Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography, London

Scott Kelby “Light It! Shoot It! Retouch It!” Seminar

davehodg — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:21:45 +0000

I have a couple of Kelby books since they’re good for recipes for doing stuff in the various Adobe packages. When I saw he was coming to London and doing a day’s seminar and it was about sixty quid, I figured why not wander along. It’s not far to go and there’s decent food and beer in Islington if all else failed.

The title of the seminar didn’t fill me with much hope as it’s remarkably similar so Brian from Family Guy’s great steaming pile of book called “Wish It, Want It, Do It”. I’d also recently downloaded his iPad app “Scott Kelby’s Lighting Recipes“, which, whilst being full of useful recipes, his presentation annoyed me somewhat with little snuffles at the end of sentences. In the event his presentation was relaxed, funny and snuffle-free.

As an aside, this was the first time I’d been inside the fabulous Business Design Centre and there were a fair few photographers shooting things of architectural and abstract interest! Great little building with an interesting history.

The agenda was:

Lighting and retouching for headshots
Dramatic lighting and retouching
Edgy light and high contrast
Lighting and retouching for fashion and glamour
Compositing: lighting and and Photoshop techniques

For me, the first three sessions were the best and it seemed to lose its way ending in some really awful compositing: taking a bright, clear shot, scuzzing it up to fit an industrial background, adding a bizarre drop shadow and adding it to a CD cover. It REALLY looked dreadful.

That aside, the techniques for softening the female portrait and making males more “dramatic” were excellent and used forms of layering I’d not seen done before.

The notes I took were:

Reflector
The nearer the light, the greater the falloff. This something I kind of intuitively knew, but it was nice to have confirmed and demostrated
Get down low for fashion then fix the keystoning afterwards. This was new to me!
You can download Photoshop brushes for eyebrows and eyelashes. Bizarre!
15 year old girls can have perfect skin. Even lighting from the side, there are no blemishes!

While in the seminar, I hit up Amazon and bought:

A nice big reflector. It’s a way of adding a second light for cheap. Adjust the power by adjusting the disatnce. And use the silver side for strobes and the gold side outside in natural light or with a warming gel on the strobe.
A long USB cable. Shooting tethered is definitely the way to go. When in Taipei though, I’d been to a shoot Doris Yeh did where the tethering was projected on a huge blank wall. That was overkill!

Kelby pushed the Elinchrom BXRi kit quite hard and if you have the space and take enough of these pics, I’m sure they’re very worthwhile. I’ll stay strobist for now; maybe invest in a nice big softbox.

He also pushed Blow-It fans as a cheap, quiet, portable hair fan. Of course, Leibowitz uses three fans to get the turbulence realistic.

And finally, having had Adobe shoved in our faces all day, I booked an Apple Aperture seminar at the Apple store. So there! I’ve use iPhoto as my storage system since the year dot and I’d like to see how to integrate Aperture into my workflow without having to adopt a whole new system. Now I have 8G RAM in my Mac book Pro, this is plausible.

And that’s it. Overall, I’d say it was sixty quid reasonably well spent and has certainly left me fired up to take more pictures. And the burrito for lunch was very good, if pricy. When did a lunch go from a fiver to nearer eight quid?!

Spitalfields and Brick Lane Photowalk

davehodg — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:03:24 +0000

I had the day to myself, so Paul and I decided to take a walk to the Spitalfields area to take some pics. We started at the back of Liverpool Street station trying to get inspired by some architecture, then to the Market and up Brick Lane for people and other randomness. This is my favourite! Look at the things going on in this. Also, a mix of black and white. Some work really well in colour, some only in black and white. An odd mix.

I had the compact and the SLR with me and I took twice as many on the compact (in JPEG! in a colour mode!) as I did on the SLR. And of this set of 17, all but two came off the compact, telling I think. The last three are from on the way home up in Dalston. But I like them!

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Spitalfields Walkabout – Images by David Hodgkinson

Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Death by Sexy, Purple Turtle, Camden

davehodg — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 09:45:05 +0000

The mighty Peanut Butter Lovesicle are approaching the end of their stint in London and this makes me a sad polar bear. In the space of about six weeks so far, they’ve turned a fairly diffident, indifferent audience, and a few discerning fans, into a great turnout at the Purple Turtle last night. Their tight, 3-piece Zep-esque brand of rock and roll never fails to get heads nodding and the girls gyrating. I’ll be sad to lose them.

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Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Purple Turle – Images by David Hodgkinson

They were running horribly late last night, and I was about to go for a wander in the drizzle but as I saw the band before setting up, I thought they’d be worth shooting at least. For their second gig apparently, Death by Sexy played a confident and competent, if plodding set and seemed to have decent support in the crowd including the almost obligatory mum and dad. The main guy seems to have landed himself a band it’d be nice to tour with at least.

