Model Shoot: Casey Edwards
- Model: Casey Edwards
- HMUA: Deni Jordan Hackett
- Styling: Lydia Downe
- Photographer: Geoffrey Dunn
Model Shoot: Deni Jordan Hackett
A series of images from a recent model shoot with model Deni Jordan Hackett. The shoot team was put together by HMUA Caroline Cresswell and was intended to feature a theme of 'Veiled'. It was a fun afternoon. I'm working with Deni again this weekend though this time she's doing creative ... can't wait, stay tuned.
The full team
- Photographer: Geoffrey Dunn
- Model: Deni Jordan Hackett
- Make Up: Caroline Cresswell
- Hair: Amelia Olsen
- Creative: Caroline | Marina T | Geoffrey
Pigman's Lament
Yesterday morning I shot a series of promotional photographs to support an upcoming production at The Street Theatre. The production is called Pigman's Lament and stars Raoul Craemer in a taxing solo performance. The story revolves around a man who is physically haunted by the memory of his dead grandfather. Raoul, who you may remember from the Beard/No Beard headshot series from earlier in the year, plays both roles.
The brief for the promotional image called for the expression of the duality extant in the central character ... to somehow combine the rational present character with that of the man beyond the grave. I chose to take two shots and merge them together to form this dualistic one ... Raoul's hand reaching from behind his head and contorting his face emphasises the extension of this nasty force from the past. The picture will appear on all promotional materials for the production and I'll post a picture of the poster when it gets printed.
There were, predictably some outtakes too ;-)
The production details
Pigman's Lament - The Street Theatre - Early 2016
- Starring: Raoul Craemer
- Director: Paulo Castro (Stone/Castro - Portuguese National Theatre, Schaubuehne Berlin, Chunky Move)
- Playwright: Raoul Craemer
New Show: Barriers - Break or Breakthrough
I'm very pleased to announce my next show Barriers: Break or Breakthrough opens next Wednesday at the Belconnen Community Center. A collaboration between myself and Marina T, the show explores our different reactions to change. Our working proposal:
Change is a fundamental part of the human experience. Often our difficulty in accepting change can stem from our inability to understand it. Barriers explores the the transitional processes involved in interpreting change.
The exhibition revolves around the centerpiece of a glass-encased clay sculpture of a human skull, which acts as both metaphor and motif of change. Meditations upon the centerpiece take the form of sculptures, and poetry.
The skull, which we have nicknamed Eno was made by Marina, features in each of the photographs. Each of the photos explores a different emotional response to change ... these comprise Anger, Fear, Denial, Delirium, Mourning and Acceptance. Here is a selection of the photographs from our shortlist for the show.
The show also features several poems written especially for the show and a number of new clay sculptures from Marina.
We made a flyer advertising the show too ;-)
Along the way we have also established domain for our working collaborative artistic endeavours 2 Tens & A Tomato under which we exhibit and also produced a short film (shortlisted at the 2015 Lights! Canberra! Action! short film festival. The site is a little lean at the moment as we concentrate on getting things together for the show and really only shows a copy of the flyer for the show but please stay tuned on that front.
Links
- About 2 Tens & A Tomato
- 2 Tens & A Tomato
- Sexy monochrome flyer version
If you're in Canberra next Wednesday evening (18th November) at 5:30pm ... please come along and say hello to us :-)
If Canberra is simply too far to come ... please wish us well :-)
#gdphoto #2tensandatomato
Time-Motion Study: Dance
On Saturday night I had the opportunity to photograph some of the show events at the 2015 Canberra Latin Dance Festival. The festival organisers had engaged a photographic team from Sydney to do formal coverage of the events and dance exhibitions and I volunteered on the day to offer to take some creative arty pictures. The event started at 8pm and was very well attended. There was a stage and seating and a large(ish) (too large I think) area in front of the stage where no-one was permitted ... not even the formal photographers!
