So, it’s that time again. The start of another year. I have no idea where 2011 went, but it certainly went quick! At the end of 2010/start of 2011 I wrote a list of goals for the year and it was a very useful exercise. It was good to go into the new year with a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve for the following twelve months. I think they were all fairly achievable and fair. I didn’t get them all ticked off, but I think I did pretty well. Here’s how it went down…
Learn/Practice More Lighting Techniques:
This was always going to be an open ended one, as I don’t think you ever, or should never, stop learning. I do feel that I did what I set out to do. I now feel a lot more confident with lighting. I continued to assist Steve throughout 2011 and continued to learn a huge amount from him (not just about photography either; I’m not pretty well versed in the stresses of owning a Dutch Barge…). I did a lot of shooting with both studio lights and Speedlight strobes, and I’m really starting to feel more confident with them and inspired to do more.
Build up a portraiture portfolio:
Again, it’s open ended as portfolios have to be kept regular and up-to-date but I do now have, thanks to a lot of very helpful and patient friends, a Portraiture portfolio that I am proud of. I’m hoping for it to get bigger in 2012!
Upgrade camera/lenses:
Yep. Through a mixture of working and saving pretty hard, I was able to upgrade a lot of equipment during 2011. I am now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 5D-MkII which I love, and a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM lens (which I also love!). I also managed to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, buy a new flash and various accessories and modifiers, a Wacom Intuos4 and upgrade a load of software! I now haz tha tools…
Experiment with time-lapses and video:
When I was thinking about this post, I actually surprised myself with how much video work I’ve done this year. There’s been One Week in Hueco which I worked on with Ben, and I think really upped the quality bar for us. I’m incredibly proud of this film, and very pleased by how it was received. We both got a lot of feedback from climbers and non-climbers alike about how they enjoyed it. It’s also (at the time of writing) had over 12,000 views on Vimeo which was much more than either of us where expecting. I also made my Day in the Life of the Castle Routesetters video which I think came out well (eventually) and of course The Rocklands Files (and subsequent Extras and A Short Film About Penguins). If you haven’t seen them, please have a look and let me know what you think.
My timelapse film, which I had hoped to have finished by the end of 2011, is still in progress but is coming together well and will hopefully be done in the next few months. It’s a time consuming thing to film, and I’m trying to keep the quality high so a lot of footage has been rejected. That aside, I’m giving myself a tick for this one!
Get images on iStock:
Arse. It was all going so well. Unfortunately, despite constant reminders, I still haven’t got my act together on this one. This shall roll over into 2012…
Climb Font 7a in Font: Well, if you’re being pedantic, I didn’t technically do this one. I still haven’t climbed a 7a in Fontainebleau, but, during our trip in April I did manage to tick a (really beautiful) 7a+ (Mémoire d’Outre Tombe, if you’re interested. On the day after my birthday, too! What a great pressie!). I did also, later in the year, go on to climb a 7a and a 7b(!!) in Rocklands, as well as a V6 in Hueco Tanks (which is works out to about 6c+/7a in Font grades). I think I’m going to let myself have this one…
Get strong(er):
When I see the above written down, I think it goes to show that I must have gotten stronger over the last year. Obviously, it is a very subjective thing, and I definitely have good and bad sessions when it comes to climbing, but I can definitely see a marked improvement over the last year. Steps are in place to keep this going though!
Visit/climb in a new country:
As predicted, we did end up going to South Africa. Rocklands was everything we hoped for and more, and the trip was a great success in both sight seeing and climbing. I would definitely love to go back there one day, but, as I think this goal will continue into 2012, I’m not sure how likely that will be. Never say never, though…
Design/Submit design(s) to Threadless:
Well, this didn’t really pan out sadly. It was mainly down to a lack of ideas and time, but neither of those are a particularly good reason for not at least trying to push this forward. It’s still definitely something I’d like to try and do though. A friend of mine from uni has submitted a few designs over the last few months and that has gotten me inspired to have a crack at getting something submitted. Since buying my Wacom tablet I’ve been keen to (and have started to) produce more artwork. This one is staying on the list to hopefully spur me along.
Do something I’ve never done before:
This is a bit of a tricky one to call. I did get engaged in 2011 which was certainly a big, life changing event that I’d not done before. However, I did know in 2010 that I was going to propose (although, I didn’t know whether Snoo would accept it!), so it feels like a bit of a fix. I dunno really; I might give myself half a tick for this, and roll it on again into next year.
