I live in Christchurch, New Zealand and yesterday morning I was jolted awake at 4:35 am by the biggest earthquake to hit this area in the last 80 years. The quake measured a sizeable 7.1 in magnitude – that’s comparable to the 1989 quake in California that famously interrupted a World Series baseball game and collapsed a stretch of two-tier highway as well as the recent devastating quake in Haiti.

I have never experienced anything like it in my life. And that includes my favourite carnival ride ‘The Zipper‘.

The quake rocked and rolled for 40 seconds, during which time I jumped out of bed and ran for the door frame and braced myself there in the pitch dark while the room pitched, rolled and slammed and I could hear things in the house crashing and banging and smashing.

Afterwards I was ecstatic to discover that my photography gear had miraculously stayed on its shelf in my office, with the single exception of my Canon 70-200 f2.8, which had taken a nose-dive from the shelf (about head height) onto the hardwood floor. Uh-oh.  It had its lens hood reverse-mounted and the hood had a major crack in it, but the actual lens looks fine. No discernable damage and the Autofocus and IS both seem to be in working order. I’ll have to do some more thorough testing and it may need to be sent to Canon for calibration, but it seems that the lens hood acted as a sort of crash helmet and took the force of the fall. PHEW!

Luckily our house seems to have come through pretty much unscathed. We had our power restored by the afternoon and have running water (although we have to boil it before using due to potential groundwater contamination).

After doing some initial cleanup at home I grabbed my camera and went out for a walk with my partner Brence Coghill to see what we could see, just within a few kilometres of our house. There’s definitely been some major damage to particular buildings. Christchurch has a lot of lovely brick heritage buildings and many of them have suffered greatly. It’s going to be quite a while before the city gets back to normal.

Here’s some initial video from the local news:

Amazingly, so far there have been NO reports of any fatalities, and only a handful of people seriously injured. This is partly due to the timing of the quake, striking when everyone was (relatively) safe in bed, and also due to New Zealand’s strict building code which requires lots of earthquake-proofing measures. Many old buildings here have been retroactively earthquake-strengthened, but unfortunately not all.

Here are some quick pictures of the Christchurch earthquake damage I took yesterday, shortly after the quake hit.

How my kitchen looked at 4:36am after the quake. You can’t see it but there’s smashed glass scattered around the floor as well. Urgh!

Lots of brick chimneys went flying

It’s a bit hard to tell, but this building has actually sunk down into the street as well as have its walls fall off

My partner Brence Coghill also posted some photos on his blog – you can check them out here.

My friend Emma Robertson is a fabulous hair and makeup artist who also does a bit of modelling, and I’d been meaning to tee up a photoshoot with her for ages. I finally managed to get organised to tee something up, and I did a shoot with her a couple days ago.

I asked Emma to do some outlandish glamour/theatrical makeup. I’d seen her in a performance wearing rhinestone jewels on her hips and I specifically wanted the bejewelled lips with some accompanying colourful eye makeup in a glam/jazz/cabaret/theatrical style. I knew I was going to be shooting mostly against a blue background so I asked Emma to keep the makeup colours in the warm tones, for contrast.

Why the blue background? That’s a good question. Originally I was just going to shoot against black but I came across this Karl Giant image online and was totally inspired by the background colour (BTW the image is of cabaret singer Meow Meow, who I’ve seen live before and if you haven’t seen her perform, well, I highly recommend it).

The rhinestones, by the way, are actually sold in cheap dollar stores as ‘cellphone jewels’ – you are supposed to stick them on your cellphone to bling it up, but they they make fab makeup accessories.

We ended up with a sort of 1970s disco glam look, which I was totally digging.

The above photos (apart from the first one) were done with a gridded spot and softbox on the model (both high and directly behind the photographer). A separate gridded spot on the background gave the blue vignette. Two bare speedlights positioned behind the model at 45 degree angles acted as hair lights and provided rim lighting.

Next we changed up the lighting setup. One of my all-time favourite photographers is George Hurrell. The man was a complete lighting genius. His work completely blows my mind. I think if I practice studio lighting every day for the rest of my life I might be lucky to get half as good as Hurrell was. Just do a Google Image search on his name if you are not familiar with his work. It’s achingly beautiful.

