One of my favourite passages in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where.”
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”
Now, as a proud Cheshire bloke, you might think I’m biased towards the wise words of the Cheshire Cat. But I really do think there’s a lot of wisdom in what he says, because the truth of the matter really is that if you don’t know or care where you’re going, it REALLY doesn’t matter which way you go. That’s something I emphasised at the most recent BIG Shoot Experience, which was themed around Wonderland as my little homage to the 150th anniversary of the book.
The main focus of the three days was helping the delegates understand how to balance flash with ambient light outdoors, as we ran rampant at the fantastic Leicestershire estate owned by Joel Hicks. I honestly can’t speak highly enough of his location or his hospitality; if you’re looking for a great outdoor shooting space (all 13 acres of it!) with the option of an indoor studio, you can’t go far wrong with Joel’s venue – and he’s not a half bad model, either!
Using a Profoto B1 with a parabolic umbrella as my key and a B2 as my accent, I was able to demonstrate how using the natural light as fill gives you the all the benefits of shooting outdoors while maintaining the control you get in a studio. Then we moved on to shooting with nothing but natural light, with a focus on positioning the subject to achieve the lighting pattern and quality required – and not a reflector in sight!
The video below will show you exactly how I positioned my lights for one of my portraits of “Alice”…
It was also a great opportunity to make use of some of my favourite lenses. I put both the 7-14mm f/2.8 and the 8mm f/1.8 through their paces, making use of the super wide-angle distortion to add to the hallucinogenic feel of the pictures. But the one I REALLY couldn’t put down was my 55mm OM lens, which I was able to connect to my E-M5 Mark II using the MF-2 OM Adapter. And wow, WHAT results! Thanks to the Focus Peaking of the OM-D, this vintage lens got an injection of 21st Century technology and produced pin-sharp results. An old school classic with a new school twist… sounds a bit like me!
But it wasn’t only the taking of pictures that brought me great pleasure over the 3 days in Hinckley… As I always maintain, 90% of my work is done before I even pick up my camera – and this was very much the case with the Alice In Wonderland inspired imagery that was created for this Big Shoot Experience. As you will hopefully be able to see from the images present further down this post, the styling involved in the shoot was incredibly conceptual and took many hours to plan and create. If you follow our Facebook Page you will have already seen one of our concept sketches for the styling of this shoot (I will include it below for those of you who haven’t don’t worry!), sitting down with the team and creating the concepts that we are to use on the day of a shoot is not only something that is massively important and key to achieving the imagery that we set out to achieve, but it is also something that brings me great pleasure.
So if that’s a sneaky look at how the concept started, lets have a look at the finished pieces that we created, starting with Alice…
And moving on to the White Rabbit…
Now for the first version of our Mad Hatter…
And now the second…
After shooting individual portraits, I got everybody in on the act and put together a group shot…
We then took the concept a little bit further, and moved on to something slightly less conventional – it gave me a great opportunity to shoot some portraits on the new Olympus 8mm f1.8 Fisheye lens ;0) …
and the 7-14mm pro lens
I had a FANTASTIC time shooting those images!
This might just have been my favourite BIG Shoot yet, which is really saying something – but next month’s event is going to give it a run for its money! On 25 and 26 September we’re taking over a groovy, grungy abandoned building for some steampunk urbexing! If you fancy having a go at some uber funky fashion, and doing a bit of urban exploring without getting arrested (we’ve got exclusive permission to use the building, so don’t worry!), you won’t want to miss the next BIG Shoot Experience.
Thanks for reading, and remember: I may be entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret: all the best people are ;0)
Best,
D
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