…So, 7 out of 10. Not bad. There’s definitely a few, ticked or otherwise, which I’ll continue into 2012 though. I’m viewing this as a general, on going personal development plan and necessarily just self contained things. The question is now: what else am I adding to the list for 2012?:
Promote my Photography more:
I feel like I’ve come a long way, photographicaly speaking in 2011, and I now feel like I’m in a good position to start to market myself more. I have a clearer idea of where I’d like to take my career and have the skills, knowledge and gear to make it happen. I just need to find the right people to speak to! I hate promoting myself in that way. My fragile, artistic ego doesn’t fair too well under the pressure, but it’s a necessary evil if I want to progress; and I do. Steve has shown me that it’s not some impossible, impenatrable world, but, like a lot of things, it comes down to who you know. And there’s only one way to get to know them…
Instagram 365 Project:
During my time on Flickr, I’ve watched and marvelled and various users’ 365 projects (which involve taking, editing and uploading a photo a day for 365 days. Simple. On paper at least). The quality of a lot of them is truly staggering, and I’m impressed that so many people have the time to produce such great work on a such a regular basis. I’m not sure I could commit to a project like that, at least not to a standard that I’d be happy with so I’ve come up with a testing-the-water compromise. An Instagram 365. I use Instagram on my iPhone a lot and really enjoy it, so I thought that maybe a 365 project using Instagram could be the way forward. I always have my phone with me, so it doesn’t become such a chore to always have my camera with me, but I can still be creative with it. In fact, shooting within the iPhone’s limitations is also a good exercise in itself. As 2012 is going to be a bit of a milestone year for me, I thought it would be good to document it with a little visual diary, too. This one is already well underway, but still has a lot further to go. I’m logging my photo-a-day on a handy new Tumblr blog if you want to follow it. If, by December 31st, 2012 I have posted a photo every day to that blog then I can give myself a tick! I can’t guarantee that the photos will always be hugely interesting, but hopefully they’ll look nice. I like to shoot mundane things in interesting ways.
Move house:
I love our little south London flat, but “little” is the optimum word in that sentence. Snoo and I desperately need to find a bigger place, and I think it would be a really nice way to mark the start of the next chapter of our lives together. We did start looking around for somewhere new last year, and even came really close to buying somewhere, but it all fell through (in a very long and boring story which I’m not going to tell). Anyway, this is definitely something that has to happen in 2012.
Finish my time-lapse film:
I want to get stuck into some more video projects this year (and I already have some potential stuff lined up) but I really have to get this finished. I’m still excited by it, but I feel like it needs wrapping up fairly soon. I’m excited to show it to you!
Draw/create more artwork: This ties in with the Threadless thing, but I want to try and get back into creating more artwork and drawing more (especially with the Wacom). I’ve been doing a lot of concept sketches in my little Moleskin book for the shoots I’ve been doing and it’s been a really satisfying experience. I want to continue this and start producing some new stuff. If I can work some of my photography into it too, then so much the better.
Climb somewhere new (at 7a if possible!):
Another fairly straight forward one. I want to visit another new climbing spot somewhere in the world. We’ve done a lot of long haul trips over the past year or so, and I think that time and money will prevent us for doing anything huge in the forseeable (honeymoon trip to New Zealand aside), but there are plenty of places in Europe which I’ve still yet to visit. Albarracín and Magic Woods are two that spring to mind. I think a few long weekends are in order…
Read more:
This’ll be an ongoing one I’m sure, but I really want to try and read more. There’s a load of books in the flat that I’d like to try and get through and I got the über-tomb that is the Steve Jobs biography to crack on with. I think I’m going to compile a reading list too to a) keep me motivated and b) track my progress. It might be interesting to list them all on here this time next year.
So, I think that’s about it. Not as many new additions this year, but enough to keep me busy (especially with the “roll overs” as well). I think they are all achievable, but I guess only time will tell. If you read all of the above self-indulgent ramblings then thanks. I appreciate it. I’d be interested to know what other people have planned for 2012. Let me know in the comments! Let’s make it a good year!
