Jewellery shots

We had a few lovely pieces of jewellery in the studio so I played around with them for a change !
These were made by students at the Crafts Council of Ireland's Jewellery and Goldsmithing Course (they are  are currently -as of Feb 2013- on sale at Designyard in Dublin and at Designwork Studio in Cork I am told)

www.sylviephotography.com

nearly done...the guitar-pedal-amp video ready !

Huurraaayyyy we're seeing the end of the editing on FX Amps Randy Plex video ! I think I shot it over a month ago, had time to shoot another project in the meantime, and god knows how many photoshoots since then too... I guess it's one of those projects that are somehow a bit harder to come to life...
Not that we weren't super enthusiastic about the project, FX Amps make really really nice handmade projects, a lovely attention to detail (seemingly the way it is wired inside is pretty close to being called a Sistine Chapel of amplifications ! it's a neat and pretty work. 

I do believe if something doesn't quite work straight away, it's not meant to work, but in this case, the potential was there, the footage was nice, I just struggled to dedicate the necessary time for  the editing, so many tiny pieces of jigsaw to put together the editing was quite daunting, while it was also tricky to match the audio with the visual and preserve the continuity since none of the songs were rehearsed, that was just jamming. Pascal, my guitar maniac boyfriend, isn't 200% happy with the audio, whether it's the recording of it or the settings on his amp, but we decided to let it go and do a better job on the audio when we shoot the next product we expect from FX Amps !

Ok, there's also a "defect" we spotted on the amp which is fixed now so we ll have to reshoot one small pan...and I'm sure in the process I ll change my mind again on the look of the video...

but here's the latest version of the FX Amps Randy Plex video for now ! Comments most welcomed :-D

On another note I'm working on the final touches for a fantastic potter and introduced myself to Adobe Audition to polish the audio, wow...that's a serious piece of software for audio enhancement. And quite intuitive to play with (unlike, say, After effects & many video editing softwares which require a bit of research before first use). I'm glad I had the perfect project to get to use Audition. Hopefully this video will see the daylight in a couple of weeks or so.

www.sylviephotography.com

The amazing things you get when the distraction is big enough...

I love going through new projects in Behance, it is such a source of inspiration and it challenges me to be more productive.
This project caught my eyes straight away, the photographer is Tadao Cern

It reminds me of the brilliant pictures (which I can't find online anymore ) that a friend of mine had taken during the first Twestival in Dublin back in 2009. The series was called "Exploded Potatoes" and consisted in snapshots of the Tweetters as they did their best to pretend a potato was about to explode out of their faces. Shot with a flashgun firing straight at their faces (including mine, that's how we met !) the effect was strangely dramatic and hillarious. 

Funny how you can get people to be more than themselves when you offer them enough distraction !

www.sylviephotography.com

Fuji Pro X 1 with 35mm 1.4 review : video performance

Trevor recently acquired the Fuji new rangefinder, Pro X1 with a 35mm lens, which I was briefly thinking of getting for myself before realising it's actual too bulky as a hangbag camera and not reliable performance-wise as a back-up camera for my own taste and budget.

Lovely camera though, nice shape and some great features like a built in digital spirit level, the info display in the viewfinder and a stunning auto focus while in Stills function that changes the focus without you even pressing the shutter half way...I was just holding it and moving it around and it adjusted the focus all along.
I'm sure there's lots of reviews about its stills performance, along with details about the problems that Adobe image softwares have at the moment in dealing with its RAW files, so Id like to highlight a major problemo for those considering this camera as a carry-around combo photo/video camera...
White balance, colour rendering, auto exposure are really nice, nicer than the Fuji X10 that we've used so far as a blog camera, nicer than my G11 which doesn't perform well in tricky light conditions...BUT sweet mother of god, what's going on with its focus in the video function? When set as AF, it's noisy  and constantly searching for focus (and blurrying the scene for a sec in the meantime)...not very convincingly succeeding in keeping the focus. We were in a room with 2 ceiling lights and 3 modeling lights from our studio lights so quite low light conditions but regular conditions if you're shooting at home, really.
Too annoyed by having my scenes ruined by intermittent focus, I set it up as MF, which means you turn the focus ring on the front of the lens. You'd think this would the most straight forward option but because it's an electronic focus ring, it seems like there were lots of small increments to go through, meaning instead of turning the ring with a single wrist movement, I had to keep turning for a while...not great if you're handholding or moving around different focus planes...
Here's the examples I'm referring to.

www.sylviephotography.com

Latest shoot with Style Skin

We've been busy and inspired at the Style Skin house !

Photographers' 1st and 2nd worst nightmare : losing picture archives and all gear during a robbery !

Back in 2010, fellow enthusiastic photographer Emanuele Siracusa was planning fabulous world trip and also thought photography could well be a new career for him, I saw he had a great potential, especially with portraits. It turned out his (and his wife's Romana) travel blog

  grew and grew into popular website, full of humanity, beauty, inspiration and travel tips, along with interesting landscapes and portraits of local people.

The photography they took while travelling had brought a lot of attention beyond their blog and once back home, it seemed like Emanuele's desire to pursue photography more professionally could be very realistic. I just learnt that they got robbed, thoroughly robbed, hard drives, cameras, flashguns...and this gives me shivers because while it's easy to back pictures up, it's equally easy for any of us to forget or just to save the jpegs from them.  As inspiring as they always are, they launched a great campaign to raise the funds to get replacements for the gear : donate or buy a print from them, and help them at the same time, that's a very fair deal.I personally bought this one but check out  all you can do for them here  and check updates on their campaigns here. Thank you !