We were more than impressed with the sheer energy & enthusiasm coming from these dudes. They told us their story & how they’d come together from Iceland, New Zealand & Canada (hence ‘Cities Between Us’) and were currently rocking out some new tracks in the UK/Canada, whichever kept them busiest. Here they are are: L>R Valdimar, Jo, Josh, Stefan & Nimal

As with all photography, wedding, music or otherwise, if the other side ‘puts in’, the results are all the sweeter. After they’d left, we were buzzing on their enthusiasm and decided to crank things up a bit for them. Instead of just a photoshoot, we were going to make them a music video. This was gonna be Phil’s baby, as we’ve found it easier in such projects to take on roles, so Phil took ‘Herr Director’, I took the reigns on camera operating and lighting and Barns would do the editing.

Meanwhile, in July they began work on their debut album, with star producer Matt Hyde – the grammy award winning engineer who’s worked with Trivium, As I Lay Dying, Bullet for my Valentine & Slipknot – and came back to us with a tasty number called ‘Dirty Money’.

We had a good listen, booked a date, hired a warehouse & some Arri TV lights & settled in for a day’s filming.  We asked aboard the helpful hands of James Lester (an ace tog pal who manned camera B & shot the images in this post) & Hannah Reynolds (James’ art college pal who manned the mac desk & file conversion).

Here’s a view of the warehouse, from the back looking towards us (you can see our macbook pro desk between the left guitar & bass amps)

Above are a few shots James caught of the band in action.

Gearwise: We filmed on Canon DSLRs (2 x 5DmkII’s & a 7D for slow mo footage), a gib (a video crane) & a bunch of Arri TV studio lights & a strobe…

…but really the show was run on CBU power! Seriously: all credit to the band, who rocked solidly for like 7hrs.

We felt for Stefan, the drummer, who was in shreds after givin it beats all day

We left the day we an absolute bucket load of footage and tootled off to Barnaby’s to hand it over for his job of editing . . .

That’s a screen grab of the final track, chopped & laid out in Final Cut Pro.

It was a seriously interested experience & learning curve for us all, not just on the day – playing with lighting, slow mo and cranes etc – but in post production – converting, syncing & chopping the footage – to pump the vid with life & pace.

But we’re totally pleased with the final result. Check it out below, in crispy HD:

If you can’t see the vid for whatever reason, check it out on vimeo here.

Hope you enjoyed watching that as much as we did making it! Massive thanks to Cities Beween Us, who are up in Iceland recording the 2nd leg of the album, for being absolute legends on the day and in general. It wouldn’t look anywhere near this ace if you didn’t put in 100% like you did.

If you’ve a commission for 3B Media, or would like a music vid/documentary, don’t be shy – drop us a line here or on info@3Bmedia.co.uk

Mary Queen of Shops has nothing to do here . . .

They look too much like actual cup cakes!

Hard at work, piping the soap and finishing one of the ‘cakes’.

A finished ‘cake’.

‘Vanity Fur’ – Soap specially formulated for dogs!

Award Winners

Overall Winner • Picture House

Best Pub • Picture House

Best Bar category • Fibre

Best Club •  Halo

Best Door Teams • Arc Inspirations

The Radio Aire Listener Award • Carpe Diem

Amazing food served by the excellent catering staff at Alea

Where would a bar awards ceremony be without some cheeky cocktails?

Radio Aire DJ  Rich Williams, presenting the awards on stage.

Best Pub & Overall winners • Picture House Pub

You may be aware that Barnaby Aldrick, Phil Barber & myself, all established Leeds-based snappers, joined forces last year to pool our skills into 3B Media.

[FYI: The 3B's come from the B's of our nicknames 'Barber', 'Booker' & 'Barns']

Our common goal has been to create an exciting, forward-thinking company with 3 major goals:

1. To run fun workshops train & develop the stills & video skills of photographic enthusiasts & aspiring pro’s
2. To take on interesting commissions in photography & video that we wouldn’t be able to approach as standalone photographers
3. To inspire one another & the world of photography through our 3B Media website.

So after running successful training courses, we’ve spent these past months beavering away at coding our vision into a working website.

Introducing www.3Bmedia.co.uk!

Let me show you around the key pages…

After studying the photography training market around us in Yorkshire there appears to a lack of training for amateurs & aspiring professional photographers. We’ve all been on or heard horror stories about training courses with too many delegates / sharing too little equipment / fighting over too few models / not having enough teachers to go around. So at 3B we decided to run a few simple courses for small groups, with all the B’s on hand for a more one-on-one experience.

The courses we’ve currently offering include:

And there are more details about each course in the Workshops section of the site if you’re interested in joining us to sharpen your skills!

The next major section of the site has been the development of the 3B Pages.

The 3B pages are the evolving, ever-expanding hub to our website, where the reader will find bucket loads of useful information and inspiration. The Pages link to the 3B Photo & Video galleries – for inspiring 3B stills & video commissions – the 3B Friday page – where every week (guess which day) we post professional techniques, tricks, and ideas on how to take your photography / business further – the 3B Amazon Store, detailing the gear we use & rate and finally the 3B Blog – our electronic signpost, pointing out news, changes within the site (such as new projects added to the commissions page) and new 3B Fridays posts.

