Author Archive for: ‘VonWong’
Abandoned building updates & the Workshop Factory
Hey guys! So it’s been about three days since we’ve hit Europe and so far we’ve broken into two buildings and shot some eagles… (see some photos on my facebook fan page!)things have been quite wild and we’ve had about 10 hours of driving in the last two days so we’re quite exhausted!! I actually can’t write much more because we’re about 4 hours behind schedule thanks to two highway accidents and currently engaged in an interview with Chester Van Bommel!
That being said I did want to take a couple moments to give you guys some quick details on a workshop that we will be offering in collaboration with The Workshop Factory over in Berlin, Germany! We’re super excited because he’s been extremely hard at work putting together a great pool of talent for us to work with including the Pataman gym time guys who are a bunch of stuntmen that will re-enact a fight scene! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edxt9bE0iCc&feature=plcp and are currently finalizing details on the second day of shooting which would involve a mix of fashion and dance.
In one of the concepts, I have been challenged to use the Pataman Gym guys to create a fight scene where two fighters would be fighting in the centre of a scene surrounded by people tossing money at them while smoking cigars and drinking cocktails so that’s what I will do – from concept building, setup to photoshop.
And for a sneak preview of the second… here is one of the dancers and model… 
We have CONFIRMED location rentals in these buildings which are absolutely amazing including an empty swimming pool!!
The workshop is limited to a MAXIMUM of ten people and all the money goes into the organizing of the whole thing… so be sure to reserve quickly!
So without further ado, here is the official poster of the event!
For more information, contact:
[email protected]
Tel: 0176 636 30 668
Workshop Tag: 1
Action Shoot
Mit 2 Kampfkünstlern und mehreren Statisten erstellen wir eine Komplexe Kampfszene.
Jeder Teilnehmer bekommt die Gelegenheit selbst zu *shooten und Anweisungen zu geben.
Was vermittelt der Referent?
Persönliche Geschichte
Workflow
Vorbereitung vor dem Shooting
Set Aufbau
Ausleuchtung
Tethering Shooting (Live Vorschau per Lightroom)
Umgang mit Model
Bildbearbeitung &Composing
Eckdaten:
Teilnehmer Max.10
Location Haus der Offiziere
Treffpunkt 10:00 Am Juliusturm 55 (Parkplatz Crunchfit)
11:00 U Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz
12:00 Hauptallee 116/6, 15806 Zossen
Für alle ohne KFZ ist noch genug Platz
Ablauf 12:30 Begrüßung und Einleitung
13:00-16:00 Aufbau und Shooting
16:00-17:00 Pause
17:00-19:00 Bildbearbeitung und Verabschiedung und eine kleine Überraschung
Preis 1 Tag 99€
Beide Tage 169€
Workshop Tag: 2
Varieté meets Fashion
Was euch hier erwartet? Eine Artistin und ein Model die in verschieden Sets in Szene Gesetzt werden.
Hier geht es darum verschiedene Sets in einer Location zu finden und zusammen mit dem Model richtig zu inszenieren.
Jeder Teilnehmer bekommt die Gelegenheit selbst zu *shooten und Anweisungen zu geben.
Was vermittelt der Referent?
Persönliche Geschichte
Workflow
Vorbereitung vor dem Shooting
Set Aufbau
Ausleuchtung
Tethering Shooting (Live Vorschau per Lightroom)
Umgang mit Model
Bildbearbeitung &Composing
Eckdaten:
Teilnehmer Max.10
Location Haus der Offiziere
Treffpunkt 10:00 Am Juliusturm 55 (Parkplatz Crunchfit)
11:00 U Bahnhof Innsbrucker Platz
12:00 Hauptallee 116/6, 15806 Zossen
Für alle ohne KFZ ist noch genug Platz
Ablauf 12:30 Begrüßung und Einleitung
13:00-16:00 Aufbau und Shooting
16:00-17:00 Pause
17:00-19:00 Bildbearbeitung und Verabschiedung und eine kleine Überraschung
Preis 1 Tag 99€
Beide Tage 169€
Voraussetzungen für beide Workshops sind:
Grundkenntnisse Fotografie Blende, Belichtungszeit,Iso
sowie Basiskenntnisse in der Bildbearbeitung mit Photoshop
sowie Basis Englisch Kenntnisse
Laptop wäre vom Vorteil für das Nachbearbeiten.
