Portrait Photography Dundee
Creative photography is wonderful and can make all the difference to an image.
The story behind the photograph.
My eldest son saw some of the images I had taken at my Last MMoS (Mentor Me on Steroids) session with Damian McGillicuddy and liked the effect it gave. After giving it some thought he came to me and said “Dad could you make it look like I am a Jedi knight, not just holding a lightsaber, but doing a Jedi dash”. I replied with “yes I can, but it will have to wait a day or two as I am busy just now”.
Although he has and interest in photography, he is not one for posing or getting his photograph taken. Given the chance to become a Jedi was too much and he jumped at the chance.
Later that day, I found myself with some down time. So I told him to get his Karate suit on and moved the furniture in the lounge to make room for him moving across it. I set up a black background. Put my camera on a tripod on the other side of the room to the background and we were ready to begin with the photography. After a few test shots to get the start and stop positions correct, by placing things on the floor. Followed by getting the timings right, we were good to go.
He also wanted to try being in two places at one time whilst holding his bounty hunters blaster. To which I was more than happy to try, below are a couple of the resulting shots from that impromptu creative portrait photography session.
Photography Technical Details – How it was done
Both of these images were shot using a single long exposure and a single flash, the starting point where he is in the background was lit by a handheld torch for a brief time. In the top image he is moving from place to place quite slowly to get the blur, and in the second quite quickly to help eliminate the blur.
Equipment used
Canon EOS 7D – Mounted on tripod
Sigma 28-70 mm f/2.8 lens
Canon 580 EX speedlight, in Manual
DMLS 19″ Beauty Dish
Pocket Wizard TT1 and TT5
Remote release for shutter
Settings
Camera – 40mm – f/4.0 – ISO – 100 6sec
Flash – metered @f/4.0 ant triggered manual by using TT1 in my hand when he reached final position.
Thats it, I hope you enjoyed this post and reading how it was done, if you have any questions or thoughts then please feel free to let me know in the comments below.
If you find yourself in a rut with your photography, try something new or different and enjoy the results.
All Photography and text in this article © 2012 Photography by Gareth Williams
