Phil Hawley Photography » Photography

Vancouver – Street Photography

Phil — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:11:30 +0000

As I mentioned in the previous post I went to Vancouver to see family, my mum hadn’t seen my Auntie for a few years so I said I would go out there with her. I did a fair bit of shooting with Models whilst there, and also as usual Pete and I went out to shoot in the street on a few occasions, a mixture of night photography (Long Exposure/Low ISO and Short exposure/High ISO), some daytime shooting from the hip, and some shooting interesting scenes of people.

So with the night photography, first of all it was raining which wasn’t ideal, but secondly it was late on Saturday night, so lots of ‘merry’ people around but there were a few level platforms I could rest the camera on for longer exposure shots, got some nice light trails when a bus pulled into the shot on a long exposure of the newly renovated, but historic Hotel Georgia:-

Occasionally though on these walks around the street you seem something really strange, this guy had been staring at the tinted glass for a while on the way down the street and was still there when we got to him:-

The next main walk around a few days later I had stuck the 50mm lens on the camera because I had been using it with a model earlier that day, ideally I would have liked to use a wider lens, but it worked ok for me, got some interesting results with a lot from the hip, but also some shots I couldn’t resist when I saw an opportunity. This shot is ne of my favourite shots of the year for me so far:-

Saw another interesting guy talking to cars:-

And this crossing place letting the guy know what it thought of his dress sense:-

I took a few shots that day and on the rainy night, have a look at the rest of them by clicking the thumbnails below to see the full image.

Weekend in Kazan

Phil — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:52:07 +0000

Kazan is the modern day capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan and lies about 450 miles to the east of Moscow where the Volga and Kazanka Rivers meet. Kazan was formed in the early 15th century but became the capital of the Tatar Khanate that emerged from the Golden Horde although it said the the Volga Bulgars also had a settlement on this site for a few hundred years by then. Ivan the terrible tried three times to conquer Kazan before he succeeded in 1552, at this point the native Tatars that survived the siege were encouraged to become Christian in order to maintain their positions, or thrust into obscurity and possibly even killed.

These days Kazan is mainly made up of a mixture of the Sunni Islam Tatar people, and the Orthodox Russian people with a mixture of Churches and Mosques scattered around the city. But it is in the Kazan Kremlin where you see both of these types of religious building brought together almost side by side with the relatively new Qolsharif Mosque and the Annunciation Cathedral.

The Qolsharif Mosque is a modern construction that was started in 1996 and was inaugurated in 2005 and is built on the site of the original Mosque that was destroyed when Ivan the terrible successfully invaded in 1552.

The Annunciation cathedral is worth a look around inside, and on this visit we had a guide who actually explained the make-up of a typical Russian Orthodox Church, how the icons are laid out, and why, it was fascinating.

Although the photo about was taken using a wide angled lens which distorts slightly, the Soyembika Tower to the left of the shot is actually one of the worlds few leaning towers. As our guide excitedly explained the legend surrounding the the construction of the tower and its purpose is as interesting, if not more so than the rest of the buildings in the Kremlin. The story goes that the last Queen of Tatarstan, Soyembika had refused to marry Ivan the Terrible on two occasions, hence the attempted invasions. On the third attempt Ivan the terrible succeeded in invading Kazan, and still the Queen was refusing to marry him, but to stop further bloodshed the queen relented on one condition, that he have a building built taller than any other in Kazan, and that he do it in 7 days. Ivan had the tower built adding a new section/storey every day until it was completed on the seventh day, Soyembika climbed to the top of the tower apparently to check he had succeeded then threw herself from the top of the tower to the ground below.

Kazan is a mix of old architecture that has been well preserved and renovated (probably for the *ahem* ‘Millenium celebrations’ in 2005), and some really run down buildings that are either in the process of being renovated, or being allowed to become derelict to the point of falling down. The people though are very nice, they were polite, courteous, and welcoming and seemingly didn’t care that you were obviously foreign (in some other places we have visited in Russia the people have sometimes been very inquisitive about why foreigners want to visit there).