Was ist im Preis inbegriffen?
Miete der Location
Getränke und Snacks
Model,Visa und Artist
Sowie Transfer
Für weitere Infos und Buchung
[email protected]
Tel: 0176 636 30 668
DAY 1 – Brussels and 2L beer
Quick update! It’s midnight over here and we just spent our first day in Europe all over Belgium!! Besides a nice 8 hour flight where we grabbed an hour of sleep, we dropped in to see Thomas from Monolithe Photographe who was kind enough not only to house us but accept and unpack 8500$ of sponsored equipment from Lovinpix.com.
We were actually chatting about it and found it quite crazy that we managed to convince somebody… that we’ve never met before… to send somebody else we’ve never met before 8500$ worth of equipment. Wild eh?
Anyways, things went smoothly on the plane and we actually managed to write down almost 80 addresses down onto these awesome cute envelopes we hope to send to you soon! We took the chance to film some (hopefully) awesome BTS footage by clamping our GoPro onto a Nasty Clamp from above haha. It attracted quite a lot of attention and by the middle of the trip, we knew everyone left, right, front and back of us!
After getting off the plane, we took a couple seconds to sort out all our equipment and to our great surprise some random guy coming out of the plane came by and randomly told us :”good luck on your von wong does Europe tour!” Turns out Alexis Bourdages-Chabot was a fellow videographer who was coming to Brussels to shoot a documentary of Cora (a pretty huge breakfast chain in Montreal), and he had seen our project passing by on facebook. Five minutes in Belgium, already felt like a star. It was quite amazing. We chatted all through customs and finally ended up inviting him out to have supper with us later on!
Right after landing, we ran off to pick up our shinny van and headed off to Thomas’s place. Turns out Thomas actually lives in a tiny little village called Chapel-lez Herlaimont which didn’t even have a coffee shop for us to drop by. They did have a carnival that was setting up… very typical 
From there, we snapped up some groceries and headed off to Thomas’s to grab a quick lunch and 3 hours of much needed sleep. Erwan turned out to need much more than 3 hours because when we woke up to start prepping the 8500$ of gear that Lovinpix.com had provided us. He was nauseous from lack of sleep so we ended up punishing him and keeping him wrapped up in blankets while we set up, tested and organized the rest of the equipment.
By the time we were done cleaning up, Erwan was still fealing quite woozy so we abandoned him to go down to have dinner with a group of fans! We had an amazing meal in downtown Brussels at Casa Mia, which almost ended in disaster with me forgetting the camera at the location… lol. Go genius Ben! Regardless, things turned out quite nicely and Alexis even brought his video-rig so we had a temporary Erwan replacement to film some video footage! Here are a couple photos of our night
Things ended pretty late and by the time Thomas and I got back home it was already 1 AM so we had the chance to grab a quick 2 hour nap before popping up to get ready for our shoot!! By 3 AM Erwan, Thomas and I were up and bouncing getting ready.
It is currently 5:20 AM and we’re driving off to break into an abandoned chamber of commerce to shoot our first subject… Chester Van Bommel from Artsome.be …
Stay tuned!!
Epic Medieval photoshoot + Horses !
Two weeks ago, I received a message from one of my fellow photographers Kelso, who told me that the folks over at Les Artisans D’azure were extremely interested in working with me. I’ve always been a huge medieval buff so I made some time in my crazy schedule and squeezed in a quick visit. When I got there, it was like being a kid in a toy store… I was running around having the time of my life checking out everything they had to offer. By the time I left the store, we had already set a shoot date, found ourselves an awesome location to shoot at as well as developed a vague story. By the evening, after a couple facebook shout-outs, we were at 20 models.
