With Hannah pointed into the wind, I shot from below using a Nikon D700 and a 200mm lens. ISO 320, 1/60th at f/4 with the camera on a monopod. A fairly bright covered zone kept us out of the rain and in wonderful natural light.
My shooting workshops start in March each year for a reason. Three months from the shortest day gives me a whole day’s shooting and a bit of natural light to utilise in the covered areas and interiors on my shoot routes. If all my delegates owned a D3, D700 or 5D mk2 then I could shoot undercover all year round. It gets a bit nippy for the models at times but modern cameras come alive in the dark of winter. (more…)
The LoveCube™ is here at last. No, it is not dodgy but it will brighten up your photographs and look great at home after the shoot too. Details
The LoveCube™ is a studio prop that will look just as cool in the woods, on the beach, up the Eiffel Tower or in your home. It comes complete with a light fitting (removable) so that it can be used as an illuminated coffee table.
Twitter continues to amaze me. I’ve connected with 800 or so photographers now and it seems the tipping point has been reached. (more…)
Five pictures that charted my career. By Damien Lovegrove 2010
Mirage in the Western Desert in Egypt. Taken by me in 1996 using a Nikon F90 with a 300mm Tamron lens and an unbranded 2x converter on Kodachrome 64. This picture was shot for stock and continues to sell well today. Sales from this shot alone total over £20,000. Every GCSE student of Physics will recognise this shot from their text books. Dorling Kindersley love it too and it often appears in their publications.
Have you ever sat down and written a title for an essay with absolutely no idea how to complete the task? I perhaps stupidly suggested to Terry Hope, the editor of PhotoPro magazine that it would be fun to write a piece about just a few pictures that became stepping stones in my life. Then perhaps he could invite other photographers to write the same essay. He wrote back and said okay get the job done. So here is the start of what might be an interesting chain of personal stories loosely strung around photographs. (more…)
It was right at the beginning of my career as a photographer that I realised I needed to be able to capture the emotion between people in my pictures rather than just shots of the people themselves.
In this grid you can see how I’ve often used very tight shots to eliminate distracting elements and to add impact to the shots. The collection shows shots from, Cherish the Dress workshops, Passion on the Streets workshops and a wedding. Notice how in some of the shots I’ve directed the girl to place her hands on or around the guys head.
The easy option was to adopt a reportage style of shooting and capture what was there in front of me but I was put off this idea after having spent three years shooting news for the BBC. I was more interested in (more…)
I’ve been on a fabulous creative trip in 2009 teaching photography and researching my latest DVD/ Blu-Ray, Speedlight Mastery. The journey has taken me to six cities in Germany, the Meatpacking district of New York, Sienna in Tuscany, Castlefield in Manchester and my beloved Bristol Waterfront. On the way I have shared creative moments and precious times with talented photographers from around the world.
Below are my favourite 50 pictures of 2009. It is a strange notion to choose pictures over a time span. I thought about sharing the following sets: My 50 career best pictures, or my 50 favourite pictures of the last decade, or perhaps 50 favourite pictures of the past year, or 50 best shots of the past month. I went for the past year option.
I wonder how many of my pictures I would have selected for all four sets? It’s worth thinking about this. Ask yourself, Is your photography going in the right direction. This is totally subjective and only your opinion counts. Another list category I thought about was the 10 photographs that charted my photographic career. This would be more of a narrative that discussed each images significance rather than the image itself. A lot of the shots I’d choose in the key career shots set would not make any of the ‘best’ sets listed above. It’s got me thinking so I’ll write about the career milestone shots in the coming months but for now here are my 50 favourite pictures of 2009:
The season started with my big flash in the country workshops. And this frame was one that shone out of the overcast day in the dark woods. Lit with two barefaced Broncolor Mobil heads powered from the same A2R pack.
Here is my technique for creating striking studio portraits using a grey background and the Lovegrove Studio Collection of gels. Grid collections like the one above make fantastic large acrylic products or canvas prints for the home. They are easy to shoot, command high prices, and they look great in a studio shop window too. Here’s how I shot the one above. (more…)
Here is the full colour chart showing picture samples taken with each of the 38 gels in the Lovegrove Studio Collection at various levels of illumination. The gels are listed in numerical order. The 38 gels each measure 12″x 12″ (305mm x 305mm). For the technical details of how these shots were taken please see my other post here. These shots are ’straight from camera’ I used a Nikon D700 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens set at f/11 and I used the ‘flash’ white balance preset. All the shots were batch cropped to 10×8 proportions in Adobe Lightroom before being exported.
What’s your favourite colour? Let me know in the comments box below.
In this 2.5 hour production I shoot 23 set ups using single or multiple Speedlights. The simplest set up uses just one Speedlight on camera and the most complicated used 3 Speedlights off camera, a Lastolite Ezybox and a reflector. I’ve tried to show every nuance of the rig and shoot. I’ve avoided detailing some of the button pushing info that is flash model specific for brevity reasons knowing that this information is in the manual that came with the flash.
Some set ups are explained in more detail and others that repeat the same action are shot at my normal shooting pace to avoid too much repetition.
I am on hand to answer your questions here. I’ll reference and link to more resources as required or requested. So if you have (more…)
This simple shot against a white section of my studio was simply lit with 2 hard lights (Bowens heads with 7" reflectors and grids). The low angle viewpoint was inspired by the classic Holywood portraits.
It was my first ever studio lighting workshop at my own studio and I absolutely loved the process of starting to unlock the bijou spaces potential. At just 6.5m x 4.6m the Lovegrove studio is very compact. The high vaulted ceiling adds to the space and lets me get the lighting rig up and out of the shots. Here are 20 of my shots from the day. (more…)
It was the last weddings workshop of 2009 and the weather didn’t disappoint. It rained almost constantly, it was dark and a perfect day for a ‘how to make a bright and sunny wedding album from a dull winter day’ workshop. The sun did come out for 10 minutes as it ducked under a storm cloud just before sundown. Here is one shot from the day (click the picture for the full res version). The rest of the pictures and their exif is in a Lightroom web gallery follow the link after the jump.
Taken hand held with a Canon 5D Mk2, ISO 400, 1/100th second at f/5 on a 21mm Zeiss f/2.8 lens.
Along with the Zeiss glass of my previous 2 posts I bought myself a Canon 135mm f/2.0 L lens on Ebay last weekend. Here are four of my first shots taken with it. All the pictures were shot on my Pocket Wizard creative workshops earlier this week. I shot them hand held and used central zone AF with a focus and re-frame technique. Click on any of the pictures for a full size image.
Canon 5Dmk2, Canon 135mm f2L, ISO 200, 1/1250th second at f/2.8
Here are ten of the portraits I shot using my new Zeiss Distagon 21mm f/2.8 ZE lens over the past couple of days. They were shot on the creative day workshops I ran for Pocket Wizard TT1 and TT5 owners. Each of the pictures can be downloaded at full resolution by clicking on it’s preview image. All the shots were taken hand held and were focused using the Canon focus confirm system in my 5D mk2.
Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 on a Canon 5Dmk2, ISO 100, 1/125th second at f/11
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