Roseblade Photography Blog

I grabbed this shot the day the planes came back. It was the first plane I’d seen in about a week since the volcano erruption.

For those who don’t know: Volcano eruption in Iceland > Tons of ash in the atmosphere > Virtually all european airports closed > Thousands of people stranded/extending their holidays.

My friend pointed out the plane and we both had this strange feeling. We’d seen hundreds of planes crossing London yet this seemed really special. Like seeing a rainbow after a storm or a bird with a leaf in her mouth after the flood. We just watched it, a little speck symbolising; not triumph over nature but rather natures grace at allowing us to go about our business once again.

I thought it might be cool to post a video of all the frames we discarded form the Retromania shoot. It looked good seeing the process. A simple little shoot but a fun video.

This shoot for Retromania earned us a lot of interesting looks and a good handful of beeps from passing drivers.

We needed a warm sunlit afternoon, an urban concrete environment and a willingness to perform. We captured a couple of hundred frames and decided to keep the ads simple with a clean uncluttered backdrop.

This is a little project we’ve just completed. It’s comprised of about 60 different shots of paper in mid air.

The concept for an explosion of paper transforming itself from a screwed up balls to perfectly crafted planes was easy; getting them to fall and fly into shot was more tricky.

It took us a while to find the optimum method and had to make a few planes as the noses kept getting bashed on the floor. Still, a reasonable result with zero budget!

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My tips for shooting this kind of thing:

Shoot plenty. While you’re on a role you’ll get plenty of ideas and you won’t want to set it all up again to get that one frame you missed.

Keep a narrow set of variables. Keep the lighting easy, simple, directional, don’t manipulate too mush in post processing. This should keep things looking natural.

Watch shadows. Since this is a layered composition you’ll need to think about painting in shadows afterwards cast on one object form another. Any ideas on automatic ways to do this are welcome!

The shoot for Jamaria is all finished now.

These images are to be used online at a new site ‘Random Sounds’. The enterprise is young and in development. In a month or two you will start to see a collection of artists all aiming to make it in the industry. We’ll be photographing all of them in the coming weeks. At a later stage we’ll be shooting specifically for album covers, sleeves and other promotional material. For now, it’s all about building up a library of images for them to use to get the ball rolling.

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The ice and water concepts for this shoot could definitely be upscaled. I’ve been interested in these elements since my ‘Sculpting With Water’ Project a little while back. Keen to get it into a shoot we had a play with Jamaria. The ‘Ice Tears’ could be more pronounced and would certainly make more sense alongside an appropriate album name.

Granted this isn’t a particularly unusual or creative shot but it was made in a different sort of way. I don’t have a macro lens, I’d hardly ever use it for what I do but every now and then I need a close up shot. This technique uses a 50mm 1.8 lens reversed. If your not familiar with this, take your lens off, turn it round and hold it against your camera body. You need to shoot manually and focussing is a bit tricky but it works to a certain extent.