A couple days later, I had assembled my assistants, makeup and video crew. A week later, we had horses confirmed. A couple days after that,LL Lozeau agreed to sponsor about 40,000$ worth of profoto flashes for my shoot. A couple days before the shoot, we were at 55 confirmed participants… Things were going amazingly smoothly…
The day before the photoshoot was a whole different matter… weather forecast announced -3 degrees the day before with snow, hail, 30km/hr winds and general unhappiness all around!!! Myself and a couple others set out to camp out the night before to get in some location scouting and planning and had a merry campfire in the wind, hail and more. Of course, no signal at the medieval village supplied by L’Atelier du Loisir meant that we had no idea how many people were actually going to show up the day of the shoot so we kept fingers crossed while huddling under the blankets.
I was pleasantly surprised to see over 80% of the people that had committed actually showed up under the cold rain to join us for this amazing photoshoot. We had the most amazing committed models trudging and shivering through rain and mud just to take a couple epic photographs.
We had four solid concepts that we wanted to develop
Concept #1:
The idea was to composite an image where our heroes were surrounded by a horde of evil minions, Diablo III
Concept #2:
We wanted to create a sort of “banner shot” where the heroes were running away, escaping from this tavern of doom through these massive barn doors. We had the smoke machine rigged right in front of the heroes so that it would come bleeding out into the open. to light the rear scene, I simply placed to bare monoblocks inside the building pointing downwards, allowing the smoke to take care of diffusing the light. From the front, a simple baby octobox+ monobloc to add a little kick to our main characters. By this time, the rain had pretty much trickled down to nothing more than a drizzle which gave me the liberty to actually place the flashes outside the barn!
Concept #3:
The idea was to have an our heroes charging through our horde of evil minions but unfortunately the horses didn’t turn out quite as cooperative as we had hoped. Also, it would seem that galloping requires a certain level of experience that our armoured heroes didn’t have so we had to settle for a dusty battle scene. At this point in time, the weather suddenly decided to cooperate (relatively) and we were suddenly showered with radian beams of sun… really not cool when you don’t have the power to overpower the sun!! Although I had a set of Pro-8a lying around, I didn’t have anything close to a 6000W generator required to power the dinky devices so they sat in their case alone and forgotten. I compensated by placing the flashes strategically around our heroes and settled for softening the shadows. We had the smoke machine behind our riders which really helped to diffuse both the harsh sunlight and our flashes.
Nothing very fancy here, just a couple large modifiers all around our heroes to make them pop out a little (as high as they could go, 45 degrees downwards… max power!!)
Concept #4:
By the time we hit our fourth concept, the sun had finally hidden behind the clouds and I could finally overpower the sun to shoot this group photo. This time around, all elements were actually present (yes, we had people crawling over the roof!). I wanted to try something a little different so I actually shot the whole thing in four seperate shots to create a group panorama. Exploiting the fact that profotos at full power require 7 seconds of retouch time, I shot the subjects farther away first so that they’d be properly exposed and wouldn’t expose the heroes closer to us! We had a second profoto equiped with a softbox hanging out of a second floor window to highlight our friendly necromancer. I asked my good friend and retoucher Chester Van Bommel (www.artsome.be) – one of the subjects that we’ll be shooting in our Von Wong does Europe tour – www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope to help me put the whole shot together since I was actually running quite short on editing time!!
And that’s how the epic photoshoot went. There are a couple other shots that I would like to edit but I’m simply out of time with the whole Europtrip coming together.
For those of you who are interested in learning not just about lighting setups but HOW you put together a mass photoshoot, check out the write-up I did for UDI over at DIYPhotography – http://www.diyphotography.net/how-to-organize-a-mass-photoshoot-in-under-2-weeks
Oh and by the way, special thanks to our heroic videographer for putting the BTS video! Laurence Turcotte-Fraser
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Costume Design: Les Artisans d’Azure – www.artisansdazure.com
Samuel Tremblay Gagnon
Marc André Thibault
Steeve Verville
Maxime Turgeon
Genevieve Cotineau
Stephane Normandin
Sponsors:
Calimacil – www.calimacil.com
L’Atelier du Loisir – www.gn.qc.ca
LL Lozeau – Profoto flashes – www.lozeau.com
Makeup:
Jessica Renahan, Lisa-Marie Charron, Patricia Lapointe
Hair: Jazz Hairstylist, Manuelle Lessard
Assist: Allison B., Jessika Chiasson, Nadia Zheng
BTS Photography: Claude Campagna Lupien, Monique Guillbault
Video: Laurence Turcotte-Fraser, Sael Simard
Like what I do? Support my Von Wong does Europe tour – www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope
The Agonist – Promo 2012
Bts Video by Five Knights Productions – www.fiveknightsproductions.com
Alissa from The Agonist contacted me TWO WEEKS before shoot deadline to ask me if we could put together some sort of crazy shoot. After an hour of crazy brainstorming we managed to pull together an insane fight concept that we put together in one week (leaving one more week for retouching)!