Death by Sexy, Purple Turtle – Images by David Hodgkinson

Night shoot along the South Bank

davehodg — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 15:57:01 +0000

We met up at the Festival Hall, then spent what felt like ages waiting for the endarkenment over the House of Parliament by County Hall. And yes, we got told off for tripods, but it turns out you can use a collapsed tripod on a wall just as easily. Dusk fell, Parliament got lit and we spent too much time there. It was too cloudy for a decent sunset but someone up in the London eye must have got one because there was a hint peeking through the buildings and the buildings facing West got a good bath in red light.

We wandered back to the Festival Hall via the obligatory long exposure of a roundabout and up on to the fifth floor of the festival hall for what was quite an impressive “blue hour”. From there, it was an onwards amble to the Tate for the obligatory shots of the wobbly bridge. By this point we were getting cold and a bit night-blind so it was a fairly brisk walk to London Bridge where we found our target pub closed. So home and sorting pictures and a beer there it turned out to be.

Not convinced by my lenses. I know my 12-24mm Tokina is a bit beaten up, but I wasn’t convinced by the 20mm f/2.8 even though it’s taken great shots in other situations. If anything my £100 55-200mm Tamron was the sharpest up close. Solange’s D700 with the f/2.8 zoom seemed much sharper with better colours.

Overall, it was a good experience even if my sensor was dirty despite cleaning it at the outset. I’d give the photos a 3/5, I think I’ve got a way to go with this. They could do with turning down the lights on St Paul’s: it’s just too damn bright compared to everything else. We also missed our target of getting to the other side of London Bridge to get a view of Tower bridge. I’d certainly spend less time in certain places and move on. It’ll be worse in the summer when there’s even less dark time.

Top tips for shooting at night:

Use your best ISO, and best aperture for your lens (usually f/8 ish)
Take as long an exposure as you need
Beware over-bright things. Like St Paul’s
Shoot RAW so you can fix colour temperature and shadows/highlights,
Use a tripod. You can always put it on a wall, collapsed if you get grief from “security”
Usually use a wide angle lens,
Use the self-timer to get rid of camera shake.
Make sure your sensor is clean!

Anyhow, the pictures. I reckon the ones in the middle round the blue hour from the Festival Hall balcony are my favorites. Thanks to Craig, Solange and Paul for coming out with me!

South Bank Night Photowalk – Images by David Hodgkinson

Bleech, Camden Barfly

davehodg — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:19:06 +0000

First time I’ve seen Bleech in nearly a year, although I thought it was much longer. Not much to say except they’re as loud, passionate and energetic as I’ve ever known them. They’ve been stepping up their gigs and it was nice to see them at a reasonably crowded Barfly. Anyhow, the pics, one of which was shot on the Canon S95, just because:

Bleech, Barfly – Images by David Hodgkinson

Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Fiddlers Elbow

davehodg — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 23:32:48 +0000

These guys are over from New York for a few months, playing toilets and building up a following. I’ve seen them a few times already and will see them many times more before they return home and I’ve pimped them as widely as I can. Musically, they’re in the modern Zepplin or Who space as a tight, loud, rockin’ three-piece. They never play with anything less than 100% passion. Like.

Credit also to “The Stags” who were on before and rocked out mightily.

If you like the pics, apparently you can buy them. Let me know if it works! The light was rubbish and they might be a bit impressionistic but it was a moment in time!

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Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Fiddlers Elbow – Images by David Hodgkinson

Maintaining a Darkpan

davehodg — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:50:42 +0000

I didn’t find many references out there that did exactly what I needed, but with the help of Miyagawa and others, I cobbled together the right combination of incantations. To give some background, at the BBC we have a project whose technical debt has built up to the point where they require archaic versions of DBIx::Class and Catalyst. Fixing these dependencies will be non-trivial.

Firstly, I had to find out what versions of stuff were on live. That was easy, get the livesite folks to give me an “rpm -qa | grep perl”. This gave me the baseline of all the modules that have historically been pulled off CPAN and rpm-ed with cpan2rpm.

So next to pull these exact versions off BackPAN. The mighty Schwern has written BackPAN::Index which makes querying BackPAN a breeze. I wrote a noddy script to mirror the files locally to an artifacts directory where they could be checked in to svn.

A CPAN mirror needs indexing. First stop was “cpansite“. Couldn’t get this to work at all, it seemed to put 02packages.details.txt.gz in the wrong directory and didn’t seem complete. I didn’t bang on it for long until Miyagawa insisted I use OrePAN. This worked out of the box for 99% of modules. The only problem was with a couple of tarballs whose path is pushed down another level like:

http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MN/MNOONING/PlRPC/PlRPC-0.2020.tar.gz

This broke a regexp in OrePAN causing the file path string in 02packages.details.txt.gz to be wrong. Easy fix for me in the mirror script and I’ve posted a bug on rt.cpan.org.