Happy new year! I can’t quite believe it’s 2012 already. I hope everyone had a good festive period; I certainly did, and that’s what I want to talk about for my first post of the new year…
Around about July-ish last year, we found out that some friends of ours (Matt and Jen, who we also went to South Africa with as well as some other people we know from The Castle) were going to be spending their Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Hueco Tanks. As many of you may know, I’ve been to Hueco Tanks before, and make no secret of my love for the place. I’d been pining to go back after our excellent week spent there in November 2010 and when I heard about Matt and Jen’s plans to head out there, Snoo and I decided, on a whim if I’m honest, that we would join them.
Excited as I was however, I couldn’t help feel a slight apprehension about the trip as it approached. I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason it just felt slightly under planned which was making me feel slightly uneasy. Anyone who is familiar with Hueco Tanks will know that life isn’t made that easy for climbers there. For the last ten years or so, measures have been put in place in an effort to try and preserve the (relatively small) park from erosion and general wear-and-tear from visitors. There is only now a small section of the park (North Mountain) which open to the public to “self guide” and even that requires formal reservations (which can only be made three months in advance at the earliest) to be made in advance to ensure entry. The end of September came and went, and the batch of available North Mountain spots were snapped up, so when we finally got ourselves organised to try and book places we found they were all gone. Yikes. We knew that the Christmas period is peak season for Hueco, but we’d slightly under estimated quite how busy it was going to be. This wasn’t a total loss, as most of the problems we wanted to try were located in the “back country” (East Mountain, West Mountain and the East Spur) which are only accessible as part of a tour taken out by qualified guides. We did know a few guides who would potentially be able to take us out on tour, but judging by the fact that all of the North Mountain reservations had gone, surely guides would start to become a premium too?! We’d also be hearing conflicting reports about what the weather could be like over that period, which included potentially quite heavy snowfall(!) which would also stop any climbing. Granted this was entirely out of our control, but it was still another issue to add to the list. There was additional concern too that the Hueco Rock Ranch where we’ve stayed previously, and were planning to stay again, seemed to be having some managerial trouble and there was a worrying amount of radio silence from them during the summer months. Fortunately, having stayed there previously, we had some insider knowledge and we managed to get in touch with someone who reassured us that everything would be good to go by the time we arrived. The flights were paid for, so we were committed. There wasn’t really anything we could do other than head out there and hope. So, on Boxing day 2011 we set off on our (delayed) flight from London Heathrow with our fingers crossed that everything was going to be ok…
I think the fact that you’re reading this post at all goes to show that the trip was (eventually) a success, but American Airlines did their best to persuade us otherwise. Our flight out was delayed due to reasons unknown (although the presence of lots of armed police and sniffer dogs at the airport showed that it was something potentially pretty serious). So, we took off late on a plane which looked like it had seen better days (it didn’t even have seat back TV’s! AA are living in the dark ages!*). To the credit of the pilot, we landed in Dallas only ten minutes late, despite being nearly an hour late taking off. However, endless queues at every step of the way through Dallas Fort Worth airport meant we missed our connecting flight to El Paso by a (galling) ten minutes. Our suitcases however, had made the flight. I was very happy for them. My apprehensions about the trip were becoming worryingly real, and as I lay on the floor of Dallas Fort Worth’s Terminal A, staring at the ceiling with my tired and reddened eyes, I was genuinely wishing I was back in London.
Anyway, to cut (what is becoming) a long story short, we couldn’t get on any of the remaining flights to El Paso that day, and despite much stress, jetlag and seemingly going round in circles we managed to get a hotel for the night in Dallas with the promise of being on a flight the following morning. So, with no change of clothes or tolietries we grabbed a few fitful and surprisingly cold hours sleep before arriving back at the terminal at 7am to finish off our journey from hell. Thankfully, everything went well on our second try. By the following lunch time we were in El Paso, reunited with our bags and driving down Montana Avenue in the sunshine en route to Hueco Tanks.
