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Ultrasound
Yes, Tegan is pregnant. Due in early August.
Apparently all looks normal at the moment, although looking at this particular image, how could you tell?! I can’t tell what’s a head or tail in it.
Introduction to studio photography
or what we did on the weekend.
On this weekend just passed, Tegan and I went down to Melbourne to do a couple of introductory studio photography workshops at a place called Shoot That!. They ran an intermediate workshop on the Saturday and an advanced workshop on the Sunday – we did both.We loved it – we had a great time. It was a great introduction to doing studio photography. We’re really keen to do more of this kind of photography – I’ve had ideas for studio shots running through my head ever since.
The intermediate workshop focused on lighting basics and one light setups with fairly simple backdrops. The advanced one used 2-4 light setups and more complicated backdrops with a focus on shooting the clothes the model was wearing as if it was a fashion shoot. This was a lot more challenging.
The workshops was definitely an introduction: I feel now that I could go into a studio and get some decent results, but the advanced course showed me how seriously complicated the whole thing gets when you’re working with complex effects and trying to get certain types of shots (in other words, with a good model, portrait shots are so, so much easier than interesting clothing shots).
It also made me realise that basic studio work is pretty straight forward. The courses assumed that you knew how to use your own gear and had basic technical competence in photography. In that sense, it gave me some confidence because there wasn’t much difference between my basic skills and what it took to get decent shots in there. What it really taught was how to light a shot and interact with the model.
You can see our photos fom the shoot at the following links:
Tim’s studio photos
Tegan’s Shoot That! photos
Saturday
We had a pretty great and in some ways surreal day yesterday.
First up, we overcame the residual effects of a viruss we’d both been suffering from during the week to make it to a photoshoot with a bunch of other people from the Canberra Photographers group on Flickr. That in itself sounds fairly normal, but our subject matter was a local burlesque troop that one of the Flickr group members is also part of. This was fantastically fun and interesting – playing with studdio lighting and having as subject matter a bunch of people who are performers already and therefore were quite good at posing. Tegan shot a couple of hundred shots with the digital camera and I shot several rolls fo B&W film. Tegan got a few quite good shots and I can hardly wait to develop my film and see the results.
After the shoot, a few of the Flickr group members came back to our place for coffee and to review our results on the computer. This was also fun.
More surreal, a stranger came to to the door. The stranger was the woman who had designed our house. She was in town, down from Brisbane, and asked to have a look around as she had never seen it before. She also told us the story behind it: she and her fiance had designed the house and they were going to live in it with her father, who was quite elderly. However, her father passsed away and she and her fiance split up, which is why it was available for us to buy it. This explained some of the design elements of the house e.g. why there are two master bedrooms. She also explained that the octagonal windows in the stairwell were designed that way because her engagement ring was octagonal.
Later in the day we had a wonderful afternoon tea, catching up with friends we don’t see very often. And then we got to have a nice relaxing evening and watch Australia thump Wales in the rugby. Excellent.
All in all, a fairly relaxing day, which was exactly what we needed.
Darkroom – old school and new
As some of you know I’ve been gettign photography in a big way in the last six months or so (those whom I have ‘forced’ to sit for portraits for me would know it even more so). While this was largely sparked by the purchase of a digital SLR (a Canon EOS300D) back in early 2004, I’ve now gone back to film – black and white and high colour slide film (especially Fuji Velvia) in particular. This suits Tegan and I quite well, as she prefers to use our digital camera, and I enjoy using our film cameras themselves a lot more than the 300D.
To further this interest, I have finally taken a course in black and white photography, which really means in darkroom skills, at Photoaccess in Manuka. And it’s great!
Last night I printed my first ever contact sheet, which was a whole lot of fun:
In contrast, Tegan had a day off work yesterday to attend a one day course on post processing photos using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Ironically, these are basically “digital darkroom” skills. Tegan found the course fantastically useful and interesting and also picked up some good tips on how to take better-looking digital photos. At first she was a bit intimidated – she was the only amateur there – all the others were either professional photographers or graphic designers. Still, it sounds as though she held her own and (certainly by the end of the day) knew just as much about post-processing as any of the others.
So between the two of us we now (or will soon) have both old school and new fangled darkroom skills pretty well covered.