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

Anyway, below are a few of my photos from the today’s fly-by visit.  Most of these were taken during recording, and being stuck in one place with one lens during the takes was quite restrictive but also quite liberating.

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!

This was one of those shots that took a little bit of patience to light correctly, to get the left hand side of his face to just creep out of the shadow,and to get a decent amount of fall-off onto the background.  I love the way all the colours subtly blend into each other.

This is just naturally window lit.

I seem to have a strange fascination with roller-shutters at the moment, I think it’s just a phase.

A winning combo guaranteed: Brick walls, shallow depth-of-field, moody stare.

We attempted to get some shots that look like they’d been pulled from a movie, even down to the widescreen ratio.

All in all a hard, but fun 2 hour shoot which bagged Liam about 80 shots.  Its kinda nice when you’ve photographed someone before, because you know how far you can push them and where they’re coming from.

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

31st Century, Steam-Punk, and Post Apocalyptic were the main words I overheard being used to describe it, so it sounds pretty cool. I photographed about 20 people all dressed in some fantastic outfits and also there were weapons a plenty getting used and demonstrated by some of the cast including Samurai swords, axes, guns and good old fashioned fists. Everyone was super energetic and gave plenty of their own ideas when it came down to getting poses and themes for the characters.

Anyhow, here’s a few posters that I have cobbled together for the series using my photos and I’ll keep you posted with a further set of images once I get round to editing them all.

Still catching up on getting some recent jobs on the blog, so bare with me as this week I have at least 2 shoots every day . . . My coffee machine is seeing a lot of use.

Audience participation was the aim of the game, and Rich Williams from Radio Aire was on the mic to draw in the punters.

A hundred frames later, I was handed a tray of tasty tasty free sushi for my lunch.

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They’re a great bunch of people and put as much into the shoot as they do a performance.  The pictures are being used for the new promotional material which is being designed by Made By Analogue, a company who I’ve worked with on several projects.[svgallery name="The Birdcage"]