Things improved exponentially from then on. The Rock Ranch was open for business and we were made very welcome by Mogli and Nikias who are/were running the show. Nikias (who is a also a guide, and knows Hueco Tanks inside out) also went out of his way to help us with our not-having-any-reservations problems by taking us out on tours for four of the five climbing days we were there (the fifth day we had some more good fortune fall into our laps and managed to fill a couple of spare spaces on another tour. Thanks, Cat!), despite having a huge amount of work to do organising things for the massive New Years Eve party etc. Unsurprisingly, the tours (which can have a maximum of ten customers on each one) were filled up very quickly by people in a similar situation to us. Subsequently, through this serendipitous piece of good fortune, we got to meet and climb with a huge variety of people we may not otherwise have spent any time with which made the trip even more fun. Below are a few choice highlights from our time spent in the park…
Not only did we get a load of climbing in, but we also saw the new year in in style! The Rock Ranch’s New Year’s Eve parties are pretty legendary, and it was really fun to finally attend one. The centre piece, as always was huge bonfire which is possible the hottest thing I’ve ever encountered (not to mention good fun to photograph)! I’m not usually a massive fan of huge, blow out NYE parties but this had a nice, relaxed atmosphere while still being exciting and good way to see in 2012…
Considering I didn’t really shoot *that* many photos, I’m really pleased with the shots I got. I did think about shooting some more video, but I think it would have been much harder to do on this trip, especially on the guided tours. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been the same without Ben…
Climbing wise, it wasn’t as successful as I’d have liked. The list of projects I created after the last trip remains largely unchanged and unticked. To be fair though, there was only a few of them that I actually got to try again (‘Dragonfly’, ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ and ‘New Religion’) for a various reasons. The fact that three of the nine are on North Mountain which we couldn’t get on was a pain. I did however tick ‘The Fin’ which I was really happy about and it was as good as I had hoped, and I also made progress on ‘Dragonfly’ (and tore myself to shreds on it in the process)! Nikias also took us right to the end of East Spur on one tour and showed us a load of problems that aren’t in the guidebook. This included a really fun V6 called ‘Tremors’ that I also managed to do! Even if I didn’t get up everything I wanted to, I still had a lot of fun working problems and trying new stuff. I’ll just have to go back again…
If you made it this far, well done you! Sorry for my ramblings, but it feels good to have documented my feelings on the trip, both good and bad (mainly good). Huge thanks to Snoo, Chrissy, Nikias, Tedi, Pete, Matt, Jen, Paul, Al, (Other) Matt, Ty, Mogli, Gustavo, Val, Cat, Tammy, Britney, Omar and everyone else we met, climbed with or just queued outside the park with during the week. It was definitely a new year to remember. I hope the rest of 2012 is as fun!
——- (*I do appreciate that this is an incredibly middle class, first world problem, but it was annoying none the less on a long haul flight.)
I’ve been very busy since the end of September, and our return from South Africa. Work has been coming in thick and fast which is amazing but somehow I still managed to sift my way through over 100GB of footage from our trip, and edit it down to something (hopefully) concise, watchable and entertaining. I mentioned previously that the project was close to completion and now I’m very happy to bring you the latest B2 Productions film: ‘The Rocklands Files’…
Ben and I got a lot of very useful feedback from our Hueco video earlier this year, and I wanted the film to be pacey and enjoyable to climbers and non-climbers alike like that one was. We were in South Africa for twice as long as we were in Hueco however, and over that time I amassed a huge amount of footage. I tried to be ruthless with what I put in and what I left out, and because there was so many amazing problems there, at times it got really difficult. I decided that, once the edit was getting over the 20 minute mark, something had to give. So, I decided the only way round this particular problem was to have an additional “extras” film with a selection of the problems which weren’t necessarily visually as strong as some of the others, or didn’t quite fit the narrative of the main film. This still weighed in at just shy of seven minutes, which goes to show that I made the right choice! Enjoy!…
I have to thank Ben for the loan of his Canon EOS 7D for this trip. It was a real shame that he couldn’t have come out with us, but the fact he was generous enough to let me take his camera to record the trip was much appreciated. Not having him around for the filming in South Africa really made me realise how much natural flair he has for this kind of thing. It’s useful for me to have someone else to bounce ideas and things off of and I think the two of us together make a really good team. I definitely missed his input in the edit too. I’m really happy with what I’ve produced but it would have been good to have had him there to give different ideas etc. I’m sure there will be plenty of other chances for us to work together on projects (at least, I certainly hope there will be)!
Also, thanks to Steve for letting me borrow his GoPro too. It did come in very handy for getting some interesting angles which would otherwise have been very tricky to get.
