Tag: studio

Studio Visit

Sarah Shaw Studio, Brighton

Throughout May we visited Brighton artists’ open studios at the weekends. At Sarah Shaw‘s studio I was taken by all the collections of old paint tubes, brushes, palettes and other supplies and took several pictures. Sarah held up a window frame used as a palette for one of them.

Click any picture below to see them larger.

Long-suffering Model

Continuing in the studio, here are some more digital polaroid test shots, preparatory to shooting with the Pentax 645.

And with that, there may be a drop in posts over the next few days. The film has been developed and scanned but there’s much work still to do, and preparations for the Lightbox show. Perhaps surprising now that I’m doing a photography full-time, I haven’t been shooting a whole lot and have no new images. Stay tuned.

Polaroid?

I booked time in the studio to practice with my new (old) Pentax 645N II film camera. I didn’t really have anything important in mind to shoot but I wanted to get time playing with the lights and learning to use the camera. In order to test the exposures I was metering for, before shooting with the expensive film I shot with my digital camera, set to the same ISO, shutter speed, aperture and equivalent focal length. In olden times, a studio photographer might have shot a polaroid in the same way.

A Comedy of Errors

I wanted to spend some time in the studio learning lighting skills but I was having a hard time booking studio time using the University booking app so I went in to enquire. Helpful people got me booked right away – only problem was not expecting such a speedy result, I had no subjects, so I pulled a few items out of my bag and set them up. Next problem was the sync cable for the receiver appeared to be missing from the case. I improvised, using the tiny clip-on flash that Fuji provides with the camera and which can be used to trigger another light. That worked but didn’t really allow me to use the flash meter so I improvised further with camera metering for a bit but that was a dismal failure. One of our fantastic instructors lent me a sync cable and now I was in business. However, try as I might, I couldn’t get rid of the shadows cast by the powerful studio light. I tried using a reflector but that was insufficient. I tried adding an LED panel but that didn’t do it either. So I spent some time playing around and then returned the trigger/receiver and flash meter, reporting the missing sync cable. Whereupon the helpful person in the equipment room dug deeper into the case’s side pocket and produced the “missing” cable.

More practice will be required.