I had imagined that I would be able to get quite close to the action and to this end I had packed my Lensbaby and wider primes to get as you say creative. Seeing as I couldn't get close my wider selection was almost no us ... I mean I was simply to far away from the action. I did have my 70-200 with me and I ended up using this for most of the night. As I was taking pictures of the performers I began extending the exposure time to deliberately blur their movements and flow. I had my tripod with me and so I zoomed to an area of the stage with black background and set about tweaking until I got nicely lit 10 second exposures. I got a lot of duds ... but we won't talk about those today ;-)
I was impressed with the way they came out. The ones above show flow and transition and a closer examination reveals faces and hands and the ever-present specular highlights of sequin and spangle. It's almost as though you're capturing the essence or the spirit of the dancers with these ghostly images. I think I am going to have to do some of these ... perhaps under more controlled conditions.
Here are some featuring spins and twirls...
The conversion of some of these into monochrome lends an ethereal feel too I think.
The One Project
Toward the beginning of the year I had lunch with my friend Hilary Wardaugh, an accomplished photographer around Canberra, and she described a project she was putting together. Hilary explained that she had a Nikon FM-2 manual film camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens laying around and was planning to load a film into it, compile a list of photographers and pass the camera to each photographer and ask each one to take a picture. Once the picture has been taken, it became the photographer's responsibility to contact the next person on the list and arrange to get the camera to them. At the end of this process, about 3 months, Hilary will get the film developed and scanned. Each photographer will their digital negative and can process it as though preparing a print in the darkroom ... that is curves and levels and filter colours but no pixel based PhotoShop edits et al. The processed negative will be passed back to Hilary who will then arrange printing of the image for the purposes of exhibition. Two shows are currently lined up for the prints, one local (at the Huw Davies Gallery in Manuka) and one in Sydney (as part of the Head On Photo Festival).
The camera travels in a box containing the list of photographers, a cable release and a book in which the photographer is encouraged to write a short piece about their picture. The project is called The One Project.
So far so good... the only stipulation was that our picture had to be a portrait!
No pressure... it's only a single frame... I mean it's not like the other twenty-odd photographers are all accomplished photographers (they are!) and will be doing their very best as well... reading through the book I smiled when I saw that everyone else was obsessed with light, exposure and focus ;-)
I wanted my portrait to be of my artistic collaborator Marina. I have photographed Marina extensively over the past two years and together we came up with the idea that often you only have an impression of someone through the images you see of them. So I put together a grid of photos I have taken of Marina and projected them digitally across her face and arms and splashed across a dark background the pictures resemble stained glass. I set my digital camera to emulate the manual settings of the FM-2 and to act as a light meter for correct exposure. The effect is one of an essentially dark shadowy image with bright pictures shaping contours but ... visible upon closer inspection ... you see Marina illuminated and looking out from the shadows. It looks great.
Then it was swap the camera over on the tripod, recompose and recheck the settings (and recheck them again!) ... I re-posed Marina and got the composition right and while she was looking perfect I felt it was right pressed the shutter release ... pa-tchang! Done! In my excitement however I had failed to warn Marina I was about to take the picture and she thinks she may have blinked but can't recall where the blink may have been in relation to the exposure. I'm sure it'll be fine! I do feel like a goose though! My main concern is that given the dark nature of the photograph (light-wise not emotionally-wise!) and the different response of the film to shadow and highlight my contribution to the project may in fact just turn out to be a black frame! But then that's the risk you take in trying something less safe I guess :-)
The photos I took with the digital body look great and I would include them in this post but I don't want to publish anything until I see how the film version came out which won't be until November. I'll do a contrast and compare then as a separate post :-)
But I would like to thank both Hilary and Marina. Marina firstly for being my muse and sharing her art, ideas and vision so freely with me ... my world simply wouldn't be the same without her in it. And Hilary for coming up with the idea of The One Project and making it happen, for the necessary artistic angst and discipline (well OK maybe I didn't take home all of the discipline lesson) this project inspired in me.