Anyway – I wasn’t out to try to recreate a Hurrell portrait, but I just wanted to use some of my favourite pics of his (like this one of actress Loretta Young) as inspiration to try some harsher top-lighting. A studio strobe mounted on a boom provided a direct top light. Bare and/or gridded was a bit harsh, but with a small umbrella I managed to get the sort of illumination I was after. I put Emma in a floor lenth faux-fur trimmed velvet ‘Cruella De Ville’ style coat I own.

I love the mix of the classic lighting with Emma’s crazy-weird makeup. I really like the photo below on the right – she looks like a spooky broken-down doll.

Finally, Emma asked if we could do some photos of her in a corset she had brought with her. She said she hardly gets a chance to wear it anywhere and thought it would be fun to do some pictures. For these photos I turned off the background light and Emma was lit with 2 umbrellas either side (one slightly stronger than the other), plus a gridded spot set up low to illuminate just the corset, and a softbox up high and feathered so it was just lighting her face.

I had a ton of fun shooting the photos and it also gave me a chance to play around with the new Bowens lights I’ve got, courtesy of Diederik over at Lightworx. As always I was ably assisted by my amazing lighting assistant Brence Coghill, who did a stellar job of wrangling the lights and helping me pretend I was channelling George Hurrell

Accor Hotels is the world’s largest hotel and tourism group. In New Zealand they own a number of major hotel chains including Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure and Ibis.

I was told it’s generally quite difficult to organise headshots for the various managers because their schedules were so busy. Therefore the one-hour conference lunch break presented an opportunity to photograph them while they were all in one place rather than scattered around the country.

I turned up the next day at the Novotel Hotel in Cathedral Square (which, incidentally, is a very nice hotel!) to set up. I was able to use a dedicated boardroom with lots of space and nice plain textured white wallpaper as a built-in background. The subjects would sit far enough forwards of the wall to render the wallpaper texture moot, as it would not be within the range of focus.

I was hugely impressed with the Accor staff and how willing they were to have their photos taken, and the fun they had while doing it. I had a constant line of people waiting, often joking with each other and trying to crack up whoever happened to be in front of the camera.

I photographed 30 people, covering everybody needed a headshot as well as doing a few impromptu group shots. I always take multiple shots for each person and choose the best one in post to make sure everybody gets a good picture.

A lot of other headshot photographers will simply deliver the images straight out of camera or just with a bit of sharpening added, but my standard post-production process includes a lot more subtle tweaking and polishing to get a really professional image, including: adjusting skin tones, localized adjustment of exposure and exposure ratios across the image, hotspot  and ‘shine’ taming, plus tweaks to sharpness, saturation and local contrast enhancement in addition to my standard portraiture techniques of blemish removal, shadow reduction and skin smoothing.

Note that I didn’t light the background as I prefer to allow ‘white’ backgrounds to record as light grey (unless specifically requested otherwise). Pure white backgrounds look extremely clinical and can have a ‘stock’ (i.e. fake) feel. They also become problematic when used on websites with a white background as the whites blend together and the image becomes a floating dismembered head unless the image is given a border.

Here’s a selection of some of images created:

My assistant, collaborator and general partner-in-crime Brence Coghill came to assist with the shoot and ended up filming a lot of behind-the-scenes footage (on a Canon IXUS point-and-shoot, for those of you playing at home).

Brence has edited together a fantastic little video giving a glimpse into what goes into producing the finished product, using video, stop-motion footage and the final finished images.

It’s only 6 minutes long and has quite a groovy yee-hah soundtrack (thanks to danosongs.com), so grab a cup of coffee and have a look.

Sharon Blance: Behind the Scenes – Dance Photography from Sharon Blance Image Workshop on Vimeo.

Portraiture is my favourite type of photography, but my absolute favourite-est types of portraits are promotional shots for performers – dancers, acrobats, circus folk – general ‘show biz’ kind of stuff.

I had the great fortune to do a hugely fun dance shoot recently with Jess – she works as an event organiser but her alto ego is a crazy hepcat swing dancer, teacher and performer.

