A devastating and violent 6.3 earthquake hit Christchurch yesterday.
Below are some images and video I took from the past 36 hours after the quake.
I grabbed my video camera right after the quake stopped and this is what I got….
For the description of each picture just click on it and it’ll take you to my Flickr page – although most just speak for themselves.
This shot below was taken from my balcony just two weeks before the earthquake. This city will never look like this again….
Have been working on the CD cover for Hera’s new album.
Below is probably the best shot we got from the studio shoot – which will hopefully end up being on the album cover…
I shot over 300 stills from this session. Here is another one of my favorites:
I was in Wellington last week for some film related meetings. While I was there I took some shots of my friends flatmate Ange.
I thought I’d have a go at creating a image similar to the style of Leah Sweet.
Below is a quick rundown of my Photoshop process. The above photo was a composition of this shot I took in her lounge…
…and this ‘bokeh‘ shot I took a few weeks back in Christchurch…
Firstly since this was an impromptu shoot and Ange didn’t have any makeup on I smoothed the skin in Photoshop.
Steps to get smooth skin:
(a) Duplicate the layer in Photoshop
(b) Add ‘Dust & Scratches’ filter to the top layer
(c) Use a ‘Reveal All’ layer mask on the top layer. Then use a black or grey brush to draw back in the details – like the eyes, nostrils and lips.
Example of the eye half done.
Then I’ve added the bokeh shot on a new layer with the transfer mode set to ‘Multiply’ and opacity to 88%.
Finally I’ve brought back the girls face details using another ‘Reveal All’ layer mask. This time however using grey brushes so some of the bokeh shot still overlays the face.
Hope that all makes sense! If you found this handy please leave a comment :)
Wow – so I seem to be doing a lot of photography lately! Just got back from a shoot with model / actress Georgia Easter. She was one of the leads in my entry to this years 48 Hour film challenge. Check it out here.
As always I was shooting on the trusty Lumix GF1 & a 20mm f1.7 lens. The shoot was purely just for my practice. Used the available light from the overhead fluorescents and 1 off camera flash (fired via my new wireless trigger).
Has been a great weekend here in Christchurch so I thought I’d get out and use my new wireless setup on some friends. Went to Hagley park and pulled out my new $10 umbrella I got on a recent trip to Hong Kong.
All the shots were done with just one flash through the umbrella and edited in Adobe Lightroom.
A rare self portrait with my friend Clementine.
Actor friend Robert Faith. Check out his work here.
A couple of weeks ago at a party I drunkenly tripped over my flashcable and smashed my Nikon flash. That damn cable was so annoying for two reasons – I was only able to place the flash 15ft away from the camera and I wasn’t able to move the camera around without potentially pulling over the stand.
So I decided to splash out and get a wireless setup. The guys at Photo & Video International (best camera shop in the world) hooked me up with a Phottix Wireless trigger set (technical review here). Took it yesterday up to Victoria park to shoot some mountain bikers – was so much easier to put the flashes wherever I wanted, move around with the camera and have no fear that I’ll pull the stand over and smash some more gear. For $200 NZD Iwas able to get a transmitter and 2 receivers – which work for up to 30m from the camera. Check out the full mountain biking set here.
Have nothing to compare them to but so far they are reliable and making the shoot 100 times easier. Am going out to play with them some more today :)
The setup on top of my Lumix GF1 and the two receivers.
So local musician Hera got in contact with me a week or so ago asking for some promo photos. She was very open to shoot anything that I wanted – which was great.
Today we headed out to get some shots at Bottle Lake forest. It was sunny so I was hoping to see light rays breaking through the canopy. Got there and one of my two flashes wasn’t working. So had to make do with only 1. Then it started pissing down!
Luckily Hera was keen to keep shooting and we soldiered on. Ended up getting some cool water shots! As you can see from the pics – she’s a pretty good sport.
Today I took some pictures of Katie O’Brien (producer) and myself to put in a booklet to go with my showreel DVD for LittleSisterFilms.
We went up to Lumo Photography’s new studio and I duct taped my flashes onto some stands to get the following shots…
Last week I went into Photo & Video and picked myself up a Lumix GF1 for travelling, general photos and shooting video. The GF1 uses a Micro 4/3 sized sensor – which is very close to Super 35mm film. The body design has a very cool retro feel to it. My friend Tim Chesney has had one for awhile now and I have been impressed with the portrait photos he has been taking.
The kit I got came with a 20mm 1.7f “pancake” lens (equivalent to a 40mm) – which is an awesome lens. It hardly sticks off the body so it’s perfect to carry the whole thing around in your jacket pocket like a point’n'shoot. One cool thing is you can get an adapter for older professional mounts (e.g Canon FD) so you’re not just stuck to the micro 4/3 range. There are adapters coming out soon for the digital lenses like Canon EOS apparently.
I also have added Tester13′s firmware hack to allow the camera to shoot fully manual video with a highly increased bit rate. And the video results are surprisingly good. Handheld it suffers from rolling shutter or ‘jello’ but on a tripod the video is more than useable for professional purposes. Hopefully will upload some sample ‘hacked’ footage soon.
I also picked up the Lumix 7-14mm wide lens – which is super cool. Check out the shot below taken on it:
And finally I got myself 2 Nikon SB-20 Speedlites to try some off camera flash photography. Was a lot of fun to play around with them for the first time yesterday. Check out some of the results below. Had one flash on the hot shoe of the camera and the other flash to the right of frame firing via infra-red.
3,200 shutter speed:
Conclusion
The camera is compact and easy to carry around in a jacket pocket, the manual controls are fast to use and straight forward to pick up and the photo quality is excellent.
The price is one of the only issues. At around $1,300 – $1,400 NZD (Photo & Video have kits on sale at the moment for $1,149 NZD!) it competes with the likes of the Canon 550D – which is a better photo and video camera. But the 550D is bulky even without a lens on it. The GF1 also doesn’t have built in time-lapse but this can be done via a cable sold separately.
So it works for my purposes of being a compact point’n'shoot like camera with an awesome lens, full manual controls and great quality. It’s a very sexy looking camera as well :)
I live right in downtown Christchurch – so when the 7.1 earthquake hit I was able to get some pictures of the aftermath.
Super lucky that the quake struck at 4:35am and not one single person died! Had it been 12 hours earlier – 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon it would have been a different story. Below are some of the pics I got…
They were also published in the Christchurch Star – check it out here