Published Work – Gatebil Magazine

2016 has been a year of polar opposites, work wise I have been incredibly busy, photographically I have been very quiet. I have shot much less but what I have shot has gone much further. Because I have been shooting for clients and not myself a lot of my work has remained on hard drives until they have been published. In July I attended an event called GATEBIL at Rudskogen Motorsenter in Norway. If that name rings a bell, it is because I went last year which you can see here. This is hands down my favourite motorsport event I have ever had the pleasure of attending and this year I got the extreme honour of shooting for their own magazine, predictably called GATEBIL MAGAZINE. I was tasked to shoot several feature cars, one of which is this super rare, Steatlh B7 which is one of one! What I didn’t know until this month was that I made the front cover. And I don’t mean I got a small picture on the front cover…I GOT THE MAIN IMAGE! Thanks guys! Anyway, here is a few images that didn’t make the cut. Thanks to Jan Øivind Ruud and Team RR for being so helpful during the shoot and thanks to Kaj Alver for getting me the gig.

SHOOTINGDAVE

Shooting Dave – behind the scenes

I am working on a little series at the moment to try and create a character from my screen name “Shooting Dave”. The idea is that this character will look like an assassin or a hitman or a spy of some sort. So far I had only created one, now I have two. Below is the first one I did, as if it had been a shoot out. Note the details like the empty film cartridges on the floor instead of bullet casings. And yes that is both me and me in the scene.

The narrative behind this one is that you are the viewer, or the subject being photographed. This will be your perspective. I, Shooting Dave am pointing my camera (gun) at you. Don’t worry, it ain’t that sinister, a long with the word play on Shooting Dave, I also have a camera that resembles a gun, a Zenit Photosniper, I have added a picture below to show you what it looks like.

Pretty cool huh?! Right I had the idea for this, I just needed to get the lighting to where I wanted it, it isn’t just a case of setting up the lights and BOOM – HEADSHOT. I needed to do a little bit of exploration so the following images are me trying out the lights in different positions.

First up the key light was off to the left, I admit, I did like the light on hand arm but I was unhappy with the light on the subject. You can also see that I would need to tweak the pose as to not cover up too much of my face.

I then moved the light to the right of the camera which gave more light to the camera/gun and the subject. Better but a little flat. Also the background was just too open for my liking.

I then boomed the light keeping the light stand in the same position, this put the light pretty much level with me as well as adding more shadow across the face. The light was also subtly lighting the camera/gun too. However the barrel of the gun wasn’t that well described so I knew I needed some fill.

Direct light would have been too harsh for the scene so I put a flash gun on the floor and bounced it off of a white wall to give some reflected lighting to the camera, it works quite well here.

For this one, I was playing with the power of the fill flash, I turned it down to 1/64th but thought it was too subtle.

Final. I upped the power on the fill flash and the tilted the key light a little more towards me help smooth off some the shadows. And that is it. There is a lighting diagram below to help illustrate what was done as well as the settings used.

Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t shoot wide open for this and I did that for a number of reasons. First of all, this is a self portrait, focusing was pretty hard so to give myself a better chance of getting a usable shot, I stopped down to f/2.8 to get more depth of field. Also if I had shot wide open, I would have been too far out of focus and any expression would have been a blurry mess of bokeh. I like to think that the depth of field allows for nice separation of the gun to subject but also keeping some of the expression and emotion there.

If you like this I will show you more behind the scenes in the future.

SHOOTINGDAVE

 

Halloween – behind the scenes

How’s it going guys, did you have a good Halloween? Have fun during Guy Fawkes night? Well as usual on Halloween, Amy and I put on a little photoshoot to celebrate old hallow’s eve. I even bought a smoke machine for the occasion. Previously I had used smoke pellets and they work great but they just burn a little too hot which always makes me a little nervous and scorching the ground or setting fire to a model.

This year we headed down to my parent’s house and roped my sister into joining. Amy and Clare went for a gothic witch look where as I bought some props to look like Jason from Friday 13th. Here are Clare and Amy’s finest efforts:

And there here is some of me:

Clearly this is a strobist (off camera lighting) setup so for each photo I also included a lighting diagram along with the camera settings to help you if you wanted to create something like this at home.

SHOOTINGDAVE

 

National Burger Day

National Burger Day, lets think about that for a second shall we. A whole day set aside to celebrate burgers? Gluttony or genius? Whatever your stance, this isn’t technically a national holiday (yet), it is however already up there in terms of big celebrations for me, rubbing shoulders with Halloween, Birthday’s & Christmas.

I have already expressed my praise for this event when Phil and I visited last year so there was every reason to expect much of the same from this year’s celebrations. However, this year got off to a much better start with my work deciding to jump on the burger van too. Big up’s go to City Pantry for hooking us up burgers from the lovely Patty & Bun, no joke, I ate two at lunch! It was than a furious digesting session for the next 4 hours until it was time to finish work and head of to Street Feast in Dalston Yard, East London. At the end of the evening, I managed to nom my way through a rather respectable 5 sliders. Rather talk about the burger any more, I will just get on with listing them in order of recommendation and the shoving a load of photos in your face to make you feel peckish and jealous.

Top 5 are;

1: Smokestack
2: Lucky Chip
3: Hotbox
4: Slider Bar
5: Nanban

Now in case you haven’t got the foggiest what that lot means, the menu is below.

SHOOTINGDAVE

Gatebil – favourites.

Sun, trees, tarmac, rocks, undulating terrain – add in the whiff of high octane fumes and the shrill sounds of a highly blown in-line 6 engine and you might be able to get close to picturing Gatebil.

Previously I had shown you what the human element of Gatebil was like, this time I want to show you the real reason people make this pilgrimage from all over the Globe to just south of Oslo Rygge. It’s for the cars, they are the stars of the show, exploiting every inch of real estate on track, pulverising tyres into carcinogenic smoke which washes lawlessly across the elevation changes in the Rudskogen Motorsenter.

To the uninitiated the internet hype and videos from Gatebil fill you with you both excitement and frustration, yet again you missed another event but you have just begun planning your trip across Europe for the next event. Well for the last few years I was in that camp, I was the uninitiated. That was until July this year when I made the trip with fellow photographer Bill. Both Gatebil virgins, both had had enough of watching videos and hearing stories, it was our time to go and see what the fuss was about. Writing these posts makes me feel reflective, I felt like I didn’t get what I wanted out of Gatebil, I felt like I failed in my duties as a photographer to effectively convey they emotions and atmosphere of the event, But a few months down the line, looking back through what I captured, I did ok, I did captured enough to spark memories and emotion looking through these photos, to me as a pretolhead, this is what I get excited about. The test will be, whether you like them. Here are my favourites from the track action. Enjoy.

SHOOTINGDAVE