The North shore Salon is a major national competition run each. This is the second year that I have submitted images and I was super stoked when I received the news this afternoon that my image “Breaking dawn” had been given a “Highly Commended” Award in the Open Colour Section. I also received an acceptance for my “Role of the Model” in the same category.
The Central Region of the Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ) basically covers the Lower half of the north island. I believe that the boundary is just below Taupo but it does include the East Coast city of Gisborne.
This year I entered both a print and a digital image into the Open Category of the salon, and had another image included in the Hutt Camera Club’s print set. I am really stoked with the results.
Because my Club was hosting the conference I actually got to help out with the judging session so was on hand to hear the comments of the judges who actually had no idea who had shot the images.
My print of the “Late for the Ball” image really resonated with the judges and it scores a merit and came third in the competition.
The story behind the image can be found on this blog post.
My “Waiting for the model call” image was included in the Club set with the overall set coming second in the category. The story behind this image can be found on this link.
Finally my image entitled “The Fall” got an “Acceptance” in the Digital Category. Not as high as I would have liked but the standard of the images in the section was very high.
This image was actually a late substitution. I had intended to enter the hanger shot into the category but when it was selected for the Club entry I was under the impression that it could not go into an individual competition. Unfortunately by the time that it was discovered that this was allowed, it was too late.
The success has spurred me on to enter the images into consideration for NZ Camera which is the actual print publication of PSNZ.
Last Tuesday was the final judging of the 2014 Ladder competition and I had two images entered. I was very pleased with the results as both images received “Merits” (which is the second to top score an image can achieve).
The set topic for the round was “From beneath” and I submitted this image taken at the old brickworks in Melbourne.
For the second image I decided to enter my “Late for the Ball” into the Open category.
Very pleased with the overall results, however they were not good enough to actually win the competition.
The Creative Focus Competition is a nationwide competition organised by the Pukekohe Camera club that has an aim of promoting photography that pushes the boundaries of traditional images both in terms of in camera techniques as well as post processing. The competition is in its second year.
Last year I entered four images and all four received acceptances, so i had high hopes of being able to repeat that process again. I entered four image again in a category they referred to as “fusion” however the more common term that should have used was composites.
This year I was not as successful having only two images (shown below) being successful. At first I was disappointed by this but then I learned that they had received twice as many images as the previous year. This meant that their rejection rate had to considerably higher as all the successful images are printed in a book after the competition.
The stories behind the image can be found in Autumn Shoot and Late for the Ball articles
For some time now I have been mulling over a concept that involved a model and a lot of books. Fortunately each year Heretaunga Rotary Club hold an annual book fair and my wife and I help out. Through this process I was able to grab six boxes of books that were either too old or in too bad a condition to be sold, and therefore were destined for scrap.
The books sat in my garage for a couple of months while I tried to come up with the idea. Eventually the concept emerged of a person who was so engrossed in the books that she became part of them. I had seen an image of a girl covered in print and so I showed it to Tiffany Williams who is a very talented makeup artist. Once she agreed to come on board we set a date and I cast for a model. My call was answered immediately by Grace who I have worked with on a number of occasion as a makeup artist but this was to be the first time as a model.
I had initially envisaged that we would cover her whole body in the print but then decided that only her upper body was needed in this way and that I would make a skirt to cover the lower half. I made a simple skirt out of calico and then glued pages from an encyclopaedia to it. In order to create the look of a library I moved a bookcase into our entranceway so that it could line up with another one that we already had there.
We made up a simple paste out of flour and warm water and Tiffany spent the best part of an hour gluing strips of paper to Grace. While she was doing this I built a throne out of the books and fashioned a crown.
The images came out pretty much how I had envisaged them. In photoshop I fixed up and extended the backgrounds to come up with a selection that I really liked. A couple of them will now be entered into upcoming photographic competitions.
Some times the inspiration for a shoot seems to come from random events. A couple of months ago I saw a box of old patterns in a book sale and bought them. My wife had been talking about using them to cover other objects and I instantly thought that it would be quite cool to make a dress out of them. My daughter then dashed my plans by telling me that patterns generally only contains half of a side because you folded the fabric in half to produce the whole piece.
Knowing that it would be difficult to completely cover a model in a single pattern the concept emerged of a girl that had run so late for the ball that they were literally trying to sew the dress around her.
Rather than post a casting call I approached a model (Suzie) and makeup artist (Crystal) who had both expressed interest in working with me. I had coffee with Crystal to go over the details of the shoot because I knew that hair & makeup would be quite unusual from what she had normally done for photoshoots. I knew that I would be compositing the body but I wanted the face to be from a single image. This meant that I wanted one side to be completely made up while the other was bare.