Despite the fact it took a long (relatively) long time, I think I’d managed to get the workflow a lot slicker than during the making of the Hueco video. To be fair, we spent a lot of time during the making of ‘One Week in Hueco’ figuring out Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects (not to mention the amount of time we spent waiting for things to render!). Ben and I have done a few video projects since then, and naturally the workings of the software and the general organisation of footage etc become more familiar. Obviously, I can see ways to still improve the workflow further, and I’m excited to get my teeth into something else next year (as well as finish my other project which is currently still in the works…).
It’s was becoming increasingly apparently that since returning home from South Africa, and subsequently working incredibly hard on the video, that my stills shooting hard taken a real back seat. Flickr and this blog especially were getting very neglected, and before too long I was starting to feel the urge to get shooting again. My portraiture project I’d been working on had also taken a back seat, and I was keen to get this going again. Among the list of potential victims models I had in mind was my friend Stacey. I’ve known Stacey for about four years now. She’s the wife of my good friend Phil (I even photographed their wedding) and I’ve been wanting to do a portrait session with her for a while. When I broached the subject with her she seemed really keen and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on both of our parts we finally managed to get a date nailed down to do it. I had a pretty cool concept idea for what I wanted to shoot with her, and I was really excited as the evening rolled around. Mother Nature however didn’t seem as keen as us though, and on the evening in question, we were treated to a steady downpour of rain. I was incredibly frustrated, but so excited to take some shots, we agreed to go with a contingency plan of doing some simpler portraits at Stacey’s flat. As it turned out, it was an incredibly successful evening! We did two or three different setups and I ended up with an abundance of shots which I was incredibly happy with (and which she was too!). Below are a few of my favourites from the evening…
Stacey was, unsurprisingly, a joy to work with. Very enthusiastic to try different things and even more helpfully for me, incredibly patient. I’m really looking forward to doing another shoot with her soon, and actually being able to try out my initial idea. It was probably a little foolish on my part to plan a fairly complexed outdoor shoot for the middle of December, but hey, why make life easy for yourself, eh?…
There wasn’t a huge amount of retouching to be done on these shots, but I after seeing a couple of other peoples before/after shots I thought it might be interesting to show a comparison of what I did do in Lightroom/Photoshop compared to a SOOC shot…
More to come soon. Doing these shoots seems to be as much an exercise in time/people management and organisation as anything else, but it’s all good fun!
I can’t quite believe that it’s taken me this long to write this post (or that the trip has been over for quite this long), but here, finally are some photos from our trip to Rocklands. It’s been all go since we’ve been back! I’ve been working like crazy which is really good, and in the down time from “actual work” I’ve been slaving away over a hot Adobe Premiere Pro file, working on a couple of different projects (one being the film of this trip, which is now finished, but there’ll be more on that another time…)
The trip to South Africa was fantastic. Simple as that. The whole thing was a bit of unknown quantity and a proper adventure. The flight was long, and relatively comfortable (for a long haul economy) and we were all in pretty good spirits when we arrived (mixed in with a large dose of jet-lagged-and-sleep-deprived-dilirium). I didn’t really know what to expect from Cape Town, but I was still quite surprised by what greeted us. The vast townships which lined the highway into the city were vast, dense and sprawling and definitely not what I was expecting to see. They were a real juxtaposition to the built up down town area, and large houses on the dotted the road up to the base of Table Mountain. We got our gear dropped off in the apartment we were staying in and headed straight out to get food and explore the city. Despite being reasonably central, and the apartment being really nice, the area was a little rough around the edges, but with plenty to look at. There’s definitely money there, but it’s not necessarily spread around that evenly…
We had four days in Cape Town to take in the sights before we were due to head up country, and we certainly packed a lot in! We walked up Table Mountain, visited Robben Island and the prison where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were held during Apartheid, went Whale watching in Hermanus, did some bouldering and wine tasting in Paarl (about 45 minutes drive east of Cape Town) and of course, saw a lot of Penguins.