On the whole it was well worth a visit, a weekend is probably enough time, but be sure to go to the other old areas of the city that have mosques scattered around, we only got a short look at this part of the city and would like to see more of it.

I am trying out using a gallery slideshow below instead of the usual gallery, if you can’t see it go here to see the gallery as a webpage.

Studio Nudes – Adriana

Phil — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:39:13 +0000

The final part of the session with Paul (Following on from the previous portrait post, and Lingerie Post) was the Nude section, half of which looked pretty uncomfortable for Adriana until Paul got her a cushion to put under her back (she was bent backwards over the arm of the chair).

This time we started with the high-key look utilising all the lights and with Adriana in a comfortable position:-

Adriana then changed position to the one that appeared really uncomfortable with the lighting changed once again to give her the appearance of a darker skin tone:-

Paul then gradually took the lights away, and changed some positions of the lights and after a few shots I took one of my favourite shots of the day, the background light spilling onto her face looks perefect to me.:-

Adriana once again changed position to sitting on the chair and gave another great shot that was more low key and Adriana was a little more comfortable but more demur:-

The light was pretty consistent after that so we tried a number of poses, and finally I really liked this one, and I left this one without converting to Black and White:-

The one consistent thing I did notice during the nude shots was Adriana’s expression was always very serious without looking uncomfortable which I liked.

The full gallery of the images is below, just click on the thumbnails to see the full, uncropped images:-

Studio Portraits – Adriana – Lingerie

Phil — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:03:55 +0000

Continuing from the previous post the session with Paul and Adriana moved on to Lingerie shots of Adriana following a similar pattern of experimentation with the light, this time with a window blind as the background.

The lighting varied from a single light with no fill light like this black and white image:-

Paul encouraged me to try shooting from different heights to see the effect, in the shot above I was kneeling down on the floor looking up at Adriana, then for a couple of the shots I got even closer to the floor. Showing more of her legs from very low down as in the shot below is very flattering and makes Adriana’s legs look longer:-

From here Adriana sat on the chair and we began to change the lighting to get some more interesting looking shots, again I got a great low-key shot with just the background brolly moved slightly so that it was also spilling some light to camera left onto Adriana:-

We moved along taking more shots, including some with gels on a light behind the blind until we moved on to Adriana using the chair as a prop rather than sitting on it. Out of these shots I really like the one below, I like the way your eye draws in from the bottom left up the two arms to the face:-

Again all the shots, good or bad, good or bad lighting are in the gallery below, click on the thumbnails to show the full image.

Studio Portraits – Adriana – Headshots

Phil — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:15:38 +0000

Last week I went to Paul’s Studio in Reading, UK to get some one-to-one lighting tuition with Paul for around 3 hours. Of all the tuition/workshops I have taken previously this was the most intense but also the most enjoyable. The session was split into three parts, head and torso, Lingerie, and Nude. This first post is concerned with head and torso shots.

On first impressions Paul was an amiable guy with a very personable manner, this first impression did not change as the session progressed as he answered any questions I had and helped by directing the model where necessary. The session started out with a brief chat about the lighting we would be using, then we got down to the headshots of Adriana, adding and taking away lights to show the effect each light had on the final image. I had initially thought I was purely interested in contrasty low-key images like this:-

This however would have been impossible without building up an understanding of how to control the light and the effects that, adding, removing, tweaking the lights. I found the practical demonstration of using white or grey backgrounds to achieve many shades from pure white to almost black to be very useful, although I was aware you could do this, showing how, and explaining why was great for me.

It was difficult for me to pick out my ‘favourite’ portrait shots, I like the contrasts in the image above, the fresh high key images like this:-

We did a lot of moving the lights around and changing the modifiers along with the use of gels on the background like this:-

I found the range of looks you can achieve with the lighting in the studio to be fascinating and has lead me to want to experiment with my own studio lighting more.

Here are the all of the shots from the session that I liked, some are much better composed than others, but as this was a tuition session I have posted the full range of shots I took:-