We pulled our resources together and managed to whip up in a week: A garage to shoot in, destructible clothing, and all the random objects you see lying around (fire hydrant, couch, etc…). Alissa did the makeup/rips for all the boys giving me a good three hours to set up a crazy 10 light or so setup.
Oh and that exploding glass behind her head in the shot? Yah, that’s real. We exploded some neon lights for the shoot.
We did two main group shots in addition to a bunch of singles.
The first group shot is the main fight scene where we used a total of 8 flashes to light up the scene. Since I had a whole bunch of time to set up my lights and the scene (close to 2 hours), it really gave me the time to build the shot up like I wanted to!
Check out the final result:
For those interested in the technical lighting jargon here are the specs:
On either side of our main subjects (Alissa, Danny) we had some nice strong edge lighting from some massive gridded softboxes. To add a bit of soft fill to lighten the shadows we had a smaller softbox angled 45 degrees upwards on a lower intensity. Grouped with those two main gridded softboxes, we had a pair of speedlights gel’ed blue to give a nice blueish hue to the shadows of the image. From there, we had a pair of monoblocs on either side of the scene, bare, just bringing in a bit of harsh hairlight that was mildly diffused by the smoke spewing out of our glorious smoke machine. And the final killer touch, in my humble opinion that totally makes the shot is the speedlights gel’ed green in the back behind those plastic-textured horizontal flaps. We bounced that one off the back wall to get a nice even distribution coming forward.
In the final shot that is the conclusion of our shoot, we wanted things to be a lot more murky and soft… so we pumped the smoke machine up to full and had an overall haze just overlaid onto the photograph. We tossed things around a littlebit to change the setup and then had them lie around just… relaxing. The shot was created by strapping my camera onto the tripod and taking a nice shot from above.
Once again, the technical stuff aside, the only difference between this setup and the last one was that we basically removed the hair lights from the rear monoblocks and lifted one of the softboxes off the ground to create a semi spotlight effect on Alissa. Here’s what the lighting setup looks like:
Curious to see more? Check out The Agonist fan page on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAgonistOfficial
Special thanks to Raphael Loudet and Yves Pelletier for helping out at the shoot!
Like what I do? Interested in learning about the photoshop behind my work? Check out our Von Wong does Europe project – http://www.indiegogo.com/vonwongdoeseurope
10k, GlideCam, Pico Dolly, Phottix Monitor, Profoto…
Finally some updates for you! Before beginning, here’s a funny youtube video Erwan and I decided to throw together of us practicing out glidecam usage. Hope it brings a smile to your faces in these dreary rainy days to come (at least on our end of the world)
Besides the entire Europe Trip things have been absolutely hectic over here! I’ve barely had time to breathe.
For the last couple days, on top of planning out the entire Europe tour I’ve been together a couple of photoshoots.
The first which you will be able to check out tonight… where we hung a charcol/vasoline covered dehydrated male stripper from a bunch of chains (over 1000 pounds worth) hanging from a custom-made metal bar hanging off a pair of I-beams… Setup shots are on my fan page in the Instagram album if you guys are curious. I was quite happy to make some practical use of my brand new Nasty Clamps where we got some nice aerial GoPro
footage!
The second being a massive medieval photoshoot with over 30 models, 5 makeup artists and a bunch of video/photo crew in a medieval village…in the rain happening this Monday. I managed to swing an awesome sponsorship for over 40,000$ of profoto gear from the folks over at L.L.Lozeau and I can’t wait to try it out (weather permitting… :/) Anyone know of any high end water resistant flashes?? I’d be totally interested. If anyone still wants to tag along (in Montreal, Canada) please let me know.