Jess wanted professional promotional images of herself in a dance context to use for a variety of promo, advertising and dance-related applications. Because swing is generally a partnered dance, she asked her dance partner Pete to come in on the shoot. I set up a white seamless environment and some studio lights and then had Jess and Pete do their thing.

Shooting these kinds of promo shots means treading a fine line between ‘dancing’ and ‘posing’ – if you have someone just ‘dance’ in front of the camera, often it’s hard to get a solid, well composed shot and things can end up looking quite random. On the other hand, if you try to do all the shots in a static, posed sort of way they lack energy.

Here’s the thing - dance is a 4-dimensional art form because a dancer moves through both space AND time. What looks amazing in a performance often looks less impressive in a still shot, because certain ‘moves’ look great in terms of their shape and trajectory through time, which, of course, isn’t captured in a still photo.

A balance can be struck by shooting getting the dancer(s) to do a certain move a few times while shooting, then review the image and evaluate it for composition and visual impact. Often little details like hand and arm position, angles of shoulders, legs, etc. can be improved to make the photo cleaner and have more energy and pizazz.

For a lot of the shots we’d shoot one or two, then I’d review the images with Jess and Pete so they could see the result and understand what changes needed to be made physically in order to improve the still image – e.g. “next time kick your leg a little higher” or “sweep your arm away a little more, palm facing camera” etc. Honing in on little details – including facial expressions – makes a HUGE difference to the end result.

In the end we achieved a nice range of photos – some more ‘posed’ promo shots, others more dynamic. Because the shots were to promote Jess specifically, in a number of them I used particular angles to give Jess more prominence in the images, while still retaining the spirit of the dance partnership.  Sometimes I’d ask Pete to look at Jess while Jess looked at camera - emphasizing Jess as the main ‘focal point’ for the viewer.

In the above picture it was about nailing little details like having Jess’s heels lifted off the floor and getting Pete’s right hand position exactly right to add a dynamic energy to the image. And I couldn’t have asked for better facial expressions from either of them!

You can see that Jess has a certain exurberance and enthusiasm that comes across – and that’s just what she’s like in person.

Here are the rest of the finished shots, clearcut to white but retaining some natural shadows for depth. Overall it’s a clean, highly professional look – great for websites, promo flyers, etc.

This just in – now you can watch a cool behind-the-scenes video of the actual photo shoot. Grap a coffee and have a look.

You see, nothing is more annoying to my friend (and thousands of others who peruse property ads) than amateur photos that show only one corner of the room and give no sense of the scale or dynamics of the property.

“Oh yes,” the agent gushed “We’re renowned for our photography, and we’ve got a wide-angle lens.”

Well, not only did they not have a wide angle lens, but the photographs they took did not show off the property very well at all, generally making it seem much smaller than it actually is.  I should know, because I’ve spent many an evening around there drinking wine and playing Settlers of Catan.

Here’s a lesson I would like everyone to learn: Real Estate Agents are Not Photographers – no matter what they tell you.

Good real estate photography isn’t about trying to make rooms look bigger than they really are, but about showing how the areas and laid out and what features they contain. For example, my friend’s bedroom has two separate built-in wardrobes, room for a chest of drawers and laundry hamper, a huge bay window overlooking the front garden, and access to an adjoining sunroom.

And here’s the photo the real estate agent took to show off the bedroom and all its features:

It looks tiny, like you can only fit a bed in and nothing else, and it also looks like there’s only one wardrobe. Obviously whoever took the photos was limited by the angle of view and could only fit in a small part of the room. But even so, they didn’t bother to take multiple images to at least show off the rest of the room.

So, my friend asked if I could photograph the house so she could make a new ad. Not only did I use a wide-angle lens to show off the rooms (the Canon 17-40mm f4 from the pro L series), I used some simple bounce flash (with the 580 EX II) to ensure the rooms were well illuminated. A bit of perspective correction and sharpening was added in post, and the photos were correctly resized for web to preserve their sharpness and ‘snap’.

Here are the photos I created of the bedroom:

Using the new snazzier house photos, my friend was able to put together a MUCH more attractive ad for her rental property, and ran it on the same real estate website as the original agent’s ad. Interestingly, the agent’s ad had already been up for a week and they’d had nobody interested in looking at the house. My friend put up her own ad with the new photos one day after lunch and within a few hours she had 3 different people booked in to view it that evening.

