Fellow Photographers,
Welcome to your regular round-up of “What’s on at Ian’s Studio”. We still have places available at all the events listed in this newsletter, although the places are going rapidly for Friday Night’s Creative Glamour which see the welcome return of Michela to the studio. On Saturday we have a messy day at studio with TWO fantastic models. The following weekend see a change of theme with commercial table-top photography and couples portraits in the park.

As most of you will know I try to make this news letter more than just me promoting and selling my events and workshops (although I’ll be honest that is important if I am to stay in business!) In this Newsletter I’ve included to recent blog posts from my “travelling light” series which will be of interest to anyone who uses an iPad to work on their images. Also I’ve included to recent Photos of the Day (POTD) one from my recent trip to Dubrovnik and another form a recent Friday Night event at the studio. In both I have tried to give a little bit of info about how the images were created and processed.

It is worth keeping an eye on the website for blog or POTD updates as I do try to update both every so often. To look through the archives of both take a look here: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/potd/

For all of this… read on…

Forthcoming Events

Friday, 2 August 2013 – Creative Glamour

Creative Glamour

Location: Ian’s Studio
Time: 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Price: £29

Glamour is probably the most difficult photographic genre to define, and the boundary between glamour nude and art nude is fuzzy to say the least. In tonight’s event let’s challenge our perceptions of what is glamour and take a more creative approach.

We will look at how revealing less can add more to a glamour image. Although our model will be working to glamour nude levels we will use lighting techniques and/or props to hide, reveal and to tease.

I am pleased to announce that the model for this event will be Michela see: http://purpleport.com/portfolio/littleleveller/?referer=iansstudio – Michela has been to the studio in the past and I have worked with her twice before having the studio.

Price £29

Please book via my website: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/events/creative-glamour/

Saturday, 3 August 2013 – Food Fights and Messy Girls

Food Fights and Messy Girls

Location: Ian’s Studio
Time: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Price: £95

This event is designed to be a fun event and is intended for photographers and videographers who enjoy messy shoots. Throughout the day we will be working with two models to capture a number of messy setups such as food fights and circus style foam fights.

The models for this event are Samantha (aka Charisma) http://purpleport.com/portfolio/samanthaand KarenR http://purpleport.com/portfolio/karenr/
Both models will be working from clothed to nude for this shoot.

Lunch and printed notes about messy photoshoots in general are included in the price for this event.

The images we will create at this event will be mostly a fun glamour style and but there will also be some opportunity to create images with a more messy fetish (sploshing) aspect to them. For those stills photographers who are more interested in creating messy art nude images I will be rerunning my popular messy art nude workshop later in the year.

Please note: While care will be taken to try to ensure that those attending the event do not get messy, you should be aware that we are working with messy substances such as paint and food substance which may stain. Wearing old clothes is advised.

A minimum of three photographers booking is required for this event to take place.

A deposit of £30 is required to reserve a place.

Price: £95

Please book via my website: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/events/food-fights-and-messy-girls/

Friday, 9 August 2013 – Table Top Night: Commercial

Table Top Night: Commercial

Location: Ian’s Studio
Time: 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Price: £15

Another is our ad-hoc series of table-top event. The theme this time will be commercial photography and we will be looking a different ways to shoot interesting product shots.

As ever for the table top nights bring your tripod (although I do have ones you can borrow), if you have macro lenses or extension tubes please bring those too (I have canon versions that people can borrow).

Some of the techniques are all done in camera but other techniques, such as the image on the eFlyer use a small amount of photoshop/post-production work. For those who want to see the photoshop techniques I use, I will spend a short while at the end of the event (10pm till about 10:45pm) demonstrating how I process and combine images together.

Price £15

Please book via my website: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/events/table-top-night-commercial/

Sunday, 11 August 2013 – Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Location: Ian’s Studio
Time: 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Price: £29

A special one-off four hour event to do some relaxed location couples portraiture. For this event we will head off into Vernon & Woodbank Parks.

We will be working with male and female models for this event and using combinations of natural light, reflectors and on and off camera flash to create our images.

Details of the models for this event will be published soon.

We will meet at Ian’s Studio at 3pm and walk 2 mins up the road into the park. If you have reflectors and/or strobist equipment you might want to bring them along to this event. Those who don’t have their own may use studio owned equipment.

Price: £29

Please book via my website: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/events/lazy-sunday-afternoon/

Friday, 16 August 2013 – Photographing Men

Photographing Men

Location: Ian’s Studio
Time: 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Price: £25

Tonight’s Friday Night Event challenges us to create great images of men. We will work with an experienced male model to create a range of male portraits and images.

Details of the male model will published soon.

We will look at a number of lighting set-ups, and use a selection of props to enhance our images.