Here’s a shot of a couple of those babies:
In other news, a couple other updates:
- Received a Pico Dolly from the guys over at http://www.photographyandcinema.com/. Very cute thing table dolly that can even support a DSLR. Lookin forward to testing it out
- Received a nifty Phottix Hector 7″ LCD monitor
that we’ll definitely be bringing on us for our tour.
- Placed an order for over 15 packs of polaroids (>300$ of polaroids!!)
- Received the sexy Von Wong bracelets!
So yes, things are going quite well… and quite busy! Erwan’s finishing his exam and I believe I’ve overworked myself to the point of catching a cold. Sniffles, sore throat, headache, general aches and pains… BAH…
I may be a little silent in the next couple days to come… please don’t be alarmed!!!
SLRLounge Lightroom 4 presets – Review
Hey guys,
Today I’d like to take a couple minutes to do a preliminary review The Lightroom 4 Preset System by the SLRLounge. These guys have ambitiously called their product ” The most powerful preset system” and I was quite curious to see what they had managed to cook up.
I took the time to throw together a visual “video” review for those of you who are too lazy to read.
Here’s the video:
Initial Thoughts: Skeptical
 |
My initial thought when hearing the word “preset” went pretty much in the direction of : Ew. It’s just another set of unoriginal simple cheesy effects. In a best case, perhaps there would be one or two cool effects, but overall… it’s probably not worth having an entire clutter of presets on the left of my Develop panel. Did I really need more of these?
But… Pye over at the SLRLounge insisted that I at least give it a spin repeating over and over that this was really a unique product that didn’t exist elsewhere… that would revolutionize my LR4 workflow. I was intrigued so I decided to give it a spin. |
First run: Pleasantly Surprised
 |
The installation was straightforward enough. Copy the presets to the presets folder and I was ready to rock & roll. From the start. I was presented with an intuitive and comprehensive workflow. Although SLRLounge had taken the time to prepare a bunch of tutorials to introduce how their preset system worked, it took me little more than 5 seconds to figure it all out. | |
 |
Rather than cluster a bunch of presets together, they had them all organized in an intuitive and chronological workflow. Click, apply setting… move on. Finished playing with “Exposure” What was cool was that the effects were actually stackable. Unlike standard presets which went completely wonky if you tried to stack them one on top of another, these ones could actually mix and blend without jeopardizing one or the other! Didn’t like the setting? Reset that particular setting Simple. Clean. Efficient. Wow! I was impressed. |
What’s so special about it anyways?
For those of you who are familiar with Lightroom, you’re probably not quite impressed with the effects that the preset can achieve. Why? Because you know how to do it on your own… and I absolutely agree with you. There is nothing that these presets do that you cannot do… but what these presets do is help to significantly accelerate your workflow.
Check out the example below:
I have applied three presets in chronological order:
- 015 – (dynamic range) Heavy boost
- 024 – (detail) Medium boost
- 054 – (vignette) Light Vignette
So rather than go into the Develop menu and screw around with Highlights/Shadows… Lights/Darks… Clarity… Sharpening… and Vignette, I can actually get the image pretty close to what I want it to be with simply three clicks. Now although these three clicks may equate only approximately two minute of saved time, going from 2 minutes to 10 seconds to arrive at a pretty similar result is actually a 1200% increase in productivity… which can make a HUGE difference especially when dealing with large number of photographs such as weddings or events.
The Cons
The Lightroom 4 Preset System currently features a total of six categories of effects. That being said, the only ones that could truly affect my work flow were the first two: My Mixology and Base Adjustments. All the other ones are specifically geared towards special pretty distinct and strong colour effects that simply don’t suit my style. The come off as one click “pow” effects that could most probably work quite well for wedding photography. To be honest I would probably be far more intrigued by them if the option to “dial down the intensity” actually existed but I don’t think Lightroom 4 can actually allow such a thing. Although I can manually lower the intensity in the standard develop tab, it somewhat defeats the purpose of having a preset if you still have to go back into the curve adjustments to tweak things back to how you want them.
