long exposure work planned, so look out for that in the next few months. I’ve just set up a personal photography facebook page so please go like it if you want to stay updated on my pictures around the web.

Thanks for reading/looking! – Rob

Looking Wider

One of the striking themes in Jonny Hughes’ film A Foreign God was the use of wide angle closeups. I used this as my starting point, doing some test shooting in the weeks leading up to it, then after jumping straight into the shoot, kept adapting my style to fit with shooting wider. There were two different styles I gravitated towards doing when shooting wide angle, ether getting close and maximising the distortion, as above, or putting your subjects into their environmental context, as I have below. I really liked using wide angles for closeups, its distinctive and kinda gives stuff a fun look. I felt it led me to experiment with my stills, choosing and exploiting angles I normally wouldn’t. When I put the final set together, I found the stuff I shot with wide angle really pop’d out compared to the rest of the images, I really liked the mix that it created. Like all these experiments, its left me eager to incorporate new techniques into the rest of my photography, which is never a bad thing. The mixing of black and white with colour came from the mood boards Jonny sent, even though the film is shot in colour, he had used a mixture of colour monochrome visual references. This was something I knew I could bring out in the stills in a way that couldn’t be realised in the film. The colour was done with a simple classic look, drawing from the yellow and brown tones of the mood board. While with the monochrome I went for higher contrast and preserved the grain from camera, disabling the normal steps I take to reduce it. I felt this brought over the grit from the colour images, tying them together. I originally tried the black and white images in sepia tone, but abandoned this quickly as it came out almost comical and the images looked over processed. Check out A Foreign God on facebook! There are also a few more stills up there for you to check out, along with more coming in the next few weeks. I’ll also be doing another article wide angle close up portraits!

-Rob

Beltane 2015

 

There’s not much you expect to find less on a hill in central Edinburgh than a bunch of modern pagans celebrating a fire festival. But one night a year you will, Beltane emerged in the late 1980’s, a reinvention of the ancient may-day celebrations and a wonderful addition to Edinburgh’s festival tapestry.

It really captured the spirit of a pagan festival, it felt like there was an underlying story and power to the events you watched unfolding, it really felt natural and somewhat supernatural.

It was a joy to watch and to photograph, that said, when I return, I probably won’t go with a camera, there were so many people recording the event on phones, cameras, and in one case an ipad, that it got in the way of what they were trying to do. I think not enough events are just experienced these days, they have to be recorded and shared in order to have happened. I don’t exclude myself from that, all too often I’ve kept taking pictures with no real result, or focused on a camera too the extent that the real reason I was there passed by.

So next time there’s a weird cool pagan festival in Edinburgh, or wherever I happen to find it, you’ll have to ask me to tell you about it, not just glance at the pictures and move on.

There are a few more you can glance at in the album here on Flickr. Please check out Beltane Fire Society on Facebook and think about heading up Carlton Hill should you find yourself in Edinburgh during the beginning of May. Also, think about leaving the camera at home next time you go to a thing (any thing).

Thanks! Rob

Creating Depth

Overcast days are tricky for me photographically, the shadows and contrast you normally get at daytime are one of my photographic crutches. I actually prefer working with streetlights at night than under the flat light you get from a cloudy rainy day. The day I came with my mum to photograph one of her course’s was one of these flat days, so I had to take a different approach to shooting it than I normally might have.

I created depth and interest by making deeper compositions than I normally would, shooting through the willow they were cutting, allowing it to crowd my frames. I think the picture above demonstrates this nicely, despite the overcast day, I has depth and interest, It also tells the ‘story’ of the event well, with the willow uncut at the front, being cut in the middle and bundled neatly on the ground behind.

I also wanted to experiment with leading the viewers eye away from the ‘traditional’ subject of the frame, for this I focused where I thought a viewer would look second, for example the crowd of people in the first shot aren’t the subject of the picture, but they are the first place you’d look if the focus didn’t draw you to the stump in the lower left.

Im glad I did this, its always fun to improvise and augment your visual style to fit with the conditions at hand. Although I did think the style gets a bit repetitive after a while, the entire set fits well together, but could have done with more variation.

If your interested in basketmaking courses or baskets in general, go to my mums site here. If you’d like to see the rest of these pictures, go to this flickr album of them. If you want to know more about Amisfield Walled Garden, which is where I took these, check it out here.

