El cheapo strikes again! B&W headshots..

[bfitzgerald]

No flash, that is a side lamp which caught it on the edges.

Have to say C1 4 is pretty good, giving it a bash on trial, that one was shot raw, C1 can do decent skintones, and when you hit "auto" on WB, exposure, levels etc, it gets it pretty well. I hit auto in LR, and it stuffed up the exposure, and missed the WB by a mile.

I think I picked b&w mostly as the lighting is hard to get accurate WB on, even in camera on custom..these come out orange in auto WB! Very warm low kelvin lights. Will try some outdoors or using daylight soon.

Anyone got full body shots at all? I always find that hard to do..composition wise.

[KevinBarrett]

No, I don't know the guy. This was another shot from the intersection where I shot this one. Sunlight from left, reflected off a skyscraper behind him, and my flash filling in the shadows from about 70 feet away (yes, it made a difference even from that distance).

I like full body pictures in B&W to be about an action.

[David Kilpatrick]

Another thread ruined. Mr Irrelevant Overkill strikes again. Everyone else chips in with a couple, or just a single, relevant and considered shots. Don floods the thread with successive posts full of pictures with hardly any link to the original theme, instead of picking just one or two or three and keeping it running as a conversation.

David

[David Kilpatrick]

Barry said he found full body shots hard to compose - take a second look at the selection you posted, with 'composition' in mind. As I said, irrelevant. The pix that Barry opened this thread with are in a different class, and I am sure that when he says 'composition' he means 'good composition', not just vaguely managing to grab a shot with bits cut off, camera tilted, subject randomly positioned.

David

[Dusty]

Looks like somebody forgot to take his meds again!

Dusty

[David Kilpatrick]

LOL...You are the one that ADVOCATES bits cut off for gosh sake! You are just being a jerk...you know those are decent editorial shots that can be sold to newspapers etc. You are about as goofy as they get these days! Jump on Kevin if you want to jump someone! Geesh! BTW...those were auto compressed and sharpened by the server and hastily cropped about 5 years ago. :lol
-Sonolta

Kevin's picture is also in a completely different class. You will never get this, I realise. 170 years of photographic history mean nothing

Your pix are like the teenage rock bands who practice in our local community centre for several hours nonstop, when something like Kevin's shot is a brief solo by a professional soloist in a classical orchestra. The teenage rock bands would just think 'what the f* is that cr* about?' and I guess that's how it is for you. It must be a cultural thing. You show places I would never want to go and people I would not want to encounter - frantic, superficial images. While Kevin, Henry (Bakubo), Dr Harout, Yildiz, Paul (Murph) and others show pix which make me want to travel more (even locally!) and meet more people.

David

[KevinBarrett]

...something like Kevin's shot is a brief solo by a professional soloist in a classical orchestra...Kevin, Henry (Bakubo), Dr Harout, Yildiz, Paul (Murph) and others show pix which make me want to travel more (even locally!) and meet more people.

David

High praise! Thank you David!

[bfitzgerald]

I thought this thread was coming along great, and we could all look, enjoy and maybe even get some new ideas from looking at other peoples shots.
Sigh.............

[aster]

Hi Kevin,

This is a serene shot; non-defying, non-challenging, non-competitive which relies on its own power of subject rendition. I like the feel of ease at your approach.

But I've been thinking after looking at the photo and then reading the post too that there's coffee involved as part of the surroundings and maybe the lady in your life was actually having a cup herself. I think that blending a coffee cup or the equivalent accesories into such compositions can make nice photos too which actually give away why the subject actually was there for. Just a thought but since you have a cooperative model nearby, I think you have many good opportunities ...

Yildiz

I tend to frame up my portraits pretty similarly. This was shot with one of my "el cheapo" lenses, the 70-210/4, which was got for $172. Available light was used in a local Starbucks chain, 75mm, f/4, 1/125 sec., ISO 640. Colors are straight out of the camera, only sharpening applied.

[KevinBarrett]

I've almost made it a rule not to shoot people while they're eating...it's too easy to get monstrously unflattering shots...but I might try getting her in action next time.

[aster]

I've almost made it a rule not to shoot people while they're eating...it's too easy to get monstrously unflattering shots...but I might try getting her in action next time.

Hi Kevin,

I may have missed the point I actually was trying to make in my previous post. What I was going for was a very subtle implication of an object, like the blurry/out-of-focus outline of the part of a cup, maybe a decoration pertaining to the brand Starbucks that doesn't show as a whole...just a tiny extra but subtle figure that suplements and thus completes your story. I didn't actually mean while drinking, eating or talking which comprises actual action but stilness of togetherness with an other object...like the one time photo you shared in the forum while she was reading a book and the book was out of focus.

I suppose I explained myself with more clarity this time.

Yildiz

[David Kilpatrick]

That last one is one the best shots I've seen from you Don. The frontmost guy could take a touch of extra density. Kind of archetype platoon leader or sergeant-major with recruits - looking, anyway, like that - it may be something entirely different!

David

[david antony]

Street Vibrations Reno 2008 (Eldorado Hotel)
No controlled light, hundreds of bikers
at my back! not in your league Don :^)

F/2.8 1/20 ISO/1600

[David Kilpatrick]

Most of the music I hear/see has no lighting and no 'performance' aspect (the people may be sitting down and may have their backs to you). Anything else tends to be either very big (Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle, REM at Balloch, Live8 - or indeed Live Aid back in the 1980s, but I had to hide my Balda 35 camera and it would have been useless) or a bit of a 'listening' gig, no DSLR sort of sound would be acceptable. So I have always used my KM A2, if anything. I was doing sound and lighting for John Renbourne and Jacqui McShee at this concert, so I was in the control room at the back of the theatre, with an Olympus E-1:


This was a still shot on the A2 but most of the time I was shooting video of Seth Lakeman:


The venue has now been burned out, the Alex Harvey Band's stage gear caught fire - no-one hurt but all the gear lost, along with one of the most popular small venues in Edinburgh.
Below, Billy Bragg on his anti-BNP tour - just A2 from seated position:


I'll post a few more music-related pix.

David

[David Kilpatrick]

Some more relevant tech content here:
With the A700, in this case I had organise the gig so I was able to shoot without any concerns, Peter Donegan (Lonnie Donegan's son, and very much musical heir, though the old skiffle style has been updated):

This is the shot without DRO on the A700 (raw conversion) and this is the same shot using Advanced DRO +4 in camera JPEG:

But I don't shoot these for any uses (in fact I haven't even filed the Peter Donegan band shoot with Alamy). The only music-related shot I've sold through Alamy, apart from many sales of tartan+fiddle, was a shot taken during one of our own pub sessions:


Consistently the best-selling music related shots are of instruments and anonymous looking sheet music arranged in still life form. That's because most band/performance shots are commissioned and owned by the record companies (they very rarely buy in outside work) and relatively few live shots are used in commercial marketing material now. What is left tends to be the generic market. My best seller is a pic of my cousin's fiddle and some antique music, which was bought by Sony (!) in the early 1990s for a classical music CD series - it was filed with Tony Stone, and I shot it in formats from 35mm to 8.5 x 6.5 inch sheet film (not 10 x 8 - for some reason I had found a wholeplate Sinar Norma outfit going for a song, and decided to use special order wholeplate Ektachrome for a while - not for long as no-one would pay any more for that size than for 5 x 4!).

David