After this intensive four days, we felt like we’d seen a lot of Cape Town and the surrounding area to get a pretty good feel for the place. More importantly though, the call of Rocklands was getting too strong to bear, and we were itching to get out on the rock! We swapped hire cars from our tiny little run around to something (marginally) bigger, and with some visibility impairing creativity we managed to get all our gear in! And so began our trip up country. The drive from Cape Town to Clanwilliam is around three and a half hours, and we were making really good progress for about the first two and half hours. Then the roadworks started! We seemed to be pretty unlucky with them too; often grinding to a halt for ten or twenty minutes at a time while a slow stream of cars filtered through from the other direction. It was agonising! The only saving grace during this stretch of the journey was that the weather had been slowly improving the further we travelled from the Cape Town coastline. The changeability and dense cloud cover of Table Bay was giving way to unbroken expanses of blue sky and sunshine, which lifted my spirits no end! The thought of arriving at Rocklands and not being able to climb due to rain was a worry I was desperately trying to suppress. Luckily, it was not an issue as we finally arrived at De Pakhuys (our home for the next week and a half) in the early afternoon, the conditions were perfect. We threw our stuff into our little apartment; freed shoes and chalk bags from whichever suitcase pocket they’d been relegated to during our time in Cape Town and headed straight out. Our first stop was the ‘Fields of Joy’ area, which is one of the closest to where we were staying, and situated on the vast stretch of land owned by De Pakhuys. We arrived at the bottom of the crag, and with the exception of a hasitly retreating Cobra(?!) we were the only people around. We hacked our way up the path and spent an incredible couple of hours running around, looking at problems and getting very excited. Eventually we settled down and actually got a few ascents under our belts, and looked forward to the ten or so days of amazing climbing we still had ahead of us!
We covered a lot of ground on the trip, and chose our areas well (not that you can go far wrong in Rocklands!) hitting Roadside, Roadcrew, Fields of Joy, all the Plateaus, Arch Valley, Riverside and Kliphaus Campground to name a few, and each area was full of great and interesting problems. Scott Noy’s guidebook was indispensable and with the exception of The Sassies, we found everything we were looking for thanks to it! I’m not going to give you a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the rest of the trip, much as I would like to, as it would take forever, but instead I’ll let the photos tell (some of) the story…
If you made it this far: thanks a lot and well done! As you can see both the landscape and climbing were incredible. I can’t stress this enough!
A few technical things: all the photos here were taken with a Canon EOS 7D and a Canon EF 18-55mm f/2.8 IS USM lens, both of which were very kindly lent to me by my partner in video crime, Ben. Although I shot a lot of stills while in South Africa, I was mainly capturing hours and hours worth of video footage, which I have recently finished editing and will post more about that soon. If you liked what you saw here, I reckon you’ll enjoy it! Stay tuned.
So, this is my first blog post for a while! It’s not that I’ve not got anything to write about, it’s more that I’ve not had the time to write about it. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do!
One of the biggest things that’s happened to me recently has been a trip to South Africa (an AMAZING trip, I might add). In the words of The Tragically Hip, it’s been a long time coming (we booked it in January), but it’s well worth the wait! The main focus of the trip was to climb (which we did a lot of) but we also did a fair amount of sight seeing too. Unsurprisingly, I was shooting photos and video like they were going out of fashion, and there’s already another B² Productions film well underway (which covers some of the sight seeing, but a hell of a lot of the climbing) which I’m excited about finishing. Eventually.
Anyway, before all the climbing started, we had a few days spent in and around Cape Town. That part of South Africa was really amazing for a variety of reasons, and not really what I was expecting (although, to be honest, I really didn’t have a clue what to expect). On our first full day in Cape Town, we headed out to try and see some wildlife. We drove to a town called Hermanus and managed to see some Whales, and on the way back to Cape Town, we happened to stumble on a sign for a Penguin colony. We had no idea what it would be like, but we thought as we were passing we’d give it a try. It turned out to be a good choice! There were hundreds of Penguins, and you could get right up close to them which was great. I shot a load of footage that day (and again when we visited another colony a few days later on Boulders Beach).