That being said, all is not lost. Rather than play with curves, Pye has told me that the SLRLounge plan son releasing a Split Toning update that I’m quite looking forward to that will be free for anyone who has purchased the preset pack in about a week so … can’t wait for that to come out!
Oh wait, but there’s more!
The Lightroom 4 Preset System actually features a bunch of brush presets that you can use quite easily on a variety of images. If you’re someone that plays around in Lightroom quite heavily without ever bothering to bring things into photoshop the preset brushes are also presented in a well ordered intuitive manner. It’s quite nice that they have included some very quick and easy dodge/burn tools specifically tailored for simple portrait retouching. To be honest, LR4 brush editing has never quite been my thing so I didn’t spend much time on it but I tested them out and they do work very well. It clearly shows that they have spent a lot of time finding the optimal brush settings to perform specific tasks. Very cool.
In Conclusion…
So in conclusion, I think that the Lightroom 4 Preset System can definitely benefit somebody who is looking to accelerate their workflow. It is NOT a one click miracle system and I definitely wish that they had some more dialled down versions of their curve adjustments but that’s really just me. The fact that they have things set up cleanly and simply will save me enormous amounts of time in my future edits, and I definitely think that any serious event/wedding oriented photographer should definitely consider investing the 100$ into the system. I’m also extremely curious to see what their upcoming free “split-toning” package will contain.
I’ve attached a couple before/after screenshots of shots edited exclusively with the preset system (sorry didnt play in the curves very much) to give you an idea of what the preset system is capable of doing. Didn’t spend more than a minute on each shot! Check it out:
Bracelets, Quadcopters, and smiles!
Great news today!
I’m super excited because I’ve been receiving a stream of good news finally… things are not quite official yet but by Wednesday or Thursday I will have news for you guys concerning a major sponsor that will be providing us with a whole bunch of equipment for us to play with for the duration of our tour. I’ve been working extremely hard with Erwan to put this whole thing together (almost over two weeks) and I’m just bursting with excitement to let it all out!!
Although I can’t say all that much for now, one thing I can let you know is that Lovinpix.com, an upcoming french photo store will be sponsoring a QuadCopter that we will be able to play with. I’ll be helping them pay for the express shipping so that we can have it in time for this MONDAY for my upcoming epic mass medieval photoshoot (still spots available if you wanted to participate!).
For those of you who don’t know what a quadcopter is, it’s basically a fancy helicopter capable of supporting a small camera. This means aerial behind the scenes videos for you guys!!! How awesome is that?
I’m not sure what model I will be receiving but for now, this is an idea of what I’ll be getting!
In other news, I also received the sexy Von Wong bracelets that I can’t WAIT to send out your way. I’ve also been dealing with The Impossible Project to try and get them to make me a bulk deal to send me 15 packs of polaroids (for a total of 120) to make sure I have enough to send your way. I’m not even thinking about how complicated it will be to send all these out while touring … haha
Besides that, I’m in the process of setting up my PARIS shoots (dates, models, workshops) so stay tuned for that. Nicolas Vallet from Strobi.fr is actually helping me put the whole thing together and if all goes well, I’ll be able to offer a free workshop to all those who have helped to make this project possible. To be fair to the rest of the funders, we will record the entire thing and offer this particular workshop free of charge to all funders. Of course it won’t be as good as the real thing but we can’t possibly fly you all in! Sorry… !
Finally, I’ve been quite hard at work putting together a bunch of videos you may have seen stream by. One, an entertaining BTS video on how I built my studio and Two, a review I’m finishing up featuring an interesting Preset Kit for Lightroom 4 by the SLRLounge.
So that’s pretty much it!
Erwan is actually healing quite well and tomorrow we were going to get together and go do some flips and tricks over at the gym and hopefully put together a small and entertaining video that shows that we DO have a life outside of photography!!
Alright that’s it for now guys, hope you’re all doing great.
Stay tuned! Big news in the next couple days…. !!!
Ps. 9650$ !!!! Only 350 before we hit the five figures :O !!!
