A few weeks ago I was asked to take some graduation shots for a family friend. Sarah recently graduated but the photographer at the ceremony wouldn’t do the various family shots she wanted, so she hired the gown for another week & brought it home.

The shots were taken at Sarah’s home. I took my white muslin background & lit the subject with two Elinchrom BRXi 500s. The shots were all done with the 24-105mm F4 L lens

The muslin background needs a lot of post processing to make the background white so I decided to invest in some white vinyl which should make the job much easier. It arrived on Christmas Eve from Glasgow. Lastolite make a version & charge around £200 for 2.5m by 6m. I managed to get mine from a company which makes fabric for curtain-sided HGVs & got it for about £49 for 2.5m by 7m (plus postage).

The second match in the season saw the Hertfordshire Hurricanes take on the University of East Anglia Pirates at the Hurricanes home ground in Hatfield.

The Hurricanes have an all weather pitch with floodlighting, which is just as well since the game started in harsh afternoon winter sun & ended under the lights with a very dark sky.

The extreme lighting variations makes it quite difficult for the photographer who has to manage high shutter speeds with increased ISO as the light disappears. Consequently the later shots are all at very high ISOs up to 6400, these shots have been run through noise reduction software. I prefer Imagenomic Noiseware which does a great job at reducing noise in the shots.

The Hurricanes managed to keep their early season advantage by shutting out the Pirates 24 – 0.

Posted under Photo Shoots

The British University American Football League (BUAFL) began in November, which sees competition between 56 university teams split into 8 divisions in 4 conferences.

The Hertfordshire Hurricanes started their campaign away at Essex University in Colchester on 8th November.

The season started well for the ‘Canes as they ran out 20-0 winners. All shots were taken on either the 5D MkII with 600mm f4 prime or the 20D with 70-200 f2.8 L zoom.

Both teams have a group of cheerleaders who put on a show at half time. Unfortunately, as I didn’t know what to expect or how little time their displays took, I wasn’t really set up with the best equipment, but managed to get a few reasonable shots. The one below is of the Essex Cheerleaders, the “Flames”

Posted under Photo Shoots

We managed to get away for a week in October for the half-term break & returned to our little self-catering flat in Overstrand. The flat is in a large detached house just a few minutes walk from the beach, so we spent much time there with Tess. The weather was fantastic with sun on several of the days we were there. We even managed t-shirts on the beach on our last day, not bad for October.

All the shots here are HDR or High Dynamic Range, which means they are a combination of several shots taken at different exposures & combined in software.

All shots were handheld & made up of three photos taken at a stop apart. They were combined in Photomatix & then saved out & completed in Photoshop.