I sent a photo of Suzie and the dress to Crystal and left it up to her to come up with appropriate makeup. I did want to be slightly theatrical with the look in that I wanted large style rollers in the hair. Crystal informed me that such things are not really used anymore but what is used really didn’t work with the look anyway.
The studio I had booked for the day is in an old house so I knew that I wanted to use the room as is. I collected a number of props from home (some under strict instructions from my wife such as her dressmaking scissors were not to be used to cut the patterns) and staged it to look like a sewing room.
Suzie had brought a number of sets of lingerie so that we could see what they looked like under the patterns, which were attached to her with double sided tape. We selected one red and a black/white combination to try out. We started with the red set.
I had decided that the way we were going to shoot it was to do the patterns first and then the dress. I was shooting tethered into lightroom which meant that we could see a larger sized image than on the back of the camera.
Suzie took up different poses and once we had them I went through and selected which one I liked the best. Suzie then got changed into the other lingerie set and we shot a few images based around the poses we liked the best from the first series.
After looking at both sets it was apparent that the red lingerie set produced a much stronger look.
Suzie then put on the dress and we concentrated on getting as close to the chosen pose as possible. Lightroom made this a lot easier as we were able to compare the two images side by side. With the help of Crystal checking the images it did not take long before we had what I thought was a reasonably good match.
Once I had the images loaded on the home computer it was a simple matter of bringing them both into a single file and masking out. I increased the saturation in the lipstick and painted Suzie’s finger nails.
It was quite a fun shoot where pretty much everything went to plan. Thanks to Crystal and Suzie for their assistance in bringing this together.
Last Sunday I has a full day in a Lower Hutt studio to produce images that will be entered into national competitions. The first was inspired by an image I saw in the July issue of F11 magazine by Italian photographer Alessandra Favetto.
I has long held the view that models are often treated as mere clothes hangers, and so I knew that I could use the image as a base. However I wanted to have more than one person in the final image and to have the models hanging from a rack of some sort.
I posted the image in a modeling Facebook group and as I suspected got an immediate response. While I had initially thought that I would cast three models I ended up selecting five. Past experience from shoots had taught me that it was unlikely all five would make it to actual shoot day.
I also knew that the shot could be something that required assistance so I managed to elicit the help of fellow photographer Alan Raga.
As I suspected would happen, in the week leading up to the shoot one model discovered that the timing clashed with a family event and a second one sprained her wrist and ended up in plaster. A third model then failed to respond to any of the communications sent out in advance of the event, and simply didn’t show up on the day. This was exactly the issue that I had spoken about in my recent blog post on “Tips for models“.
In the end Summer & Renee turned up right on time. I had asked the models to bring a number of outfits so that we had a good variety. Renee brought a small suitcase while Summer only brought two (both of which were very similar). We selected initial outfits and the girls got changed. I had to ask Summer to go and change her bra because she had a purple one on under a white top.
In terms of preparation this was going to be a very easy shoot because no hair or makeup was required. I knew that it would require several images to be taken though and then composited together. Past experience in this area has taught me that when you plan to do this having the lighting, camera position and focal length consistent between all shots make it so much easier in post.
The staging for the shoot was very simple with a large fabric backdrop that extended onto the floor and covering a small platform for the girls to stand. The hangers were suspended on another backdrop support. Once the girls were in position we raised the support up to create the illusion that they were hanging from it.
The main light was a large octobox set just left of the camera and high. The fill light was set camera right and down low. I was shooting tethered into a laptop with the camera mounted on a tripod.
Once we had the shots of the girls on the hangers we removed the platform and positioned two high backed chairs in a similar position to where each model has been standing. The girls then raised themselves up and I took the photo.
I had originally envisaged three models on the rack but decided that there was room to shoot four so both Renee & Summer got changed and we repeated the process again.
Putting the images together was relatively simple process as the hem of the skirts provided a good point to merge the images. The hardest part was blending the backdrop and in future I will chose a material that is much more consistent in colour.
As often happens when you look at the images in post you realise that there was something that could have been done better during the shoot. In this case it was the realisation that the dress chosen for Summer in the second shot (orange) was actually hanging next to her in the first series. Fortunately colour is easily changed in photoshop.
The competition it is being entered into closes on August 13 so I still have a little time to tweek it further before then.
It was a very smooth shoot and it only took 40 minutes to get all the images we needed. Thanks to Renee, Summer and Alan for making it an enjoyable event.