Thanks! Rob

341’s

For That Lizard Laden Death Feel I wanted to try something a little different, before our first meeting, Tom (the Director) had sent some visual references and suggested a couple of films I should watch. I started with Tarkovsky film’s ‘The Mirror’ its known for long takes and what really stuck me was the movement in them. I began to think of photographic techniques I could use to show movement, as the shot list I’d seen for TLLDF included several of these long moving shots. Movement usually poses a challenge for stills, as photographs are a single moment in time, not a collection or progression of them. From those thoughts, long exposure photography seemed like it could fit the bill, I would open the shutter at the start of a take, let the action happen and close it the moment cut was called, up to 5 minutes and 41 seconds later. This would show movement through the frame as I wanted and leave noisy shutter sounds out of takes, keeping sound happy!

The pictures I took ended up exactly how I wanted, showing the movements of the crew, cast and equipment through frame during takes. I think they ended up very alive, really reflecting the organised chaos that takes place behind the camera when its rolling. It was really fun looking at the picture after letting the camera run so long, exposure was mainly guesswork and framing restricted to where I could park a tripod out of everyones way. Its definitely something I’ll come back to, like any photography technique It has its place and its great to have an excuse to do something different and interesting with stills.

One of the things I didn’t expect were the LED’s on various bits of kit, they left trails, a bit like abstract unintentional light painting and I really liked it. If I did it again I would try and get this affect on purpose, its always nice to have a happy accident like that.

Tools of the trade for basic long exposure; a cable release and tripod. If you want to use bulb mode, where the camera keeps the shutter open until you tell it to stop, you’ll definitely need a remote shutter release, it cuts out the wobble you’d get from holding your finger on the shutter, keeping the stuff that stays still crisp. The tripod is also pretty essential, but I got away with perching the camera on things for some of these shots, as long as its stable you’ll get the same results, along with being less in the way. The reflective tape cuts down on the trip hazard factor, something you don’t want to add to on set and the strap is just to make it possible to sling over a shoulder without needing to grab the bag.

I missed ND filters from this picture too, I usually ended up at f22 with the ND8 and ND4 stacked together, if you need ND and don’t have screw on filters, try cutting a square off a gel and taping it over the back of the lens, it’ll work in a pinch or if you cannot fit filters onto the front, like a fisheye.

Check out TLLDF on facebook or twitter, there are a few more photos there and info on release etc. I posted before about the other stills I took for them film and how I got the the final visual look and I will post about the few instances of hopefully natural looking flash photography in my stills from the set shortly.

I hope you liked looking at these as much as I did taking and editing them!

Thanks for reading, Rob.

That Lizard Film

So this last week I’ve been working on a film called “That Lizard Laden Death Feel” Its a short being made by an Edinburgh College of Art masters student. Its been a really fun shoot, with really fun people and it gave a great opportunity to do one of the things I love to do on sets, take production stills.

My production stills concentrate on the people that make films happen, I’ve never cultivated a style on purpose, but one has definably emerged in my work. Like to catch people when they aren’t paying attention to me, concentrating in the task they are working on. It doesn’t alway work, I’ve got stacks of pictures with people staring straight into the lens, having caught onto my ways. But when it works well, I have ended up with some of my most highly regarded work.

With the general stills from the set, the Director, Tom, wanted a colour look that matched the Tarkovsky influences of the film. When we met up before shoot, he showed me a mood board and gave me a few films to watch for visual reference, I kinda went for a modern interpretation of the pallet, lowering the blacks and tinting them green, while lowering the contrast to keep them from popping too much, as Tom mentioned that he liked the quality of my portfolio. Experimenting with green undertones naturally led to comparisons with The Matrix and as much as I love The Wachowskis, it seems they’ve rather taken the colour. I found that just tinting the blacks (using curves) was the best way to avoid looking like a bullet time screen grab, the second you have green highlights you might as well photoshop sunglasses and a firearm onto your subject and move to Zion, neo.

Which brings us onto lizards… It seems they have three gears, perfectly still, one step forward and OHSHITTHEYAREESCAPING fast, naterally the first works for stills, the second for video and the third for no one. It was so much fun to have them on set, stressful for some departments, but generally cool for the rest of us. Our discoveries on shooting with them can be listed as so;

• Lizards like to go to hot lights, but only if you don’t want them too.
• Lizards are massive posers, until they change their minds.
• Lizards run away all the time, but always stop so you can catch them.

I and others liked the lizard pics I got and the camera team got some truly amazing stuff, which is of corse actually the goal of filmmaking, what use are publicity photos without a film to publicise.

Check out TLLDF on facebook or twitter if the pics interest you, there are a few more there and info on release etc. Later in the week I’ll be posting about the long exposure stills I did on this film, (you can take a look at those here) and after that I wanna talk about what I did with a flash, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, Rob.