Now we have a populated Darkpan, the last step is to get it to install. This requires the right combination of switches to cpanm:

cpanm --force -v --mirror-only --local-lib=./perl5 \ --mirror="./artifacts/" \ --mirror-index="artifacts/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz" .

And yes, I’ve tested this by unplugging my machine from the internet and running.

Hopefully all this will be of use to someone!

Shiny New Kings Cross

davehodg — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:32:24 +0000

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Kings Cross – Images by David HodgkinsonThe new Kings Cross opened this week, a day ahead of schedule with an awesome new ticket hall and new passenger flows with an airport-style arrivals and departures scheme and of course, a refurbished platform 9 3/4. The things has been reviewed to death by the likes of Ian Visits and Londonist but as a part-time spotter, I thought it was worth a look. Yes, yes it is. My son gets a nice new arrival from Hatfield, there are lots of hanging around eating opportunites (although we went over the road to Sourced in St Pancras for brownie and hot chocolate) and a beguiling new Fullers pub tucked away at the back. A visit to the latter is booked for next weekend.

Now for a shiny new terminus at Euston for the HS2.

Minnie Weisz Studio – Wet Plate Colloidon Photography, Ambrotypes and Daguerrotypes

davehodg — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:51:14 +0000

On our way back from our usual Sunday afternoon Womble to Kings Cross to see the shiny new buildings via the usual St Pancras Old Church and Camley Street natural park, we came across one of the not railway arches was open and demoing some photographic techniques.

The Minnie Weisz Studio, bills itself as teaching the processing of “wet plate colloidon photography, ambrotypes and daguerrotypes” and that was what we found them working on, with chemicals and hair dryer. So if that’s the sort of thing you ilke, sign up for one of the workshops!

Obviously, I asked them how many megapixels their prints were.

Recruiters – what exactly are you for?

davehodg — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:57:51 +0000

I was recently looking for a new contract, hopefully something leveraging what I’ve been doing recently (SCRUM) and outside what are usually seen as my core skills (perl, Hudson). This brought me into copious contact with that subspecies of human we call the “recruitment consultant”, “agent” or more collquially “pimp”.

What I’ve found has staggered me. Years ago, I had one agent in Bristol that took the time to find the kind of left field candidate I was looking for and since then I’ve built a relationship with a couple of agents at one agency who are also good about knowing what I’m looking for.

Anyhow, this recent contact has left me staggered that most of these people even remember to breathe. Here’s a list of transgressions and stupidities:

Don’t lie to me that you have jobs. The perl world is small enough we know who is hiring and who their sole agents often are. If you want to fly a kite, find a field.
Don’t send me job specs that have NONE of the major skills I have. Or indeed want to have. I’m looking at you Monarch IT and your C#/.NET job.
Do your research. £200 a day for a senior developer/SCRUM master, in London, with immediate start will just make me laugh and hang up. Even if I’m between contracts.
If you call me, have caller ID. That helps me file you away and when you call back I know who you are without all the preamble.
If you call me and I don’t pick up, LEAVE A MESSAGE. Especially if you don’t have caller ID or if your firm shares one dedicated number for outgoing calls. Otherwise you won’t make your commission.
“Hampshire” is not a location. It stretches from Fleet to Southampton with many a hayrick in between.
Make sure your job ad or email is literate. You are not a 17 year old writing an SMS. Or maybe you are? Get “its” and “it’s” right and spell the technologies you’re hiring for correctly. As soon as you write “Pearl” you’ve lost your commission. I may be principled, but I’m not a “principle programmer”. We’re all poking fun at you when you make mistakes like this.
Please make sure your phone doesn’t make it sound like you’re calling from the moon
I appreciate you’re Indian, probably better educated than I am and have a better grasp of English and cricket than I do, but if I can’t penetrate your accent, then we might as well be speaking different languages. There are classes. Watch My Fair Lady.
If I tell you I’m not interested in a position, do NOT keep calling me offering a better rate. I’m NOT interested for any money.
When you enter a job, put in the location of the job, not your office. Sheesh.

Got any other pet hates? How could they do what they’re getting paid or better?

Dave Hodgkinson Music Photography, London

Scott Kelby “Light It! Shoot It! Retouch It!” Seminar

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Spitalfields and Brick Lane Photowalk

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Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Death by Sexy, Purple Turtle, Camden

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Night shoot along the South Bank

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Bleech, Camden Barfly

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Peanut Butter Lovesicle, Fiddlers Elbow

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Maintaining a Darkpan

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Shiny New Kings Cross

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Minnie Weisz Studio – Wet Plate Colloidon Photography, Ambrotypes and Daguerrotypes

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Recruiters – what exactly are you for?

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