In more ways than one last week was a very flat week photographically speaking. After spending the previous week wandering the streets of Melbourne I returned to Wellington with a cold. The weather all week was crap and so was my main work (as we are going through a restructure). It was therefore a real struggle to find the motivation each day to ensure that I shot the image for my “photo a day” challenge. It was therefore probably not a good week to have several images up for judging in the week, and my underlying mood probably resulting in feeling particular bad when the results came out.
First up was my Audio-Visual entry in the Tauranga AV competition and the results came out on Monday. I ended up getting nowhere, which I have written about in a previous blog entry, and are still waiting on some feedback from the judges.
Then on Tuesday night I had two images being judged in the Hutt Camera Club Ladder competition. The set topic was “wear & tear. Both images got an “accepted” grade which again was disappointing as I had hoped for higher. The judge was a local professional photography who admitted that he shot weddings and therefore was not overly qualified to judge other types of work. The images and the judged comments are shown below.
Finally on Sunday I entered my “The Wolf Within” print to an image critiquing session of the Wellington branch on the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers (NZIPP) under the creative portrait category. NZIPP judge on a different way than used in camera clubs, or any competition run by the Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ), so I was interested to see how the image would do there. The event was sponsored by Canon so it was a great opportunity to see what the image looked like on high quality paper. The Wellington group use the session as a lead in to the annual NZIPP Iris awards so many of the images were ones that the photographers were considering entering. The judges were aware of this therefore the amount of feedback received was actually greater than perhaps would have been if it had been an actual competition.
The image scored an average of 66 which was midway through the range considered to be of “professional standard”. I had hoped for a little more, but given that there were three very experienced judges and the comments made about the image the mark was probably accurate.
At the end of the week I felt really down about the standard of my work and I really questioned why I had bothered to subject myself to this process.
After consideration I decided that you need to invite such critique if you are to advance in photography because in it, like life in general, we learn so much more from our mistakes than our successes.
From the judging at club
From the NZIPP judging
Most photographic competitions involve the entry of a single image, or a portfolio of separate images. There are however a number of competitions that let you enter an audio-visual (AV) in which you piece together images with music and sometimes narration. The AV is then judged as a whole.
I decided last year to try to put an entry together for the Tauranga AV Competition in the category of “Music, Poetry & Song”. I found a piece of music that I liked written by the Irish band Westlife titled “Flying without wings”. The song had very strong clear lyrics and a reasonably consistent beat so I figured it would be ideal to use.
I actually visualised that the final shot would be a girl appearing to fly off the end of a wharf with a set of wings lying on the ground. Unfortunately that was as far as I got and the entry date passed without me doing anything about it. This year I determined that I would make the effort and enter. This was further spurred on when I bought Fotomagico which is a Mac based tool for producing AV’s.
I started by downloading the lyrics for the song than in order to plan it I put them into an excel spreadsheet. This meant that I could make notes of what images I thought may be suitable to represent them. Ideally you would go out and shoot a series of images specifically to fit the song, but given that it was a love song I was sure that I probably had images that could be used. I went through and reviewed all of the images I had taken in the last three years and selected a number that were possibilities. These were then places against the lines that I thought they most related to.
Fotomagico has two ways in which you can time the slide transitions. You can define markers on the soundtrack or you can set a duration time on the image. I initially set markers but this caused problems in areas where I did not have an image. After having to resetting times after adding new slides I abandoned the approach and set durations instead. I also used a selfie image as a placeholders for this lines that did not have an image.
Over a six week period all bar three lines were able to matched with existing images and I went out and shot the final three images.
After numerous run throughs I thought that the AV was ready but you do reach a point where you can no longer be objective to it so I showed it to a number of other members of my camera club. They liked most of it however the initial four images confused them somewhat. My wife had made a similar comment so these images were replaced. I then showed the AV to an experienced judge who I knew has entered AV competitions before. He gave favourable comments but did express the opinion that he was not sure how it would go as the judges in these competitions seem to have some strange ways in which they judge them.
In the end the concept for the shot that I had right at the start was never taken.
I would have liked to have finished this post by saying that the AV did well. Unfortunately it was “not accepted” and I am waiting to hear comments on what the judges felt was wrong. The AV is below and I would welcome comment on it.
For most of this year I have been taking images for a club competition. The final judging was held last week and I was really pleased with the results. I submitted two digital images and two prints, receiving three “merits” and one “commended”. In our scoring system a “merit” is the second to highest mark that can be given.
On all points combined my images outscored everyone else.
I also entered a number of the images into the inaugural “Creative Focus” competition run by the Pukekohe Frankton Camera club. I submitted four images and all were selected.
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