So we hope you enjoy our shiny new site. It’s still a work in progress and will grow and change as time goes on. But it’s there for you and we’d love you to follow & comment on the blog, drop us a line if you’re interested in using us for a commission or fancy joining us on one of our upcoming workshops!

For the strobists amongst you: I was working with one Canon Speedlight 580 EXII, using a lastolite 80cm umbrella-box on a light stand, triggered using an Elinchrom Skyport, and both camera and flashgun were on manual.  f-stops were around 5.6, shutter speeds anything between 1/30th and 1/160th, with ISO again starting at 200 increasing to 800 as the daylight vanished!

They’ve both been working hard at getting access to this gig for ages and at 12:30 that day (just as I was setting my afternoon up for cups of tea and working though a back log of editing), I got a phone call from Phil. “Whatever you’re doing, cancel it; I’ve got two press passes to U2 and I’m coming to get you.”  Dull afternoon avoided.

Whether you like U2 or not it was impossible not to be impressed by the amazing show that these 4 Irish blokes manage to pull off.  The rush of photographing such a high profile gig in front of 50,000 fans was like nothing I’ve experienced before.  I’ve photographed dozens of events and gigs before, but this was on a whole new scale.

The basic set-up for photographing gigs is something like this: First 3 songs only, No use of flash, Get the hell out.  Me and Phil are used to working fast, but the pressure was on when we realised we had about 10 minutes to nail a set of pictures.

This was the press lady, who explained to us that after the second song, the bridges would swing round to allow the band access to the second outer stage, and also to duck.

The Edge making one guitar sound like 9.  Smoke machines and spot lights make my life easy

Adam Clayton, looking a bit like a Bond villain.

The stage all reminded of us of something out of of H.G. Wells novel

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The three of us blog on a regular basis about the work we do, but we knew that with video it would be a lot easier, cooler and better to showcase how we do, what we do.  We also were keen to show potential clients that a photo shoot can and should be a fun thing to be involved with.  The majority of people we photograph are not professional models and we wanted to give them an idea of what to expect.

So after several half pints of stout we decided to put a shoot together at a mechanics garage in Leeds.  We all wanted to experiment with some new lighting techniques and put the bias of the shoot on high-end high street fashion.  I contacted a few models to come along for the day, we arranged a make-up artist and got our good friend Cris Matthews along to capture the video footage.  There’s another blog entry below to fill you in on the details of the day.

Anyway, I’m writing too much and ignoring the point of this post which is to show the video!  After some late nights in front of a MacBook Pro here’s my final edit of the video.  To watch in super spangly High Definition click on the HD logo once the video starts playing.  You can also see Cris’ edit here: http://www.vimeo.com/6010320

3B MEDIA • Fashion Photography • Lighting On-Location from Rob Booker on Vimeo.

We decided on the 3B Media name as an umbrella brand for anything the 3 of us do together.  Booker, Barber and for alliterative purposes Barnaby.  We’ll be working on a few more of these fashion and lighting days over the coming months, and as Cris did such a sterling performance of making us HD-Ready, he’ll be along for the ride too.

3B Media are planning to do some training workshops in January 2010, so if you’d like to come along to one then please get in touch.  There’ll be in a similar theme to what you see on the video here, giving all you photographers a chance to shoot some new portfolio material, learn and develop your skills behind the camera, meet some like minded people, and bug the 3 of us to death about how we do what we do!  As we shoot more videos over the rest of the year we’ll be posting them up on our blogs so you can get a feel for what the training days will be like.

More on 3B Media later, but for now here’s a few more of my pictures from the day.  There’s no geeky tech details here, but don’t be shy about posting a comment and I’ll fill you in on the f-stops and focal lengths and flash ratios.

First up we’ve got Matt who is a super cool all round good bloke, coming up with some crazy but awesome ideas.  I found this wedge shaped corridor and after clearing it out, Matt experimented with the space throwing out some acrobatics to get into these positions.

This was shot behind a couple of container crates I found in the yard of the garage.  It was raining pretty badly by this point, so we had about 2 minutes to get some pictures before my camera started giving me electric shocks.  The suit Matt’s wearing is a £3 charity shop special, and the cross of tape was his idea.  I think portraits are a lot more interesting, when you can imagine a story behind the details.

Next up we’ve got Clare who is a photographer as well as a model herself, so was keen to see what was going on both sides of the camera.  This picture was a pretty quick set-up with 3 flashes and again I let Clare experiment with the space.  The processing on the shot I pushed as much as Photoshop would let me,  I wanted it to have as much punch as possible, but ultimately it’s the red glasses that make the shot.

Stef was one of the first models who was ready on the day and most of the mechanics stopped work once we started shooting!  This set-up was shot with a ring-flash and giant softbox off to one side.  Processing again was pushed as far as I can take it.

Viv had Phil’s attention for most of the day, but I saw the potential of this yellow steel door as soon as we rocked up in the morning.  Then when Viv came down wearing a black dress and a splash of red lipstick, I was dying to put the 2 together.

Here’s a gallery with some more images on:

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Check out Phil’s blog and Barnaby’s blog for their side of the day, and if you want to get in contact with any of the other guys involved you can do so here:

Make-Up • Katy Padam • www.ktmakeup.co.uk

Video • Cris Matthews • www.crismatthews.com

Models • Stef Jones via modelmayhem.com, Vivienne Edge via modelmayhem.com and Clareski via modelmayhem.com