Dreams & Motivation
While speaking with a fan who had the courage to spontaneously add me on skype today, I had mild moment of clarity that I really wanted to share with anyone who decides to get off their butt and pursue their dreams.
I suppose each person has their own strengths and weaknesses and mine has definitely got to be some form of self-doubt. Organizing such a high-profile event like this Europe tour means that there are inevitable highs and lows that come with it. On some days, I feel untouchable – when things are just happening, constantly. The organizing, emails, planning… all that is great to me because it makes me feel productive and gives me purpose. That unending list of work somehow translates into: Great Job Ben, you’re doing the right thing.
And then of course, we have those inevitable silences… when nothing really does happen. The list of things to do hasn’t changed… but suddenly you’re waiting for news from a couple critical components, or something you planned and prepared didn’t quite go as planned, or someone somewhere threw you a nasty comment… and suddenly things just slow down. Nothing has truly changed: The list of things to do, the dream, the passion, the support… everything’s there yet somehow perspectives change and suddenly the excitement is gone. That untouchable high just became human again and the oddest questions can come up: Why am I doing this again? What’s the point?
So why am I writing this?
I’m writing to tell you that I am only human. That I too doubt, and hope… and that I probably have those same stupid doubting feelings that you do… but that I have decided to push those aside to chase my dreams. That if I can do it, so can you.
–
Speaking of dreams, I received an email a few days ago from a fellow photographer by the name of Morgana Creely off in Melbourne with a peculiar thank you. We had met virtually about a year back where she had asked if I would answer a short five question interview so she was not a complete stranger to me. Finding her story quite interesting, I asked if she would be so kind to do a small intro and write up for the blog. Here it is:
Hi, I’m Morgana Creely, a part-time photographer from Melbourne, Australia. My passion is creating images that tell stories.
My serious addiction with photography started roughly six years ago. We’d bought a new DSLR for my husband Martin [a part-time motorsports photographer] and he encouraged me to have a go. At first I was really intimidated [I don't know what I'm doing! It's expensive, I don't want to break it!] but after Martin patiently showed me the basics I was immediately hooked.
I have always had an overactive imagination and photography lets me play the “what if” game, creating images that tell stories with a twist. Even though I always have way more ideas than I could ever shoot, I’m always looking for inspiration. The photographers who inspire me, such as Gregory Crewdson and Drew Gardner, are masters of both storytelling and lighting.
I first came across Ben’s images on Facebook, really interesting, striking and sometime out there images [who else would ]
It’s very easy to look enviously at someone “living the dream” and think “no matter how much I want that, it will never happen”. I know how this feels. Following Ben online as he does amazing shoots, and then started to put his “Von Wong Does Europe” together, living my dream seemed impossibly far away. But I still wanted to support the project, partly because I really like Ben’s work, and partly because if I couldn’t “live the dream” I wanted to help make it happen for someone else.
Somehow over the next day or so my attitude towards my own photography began to change. I’m in a very different place in life to Ben in many ways; quitting my day job and organizing an amazing trip to Europe is just not possible. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t start to work on the things I want to achieve; and maybe help my friends do the same.
So thanks Ben for giving me the kickstart I so sorely needed.
Links:
Webpage: www.morganacreely.com
Blog: http://mcreely.blogspot.com.au/
Did you have a story to share? Please send it in
DIY VonStudio
(For those of you too lazy to read the entire blog post, feel free to scroll down for a list of all the pieces I had to buy)
I recently decided to inspire myself from a video I saw posted over at DIY Photography where I saw a fellow photographer by the name of Joe Edelman actually set up a bunch of fluorescent lights on rails and tripods to have a pretty effective and slick home studio.
Rather than Do Things Myself like I was supposed to, my three step plan kinda went something like this:
- Buy the parts
- Get my dad to design the setup
- Get a friend to help drill, dremel and screw things in.
Not a bad plan eh?
The first things I grabbed were a bunch of four light ceiling fixtures
From there, I grabbed a pocket door kit
Although in theory, simply screwing the closet door kits straight into the ceiling fixtures should have solved all of our issues, my ceiling happens to be pretty high which significantly complicated our lives. Since I didn’t want to be permanently standing on a pedestal everytime I shot a video, I had to figure out a way to lower the entire setup economically.