I decided at the time that I wanted to use some of my new footage in the full film that I was planning on making, but I ended up with so many clips which were so good (and cute) that it seemed a shame to waste it. The answer seemed obvious: they needed a short film all of their own. And here it is. If you like Penguins, I’m guessing you’ll probably enjoy it…
Ben very kindly lent me his Canon EOS 7D for the trip, and I got a hell of a lot of use out of it. This video, all my stills and the huge bulk of the Rocklands film that is in the making was all shot with the 7D and a Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM lens. I was really pleased with the quality of the results. Definitely an excellent camera if you’re interested in shooting video. There’s plenty more to say and show you about the trip, and will do so pretty soon!…
A couple of months ago I was invited up to The Castle to spend the day shooting the route setters (for those that don’t know, they the people that put up all the problems and routes in The Castle, which is a full time job, believe me!) as they reset the Mezz area. The Mezz reset is always a bit of a big deal at The Castle. It’s the biggest of all the bouldering areas, and often has the highest concentration of problems in the centre. Because of this, it also takes the longest to set. All the holds from the previous set have to be stripped, cleaned and dried before the new set can begin. When I got to there (around 11am) the walls were bare and ready to go.
The initial plan was to shoot mainly stills, but when I got there, I thought video might be the way to go. I had the seed of an idea in the back of my mind that it would be interesting to make a short film about the whole process. This would also give me a great opportunity to get some interesting time lapse shots (as the route setting process lends itself pretty well to time lapse footage). So, that’s what I did. I had my Canon EOS 40D pretty much on constantly shooting time lapses from various positions, and I used my 5D-MkII (with a selection of lenses) to shoot some interesting pick ups and details of the guys at work. The final video looked like this:
After a very long day of shooting (and then an evening of trying out the new set!) it took me quite a while to edit the video. It was an enjoyable and frustrating process in equal measure! I set up the project, and roughly cut the intro sequence together pretty quickly, but then totally hit a wall. The main issue was finding the right music track to hang the whole thing off. The music choice changes the feel, pace and style of the video, not to mention the way you actually cut the footage. I’d spend hours clicking around Spotify trying to find the right thing. I had quite a clear idea in my head about the kind of track I wanted; this can be a blessing or a curse. On one hand it’s really good to know how you want the video to look like, but at the same time nothing is ever “quite right”. Over the course of the next month or so, I’d open up the project, push some footage around, try a couple of different music tracks and then ultimately decide it didn’t work and ditch the whole thing. Then, finally, I found what I’d been looking for! Ben suggested to me that I try some Pretty Lights, and after a few minutes of working my way through the back catalogue, I finally found the track I’d been looking for! Having found this, the whole project shifted into high gear! I went from having hardly anything done to, a mere six hours later, having a rough cut of film pretty much done! It was quite a fiddly process, as much of the clips used are only a second or two long, but I think it’s got a pretty good pace to it, and gives a pretty decent overview of about fourteen hours worth of work squeezed down into four minutes.
The film seems to have been received well too, which is nice. The route setters seem to like it, and I’ve been getting lots of nice comments, randomly, from people at The Castle. At the time of writing, it’s had a little over 1,200 views on Vimeo (thanks in part to Brian from ClimbingNarc) and has been featured on the Castle’s website too.
I was really glad to get it finished. The footage was sat on my hard drive for ages, taunting me, but I knew that I couldn’t just delete it! I’m very proud of what I’ve produced, and I’m really inspired to get involved with more video projects with Ben again. Hopefully our imminent trip to South Africa will provide just what we need to make something cool! Not long now…
So, the year rolls on and so do the portraiture shoots! It’s been a lot of fun doing these and a huge learning curve. One thing I had been becoming a bit aware of was that all my shots where city based. I don’t think it was a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but when I got the opportunity to get out to country side to do some shooting, it seemed like a great idea…
Earlier in the year I spent a day round London with my friend Ruth. It was a really fun and productive day, and I came away with some really great shots. At the end of the day, Ruth invited me down to Brighton to do some more shooting. I was very keen for this, and when she later followed it up with an email about this incredible wood near Chicester that she’d heard about, the gears meshed and a plan started to formulate. A couple of weeks later I found myself on a train to Brighton. From there the plan was for us to drive out to a place called Kingley Vale. Ruth had emailed me me some info about the place, and I got really excited about the prospect of using these ancient, gnarled and twisted Yew trees as a backdrop. So that’s exactly what we did…
We spent a couple of hours there wandering around, admiring the incredible trees. In total we used about three or four different locations, with a selection of simple (usually one light) set ups. I wanted to keep the lighting quite simple and subtle wherever possible. Once again, it was another productive day with Ruth, and I got a good selection of shots I was very pleased with. We still didn’t get to do any shooting around Brighton though. Maybe next time…
So, after interviewing and filming Intraverse on the Friday, and then having to perform my quickest pack down and exit to the station ever, I was back up early on Saturday morning for a shoot with my friend Hanna. Despite being sickeningly young (it feels a bit odd to have friends born in the ’90′s) she’s written a crime novel, and she had been in touch with me earlier in the week to ask if I could take some shots of her for her agency catalogue. I was, naturally, very keen to be involved. It seemed that, after she gave me a rough idea of what she was after, that we were reading off the same page style wise. She wanted something gritty and film noir-esque to fit in with the vibe of her book, and I had the perfect location in mind straight away; “The Tunnel”. The Tunnel, for those that don’t know, is a designated graffiti area near Waterloo station. I’d walked through it a few months before with some friends, and I’d made a mental note to make use of it for shoot at some point, and this seemed like the perfect time.