On the Inside Looking Out
I've written before about those special moments when a picture reveals itself right before your eyes. Some days when you're ready to take a photograph ... to capture something special a scene can prove elusive ... there are, I believe, times when it's almost as though you have to be 'open' to a photograph's materialisation. By that I refer to perhaps a process or state of mind whereby you as the photographer are open to the image that present itself to you. It's like realising there is an image waiting in front of you or even anticipating an image's appearance ... this one represents one of those moments
Back story: A recent trip to Melbourne, Marina and I had just been to visit the Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Marina had wandered outside and I went to retrieve my camera bag from the cloakroom. As I walked across the foyer of the gallery toward the exit I noticed this young girl outside touching the glass of the water wall with her finger. I quickly reached into my camera bag, grabbed the camera and took a few pictures (before her father came and dragged her away from an anticipated episode of soaking). This one was my favourite... on the inside looking out.
The exhibition at the NGV is spectacular btw ... should you find yourself in Melbourne ;-)
Projected
I have, for many years, wanted to play with a photographic technique called 'Projector Photography'. This is essentially where a light source (in may case a digital projector) is used to throw patterns or other images upon a subject and the results captured in the camera as a photograph. I know it's all been done before and this technique has been around since the very beginning of photography but I'm thinking the important thing here is that it hasn't been done by me yet ;-) and to further this minor notion of inflated self-importance I recently obtained a digital projector (a little XGA Epson) and began to make some experiments ... the first of which I'm happy to present here.
For the technically minded: For the pattern I created a vertical line image in Photoshop using the pattern editor and transferred it to my laptop connected to the projector. I was running the image through Lightroom in fullscreen mode. This enabled me to play with the image size (and hence the width of the stripes) and also apply a hard vignette to make the projected images smaller and circular. The images was captured using a Nikon D600 with an 85mm f/1.4 @ f8 and ISO 640. At these settings the exposure time was around 1/6sec and so I had to remain quite still ... excepting the frame where I took advantage of the slow shutter and deliberately moved my head from side to side. These setting also showed that I have plenty of light to play with using increased ISO settings on the camera.
All in all a successful first experiment I thought ... can't wait to put my favourite model in front of it :-)
I have many ideas for patterns or images to project ... spiderwebs, water, fire ... I'd interested in any ideas you may have for the technique.
Gretchen Chappelle: life in still motion | scenes from the pacific shore
While in Sydney two weeks ago I had the pleasure of viewing my friend Gretchen Chappelle's most recent exhibition 'life in still motion | scenes from the pacific shore' at the Art Est. Art School and Gallery in Leichhardt, Sydney. Gretchen has, over the years, developed and refined a post-processing technique involving layers and motion blur to effectively isolate subjects in a frame whilst taking advantage of the colour fields surrounding them. I remember thinking 'Wow, that's cool' when I first saw her post one. Apparently, many folks have asked about the technique with a view to emulating it and while a number have tried I don't think any of them have mastered it the way Gretchen has.
I liked the prints in the show (and of course catching up with Gretchen!) but the gallery was a long way out ... Marina and I caught the train to Summer Hill and then walked at least a kilometer (Google Maps claimed it was 600m!) into the burbs of Leichhardt before we came across the gallery ... Gretchen arrived on her bicycle more or less the same time we did. I thought that Gretchen's work deserved more of an audience than was going to stumble across this out of the way place ... it needed more of a walk-in viewing audience/customer base and this wasn't the space that was going to provide that. Then, I guess those galleries cost more to host shows and the commission they charge is generally higher too. Still these are the lessons we learn when showing :-)
Good on you Gretchen ... the show looked great :-)
The show ran for the month of May so, due to my slackness in promoting the work of friends you can no longer trek into Leichhardt and see it for yourself ... it being quite suddenly June...
Links
- Gretchen's home page
- Gretchen's Gallery on Smugmug
- Art Est. Gallery and Art School
Masked
So we made this little movie ... an arthouse piece in a world that plainly isn't. In the movie, we're wearing masks ... well, in the latter stages we're wearing masks plural seeing as we had only one mask when we began filming and had to share it. It wasn't until I came across a supply of masks in Chapel Street in Melbourne over the final weekend that we were able to appear together both wearing masks. But that's an aside.
It's a strange feeling to be wearing masks in public, on the street, in coffee shops and shopping malls. Noone seemed to think it particularly odd, we didn't get asked to leave anywhere and anywhere people did look a little alarmed we just assured them we were "making a movie" and everything was fine! One thing I did notice though was that when I was masked, people I was flashing a reassuring smile to as they walked past or lingered couldn't actually see said reassuring smile; just some nodding weirdo in a mask.