Thankfully, my dad was readily available for consultation and came up with the brilliant idea of connecting a couple Galvanized 3/4″ Floor Flange
Regardless, once all the parts were purchased, all that remained was to take a dremel
I’m not quite certain what I did wrong but I suspect that our canadian prices here are slightly hire than the US ones because my home studio cost me far over the estimated 200$ in Joe Edelman’s version.
Here’s my breakdown:
4x four light ceiling fixtures
20x 40W T12 48″ 6500K Light Tubes
2x pocket door kit
2x 8 feet alubminum rails = 30$ (sorry no link)
Screws, Nuts, Bolts, Flanges, Rods = 100$
For a grand total of 550$ + 15% taxes (go Quebec!) = 630$
Add on the cost of the fancy white backdrop + three roller wall mount and I hit 750$… slightly over the budgeted 200$…!
But honestly, the ease to actually pull things down at the flick of a light switch and just be ready to shoot within 5 minutes made it all worthwhile. Total time to put the whole thing together from concept, shopping to ready to go? 3 days.
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So the pros and cons of my setup are:
Pros:
- Zero setup time
- Takes up literally no space at all
- Flexible lighting (two degrees of freedom (back/front and rotation))
- Silent, does not heat up
- 6500K Daylight
- No flicker (even when shooting at higher than 250th shutter speeds. Don’t ask me why, I’m not quite sure but I’m going to guess it has something to do with the “flicker free” that’s marked on my box of fluorescents)
Cons:
- Only two degrees of freedom (cannot be angled up or down and fixed height)
- Even lighting from all directions. No efficent way to dim a set of fluorescents.
- Slightly expensive.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with what I have but I definitely plan on upgrading it in the near future with additional light banks and perhaps a dedicated variable height ceiling rail system
POWER OVER 9000!
GREAT NEWS GUYS!
We’ve actually just hit 9000$ !! There’s only 1000$ left before we hit the 10k limit!
Thank you so much for all your support, let’s KEEP SPREADING THE WORD!! To thank you all for your continuing support I’ll actually be preparing a second free photoshop tutorial for you guys… this time a lot more advanced featuring a deconstruction and live re-edit of my photoshoot with “The Agonist” on my YouTube channel so stay tuned for that!! I’ve also got a surprised prepared for you guys if we hit 10k so please keep sharing… I promise you won’t be disappointed!!!
In other news, I’m so sorry for that missing my last update! It’s been birthday armageddon over here and between celebrating a variety of birthdays, having fun with my nasty clamps, the millions of emails like usual and building the DIY home studio video that will be live tomorrow, I’ve been quite swamped!
The faithful facebook followers know this already but… we finally have most our dates locked down!!! We’re slowly putting things together such as a beer/supper somewhere in Brussels around 7 PM on the 2nd for anyone who’s close by! (We’re also looking for a place to crash if anyone has a couch/floor/bed to offer!)
- Brussels – 2/3/4/5/6
- Bratislava, Slovakia – 12/13/14
- Paris – 17/18/19/20/21
- London – 22/23/24/25
- Burgos, Spain – 29/30
- Barcelona, Spain – 31/1
So what does this look like in google maps?
That’s 5500 kms which excludes any travels we will be doing to get from location to the other within the cities…!! I think it’s safe to estimate a good 7000-8000 kms of driving in the next month. WILD!!
Things are lining themselves up quite well though.
We’ve been under some pretty intense negotiations with some stores in Europe and it looks like we might most probably be sponsored a full set of Photography and Video lights for our tour!!!! That’s HUGE for us. What it means is better lit photos and videos for you!!! In addition, Innovatronix a very well known portable battery pack supplier has also agreed to sponsor us a couple of their batteries for the duration of our tour. This means we get a full portable studio anywhere we go in Europe!!!
And that’s not all the good news… but all I can tell you for now!
Although things haven’t gone up much in the financial side of things for the last couple days, it’s simply because our focus has really been on actually making sure we put your dollars to good use!
Things are going along fantastically.
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Thank you for encouraging us.
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