Price: £25

Please book via my website: http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/events/photographing-men/

From the Blog…

Travelling Light: More technical problems

Saturday 27July – More technical problems

The theme for this trip has been “travelling light”. I wrote three blog entries at the start of the trip… I had intended continuing to write more blog entries as the trip progressed but I hit a number of technical problems with what I wanted to achieve, and as a result rather than spending time just writing about the problems I wanted to try to solve them first.

The first problem was to do with being able to upload images to my Galleries. A blog about travel photography needs images. I use Zenfolio to host my images and had loaded the Zenfolio app on to the iPad. Unfortunately I had a lot of problems using the app to upload images. Firstly I could not find a way to get the app to resize the images prior to upload. I can live with this, but what I also found was that every time I tried to upload via the app it would report a server not responding error… “The server has not responded for xx seconds” and that count of seconds would go up even when the number of bytes being uploaded was STILL Increasing. After a minute or so the whole upload process would stop. Despite many attempts during this trip I only managed to upload one image that way. I have since installed and app called “photosync” which does enables me to send images to lots of places… Including to my Zenfolio account. Not only will this permit me to resize images if I wish but doesn’t appear to suffer from he timeout issues that i saw with the zenfolio app.

Having resolved that problem I hit a more significant one. The inability to load the JPG images off my memory card on to the iPad. I have previously talked about the third party camera connection kit. But the latest problem does appear to be an iffy connector. The iPad no longer sees the card when using a USB card reader. And when using a USB lead to connect and read the images direct from the camera the whole setup has to be held at a strange 45deg angel. Even then iPad no longer recognises duplicates… This is a pain, when trying to scroll through literally hundreds of images on the card to select image at a time all the new images since the last download. The slightest movement of the iPad away from its precarious 45degree angel and i have to start over again. Needless to say this is unworkable and after the first few days shooting I have been unable to copy images to the iPad.

The third technical issue is to do with my tripod… Which left me unable to take vertical images on tripod… But I will talk about that some other time.

I have not given up on the “travelling light” concept, and intend to resolve all these issues and continue to write the occasional blog post on this theme. So please stay tuned to the website.

Travelling Light: Seeing Red (Exclamation Marks)

Tuesday 16 July…
A key part of this travelling light experiment is the ability to deal with the images on the iPad. The first part of that is getting the images on to the iPad. Before leaving the UK I purchased a camera connection kit for the iPad. I tested it out and made sure I could download images successfully. I could. However when I came to do the same thing here, although the images showed up as icons. When I selected download all I got was a red exclamation mark against each image. No reason – just a red exclamation mark.

I tried juggling the lightning connector. I am using a third party version. I decided not to buy the apple one which is a lot more expensive and offers EITHER an SD slot or a USB connector and as I wanted both, I would have had to buy the think TWICE! Anyhow, juggling the connector did not resolve the problem. I tried using a CF card reader in the USB slot, I tried connecting the camera to the USB… still the same red exclamation marks and no error message.

At this point I was cursing the third party connection kit. But decided to do a little bit of research. It appears the red exclamation mark means the the iPad can’t download the image… Gee I would never of guessed that! What I wanted was reasons. One report I came across on line suggested that it was not possible to download from certain devices because there was not sufficient power on the lightning port to power the device connected to the connection kit. I knew my kit HAD worked before I came away, so that couldn’t be the problem? Could it? What I realised however was that I had a lot of apps open in the background, could that be draining power? Closed the apps. Tried the download again and it worked. Coincidence? Well today was the acid test. I was visiting the ancient city of Dubrovnik and twice while was there I paused to copy the images from camera to iPad.. Each time with no red exclamation marks, and as far as I am aware with no problems.

In my next blog update more info about what happens to the images once they are on the iPad. And… Just to prove it all works here’s some of the images from today’s shoot. All stranight from the camera (via the iPad)

Photo of the Day

POTD 24 Jul 2013 – Franciscan Monastery, Dubrovnik

From a visit to a Franciscan Monastery within the walled city of Dubrovnik. I was struck by the symmetry of the cloisers and when I took the image it was with the intention of converting it to monochrome as you see here.

I’ve done a little perspective correction in lightroom, boosted both the contrast and clarity. Opened up the shadows a little, added a vignette and finished the image of with a slight split tone to give a hint of sepia to the image.

POTD 12 July 2013 : Bokeh Night

Bokeh Night at the studio with model Rachel Horner. The entire image was created in camera. This effect was created using multiple techniques including false perspective… the lights are NOT coming out of the glass but are situated a long way behind Rachel. The heart shaped effect is was created by using a heart-shaped bokeh mask over the lens.

The lights themselves are WHITE LED lights but they appear blue because Rachel is lit with a tungsten modelling light. We have colour corrected to take the orange out of the tungsten light which makes the white LED lights take on a blue colour cast.

What appears to be smote at the top of the image is actually the out of focus cable connecting the LED lights.