We met at Waterloo station on a very wet Saturday, and made our way down there. Thankfully it’s totally undercover there, as it was chucking it down for most of the two hours we were there. It’s also really dark, which gave me good rein over the lighting. We did a few different setups. I had three Speedlight flashes with me which gave us a lot of scope to try different things. We eventually came away with nice mix of full, three quarter and close up shots in both colour and black and white (a few of which you can see here).
I think that we both came away from the session happy. She had a good selection of portraits for her agent (which apparently went down really well) and I had a willing model at my disposal while I geeked out on lighting setups. I’m easily pleased. I’ve also got some cool shots for my portraiture portfolio, which is starting to come together quite nicely now (more on that soon)…
No, that title isn’t a typo. Hopefully all will make sense shortly. Things have been a bit off-and-on for me, photography wise recently. I have a lot of other stuff going on which is requiring my attention, and I hadn’t really used my camera in anger for a while. That all changed a couple of weekends ago though! There’s a website which I occasionally write music reviews for called Call Upon The Author; I’ve mentioned it on here before. It’s run by my friend Matt, and recently he’s wanted to give the site a bit of an overhaul. There’re lots of live reviews and things on there, but he was very keen to get some interviews with bands and artists on the go. This sparked off some creative ideas in my brain, so I ran the prospect of perhaps doing some video interviews past him. He was very keen, so I set up an interview with Tunbridge Wells based band, and friends of mine Intraverse. As usual, I wanted to make it the best quality production I possibly could, so I roped in Ben (with whom I’ve made some very successful short films with before) to come along. Having a second camera/cameraman made such a huge difference and added an extra level of interest to the interview and (especially) the live show which we also filmed. We cut the whole thing together (interview footage interspliced with some live performances), added in some cool After Effects stuff, and had it rendered in just under a week, which I thought was pretty good for over 15 minutes worth of final footage. Check it out below and see what you think:
We also had a load of footage left over (mainly live stuff) which seemed like a shame to waste, so I cut together an extra track as well. We’ve probably got enough to do a couple more as well, and if/when I get time then I will do:
Other than a couple of wobbles and issues we had to deal with on the fly, the shooting of the footage was actually the easy part. Mikey and Tim did an excellent job in the interview making it both informative and funny. They were very patient with us too, but I thought considering this was the first one of these we’d done, we did a decent job.
The cutting and editing was (as always) a lot more work than expected. We’d learned a lot from our Hueco video; mainly in regards to being organised with footage and things. I spent some time getting everything organised within the project and setting up sequences etc. I also gave myself a crash course in synching the video footage with the external audio source which I recorded during the show. I don’t think I did it the most efficient way (i.e. by eye) but for the footage which we had it seemed to work. I basically shot two or three long clips on my 5D-MkII from the back of the venue while Ben was down the front with his Canon EOS 7D shooting close ups. He shot lots of shorter clips, so this ended up meaning that we had to synch up each individual clip separately. Below is a screen grab from one of our Premiere Pro sequences, which also shows my incredibly anal file structure (which I’m rather proud of):
As is expected, we still made a few mistakes and a few details were overlooked (mainly concerning frame rates; you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing with stills!), but I’m chalking them up to experience. I’m really getting to grips with Premiere Pro and After Effects now, and they feel a lot more natural and familiar than when I first opened them (especially After Effects) thinking “I know Photohshop; how different can it be?…” – That was quite a shock. I’m looking forward to doing more video projects. Hopefully we can get some decent climbing footage from South Africa and pull together another climbing short. Stay tuned!
