Portrait shoot

Last Friday I had a full day location corporate portrait shoot with Just Group, always good fun working with these guys, they to have an amazing culture and attract high energy people, people who are always great to work with.

AGM's

Part of what we do is Event Management and last week was the AMCOR Annual General Meeting at the Park Hyatt Melbourne.

Co-ordinating the venue, presentation, staging, lighting, audio, auto-cue, webcast and video, this is the area of the business that Wayne most enjoys. Events like this bring together most areas of our business, graphic design, multimedia design, photography and video production, and event management, all good for business.

For me the day was some stills for the record and to set up two cameras for the webcast, a wide shot to cut to and a close up of lectern and the Chairman during Q&A.

Mornington Volunteer Marine Rescue, VMR

I have an uncle, Tim Warner, who is involved with the Mornington Volunteer Marine Rescue, a couple of years ago he asked if I could do a shoot for them with the idea of populating their website and to improve their promotional and sponsorship materials. This seemed to work well enough for them, and recently they asked me to do some more with them. Sunday 17th Oct, I headed over to their base and photographed all their committee groups, all the members and some portraits of the exec. Whilst there I picked up some abstract shots that they will be able to use on their site and in other places.

I enjoy supporting these guys, they make a great contribution to the community, check them out on their website.

Hockey Photographs

This Saturday saw the Mornington Peninsula Hockey Club, MPHC, have their presentation day, the afternoon for the juniors and the evening for the seniors. Both of my boys, Josh and Loch, play for MPHC and as I do not have the skills to coach, my way of supporting the club is to shoot group and action photographs of each team. These images are used in the year book compiled by Matt Haysom and on the website, managed by Harley Freeman, I then also run a basic slide show from Aperture of each team whilst they are on stage handing out their respective awards.

Some-one asked how much time I have to put in to do this, some quick sums.
I photographed
• 28 teams at 34 games, each game including before and after shots,
• about 12,000 21MP images
• travel to games
• sorting and process images, allowing 1 hour processing for every hour of shooting.
• exporting images for the designer and website

How much time, yeah it takes a bit, but then so does each of the other roles in the club and I enjoy mine.

Tunnel Breakthrough

Cool shoot today, 65m down filming a Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM, breaking through after travelling nearly 4km under the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Not my pics this time as I was shooting video, rather pics of me working.

Shooting again

I have spent the last few days in the studio, reviewing vision, sorting stills and managing the Melbourne Water Image Library so it was nice today to head out for an impromptu shoot.

On of our clients, Melbourne Water, are always on the look out for images that they may not have the opportunity to commission, an example being floods or water over the road. Last nights down power in Melbourne gave us the opportunity to head out and grab a couple of shot for them. Nothing special, but images that will be called upon to illustrate flooding.

Also in the process of prep'ing the video gear for a shoot tomorrow, heading back out to the Melbourne Main Sewer Replacement, MMSR. I will be shooting pipes being lowered into the Yarra river crossing, the overview we have been given makes it sound like an interesting process. Shooting on the Sony EX3 as the prime camera and our little baby Sony MC50 as a second camera for those tight and uncomfortable places where you do not want to take an expensive camera.

We purchased the Sony MC50 specifically for the filming of this project, MMSR and the Northern Main Sewer Project. Both require vision to be shot down in the tunnels in hot, wet, dark and dusty conditions, my feeling was I would rather trash this little camera than the big one. Having shot for a day in one of the tunnels I was blown away by the quality of vision from the MC50. It is pin sharp, the image stabiliser works beautifully and the audio which I was dismissing due to the noise levels is actually quite usable.

These pics are from the MC50, the vision has been transcoded to ProRes 422 and exported from FCP as a png. They are all available light, handheld.

 The first is shot from a moving train in the tunnel, very little light, lots of movement, the stabiliser shone here.

This second image is in the front of the Tunnel Boring Machine, it is about 45 degrees Celsius, 113F, it is humid as they have been spraying everything with water to try and cool it down enough to touch.

Again available light, notice the intensity of his head torch and handheld.

This last image was shot on the EX3 and a tripod.

Discussion Forums

At some stage in my life I was introduced to the adage, "the more you put into something, the more you get out of it," I try and use this all the time and often look back realising that it is when I have put the most into something that I have got the most out of it. This applies to everything from being on School Councils, Sporting Committees and surprisingly the Apple Discussion Forums.

I have become a regular on the Aperture  forum, not because I have specific questions I want answered, rather I find that it is almost selfish, I learn so much from the others on the forums. Questions are asked that I often look at and think "basic", but there are many which I look at and think I have not got a clue, reading the answers giving an insight in to the application and the trouble shooting process. I have found a few times where an issue has cropped up and it is only the reading of the forums  during my down times that has kept me operational at the critical moments.

Shooting for annual reports

I recently spent a day on location at the Australian Synchrotron shooting material for their annual report, a full on day and great fun.

Our studio does quite a but of work with the Synchrotron across disciplines, print design such as posters, banners, annual reports and newsletters, web and presentation design, video production and corporate photography. It is this cross over that works well with our clients, our graphic designer was able to go through my image library finding suitable material for the annual report and then also brief me on style and content for the photographs I needed to go and shoot on location.

It is interesting what gets used from a shoot and working closely with our designers gives me an insight to what is needed, an example being abstract imagery such as these ones of lighting panels. Our designer took these images and incorporated them as backgrounds and standalone items.

The original brief was for specific people in their work environments, working with our designer Sara on location we were able to find additional material to supplement and enhance the Annual Report.

 

I learnt the lesson about picking up closeups and shots such as these whilst shooting video, in video production the need for cutaways is paramount, print and web design is not different, close ups and abstracts add an enormous amount of value.