I did take the opportunity to take some stills as we were shooting but likely nowhere near as many as I perhaps should have :-)
Here's a few.
You can watch the movie here
Hot Baby (Take 2) = much happier baby
Back in December I did a baby photo session of then four-week old Bjørn. That sunny Sunday reached 39°C in the afternoon … and little Bjørn was a hot baby and hot babies tend to be a little cranky. I got loads of lovely pictures of Bjørn but they were largely split into two groups … peacefully asleep or grumpy 
Now, I do know that parents love pictures of their children looking happy and smiley so I undertook to do a second session to capture some of the said happy and smiley pictures. Fast forward through the 4-week blur that is Christmas, travel, new year et al and little Bjørn is not so little now ... well ok he's still pretty little ... just not quite so little ... anyways on with the pictures! :-)
We met up at the Botanic Gardens on a Sunday morning and I foolishly wore a white shirt and as I lay on the damp dewy grass in amongst the wallaby poo ... this became apparent ... this foolishness. My shirt looked as though it bore external witness to a coffee drinking problem ... which is quite untrue ... like really.
Pocket Places: Paths into inner Canberra
Ever shot a poet on a bicycle? No? Well neither had I until week before last. Canberra poet PS Cottier (whom you may remember from this shoot) got in touch with a fun request:
"I just found out that I am having a small chapbook published about
riding the bikepaths of Canberra. It has some autobiographical
elements and is a prose piece in a series called Pocket Places. The
publisher asked if I have a suitable colour photo of myself on my
bike. I said I have some lovely photos with a parasol (and we may
use one from that session) but none of me riding my bike."
So, after a glass of wine at local pub/cafe The Front we set off on a little soiree on the bike paths of the Inner North. Here's a selection from our wander.
The book will be called Paths into inner Canberra, to be published by Ginninderra Press of South Australia. (GP began in Canberra 19 years ago but moved to Port Adelaide in 2008.) It will be part of their new Pocket Places series, and will be available here for the enormous price of $4. It will be about 24 pp in length.
Links
Shoot: My first Greek Orthodox Christening
Not only my first Greek Orthodox christening but my first photo shoot of a Greek Orthodox christening to boot. Not one but three babies, all cousins, were christened last weekend at St Nicholas' Church. Not being a regular attendee at church services, I took the opportunity to read up on the ceremony before the day arrived ... to get an idea of who would be standing where and what the different components would entail. I even visited the websites of photographers specialising in christenings to see what sort of pictures they got ... research I believe it's called ;-) and I'm very glad I did. I got to the church well before the ceremony to check out the light and to speak with the Fathers about where I could and could not go ... '...anywhere but the steps up to the sacred place!' ... no problem ... anywhere but the steps up to the sacred place! Got it!
It was very interesting day and also a very hot and humid one. I had a great time, took some lovely photographs which the families are very pleased with and hope to do it again.
Headshots: Raoul Craemer 2
As promised back in this post, I present the clean-shaven headshots of actor Raoul Craemer...
Raoul certainly looks different sans beard and though he wanted the shots to be simple and neat, the photo where I asked him to mess up his hair has an edgy look to it that I just love. That one is easily my favourite of the session. I like it slightly more in monochrome too.
Here's a contrast;
It's likely a little too late now, but I still think the beard works. What do you think?
Hot Baby
On the same weekend I took photos of actor Raoul Creamer, I also did a baby photo session of four-week old Bjørn. Turned out that Sunday morning was hot and sunny ... it reached 39°C in the afternoon ... and heat tends to make for a hot baby and hot babies tend to be a little cranky. So I got loads of lovely pictures of Bjørn but they were largely split into two groups ... peacefully asleep or grumpy :-)
Here's a selection of the more peaceful ones ... I particularly like the one where he looks like an old-school Soviet Premier ... you'll know the one (it's the not-so-peaceful one) ;-)
I've arranged a further session with Bjørn, who will hopefully bring his happy smiling face along, next week. Parents and relatives do appreciate pictures of happy, smiling children :-)