If you own a property and are looking to rent it or sell it, either hire a professional photographer (and not your wedding photographer, but one that specialises in interiors!) – OR be adamant that your agent uses a professional photographer. If you think the agent’s photos aren’t up to scratch, tell them so and organise a photographer yourself.

Here’s the photos of my friend’s property – both the original agent photos and the new ones I created. Which house looks more enticing? (all photos are shown at the actual size they appeared online. I resized my images to exactly fit the image frame size of the website on which the ad was to appear)

Exterior and front yard:

Agent photos

Photographer Photos:

Lounge

Agent photo

Photographer photo

Dining area

Agent photo

Photographer photos

Kitchen

Agent photo

Photographer photo

Second bedroom

Agent photo

Photographer photos

Bathroom

Agent photos

Photographer photos:

On Friday night my phone rang. My friend multi-talented friend Alister (physiotherapist by day, sound engineer by night) wanted to know if I could come to Al’s Bar that night to photograph a concert by a New Zealand Led Zeppelin tribute band, aptly named “NZeppelin“.  Now, I don’t think of myself as a Zeppelin fan – for no particular reason other than I haven’t been exposed to much of their music – but I jumped at the chance.

My partner Brence Coghill recently bought a Canon 5D MkII and I wanted put its high-ISO capabilities to the test and photographing a rock band at Al’s Bar would be the perfect proving ground. In fact, photographing a gig like this is an absolutely excellent way to put all of your photographic skills to the test, because the conditions are fairly demanding, photographically:

1. It’s darker than the Batcave in Al’s Bar – ISO capabilities are generally maxed out in order to get any kind of breathing room for shutter speed and aperture

2. Did I mention how dark it is? I was shooting pretty much wide open on whatever lens I had on, which varied from f2.8 to f1.4 – therefore the ability to focus accurately on the subject would be key.

3. Nothing stays still. Rockers move around on stage. A lot. Unpredicably. Being able to get focus in the right place with a wide-open aperture can be less than straightforward. Plus, given that your subjects are all moving targets, having a fast enough shutter speed to prevent every picture being a mess of motion blur is no picnic. Did I mention how dark it was? I was lucky enough to push up to 1/250th in a few cases, but often my shutter was slower than that.

4. Totally Erratic Lighting. Even if you squeeze enough juice out of your ISO to get a vaguely usable shutter speed and aperture, and even if you mange to get focus in just the right spot, and even if you hit the shutter at the exact right time to capture an awesome expressive moment, you are still at the whim of Al’s Magic Light Show. You see, Al himself works the stage lights. Which essentially consists of Al standing behind the master control panel, totally rocking out on the spot and mashing the control buttons like a monkey on a typewriter. Essentially the light show is like a mood ring depicting just how rocked up Al is feeling at that given moment. So you could have all your photographic elements line up beautifully like a lunar eclipse but at the decisive moment Al might hit the ‘red’ light button and your photo looks like an over-saturated nuclear explosion happened on stage.

So here are some takeaway tips that I learned pretty darn quickly:

1. Shoot on manual because if the lights are flashing all over the place like an epileptic’s nightmare then your auto-exposure ain’t gonna be worth jack.

2. Max everything out. I spent most of my time on ISO6400, dipping down as far as 3200 now and then when Al was more in a ‘bright light’ mood. Shoot wide open. For me it was about maxing out every parameter in order to get as fast a shutter speed as possible. Grain/noise is preferable to unwanted motion blur, IMO.

3. Line up the shot, then: shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot. Hopefully one of the frames will have decent lighting. Expect a lot of dark frames or all-red blown-out burn-victim frames if Al is feeling particularly moody.

4. You will have Very Few Angles to work with. I shot some stuff from the near corner of the stage and then spent a set on stage behind the band. But the stage was so crowded with gear and general band stuff that my working position was pretty fixed and I just could not get some of the angles I wanted. Sometimes the best you can do is shoot loose knowing you’ll crop out the junk later. Here again, the awesome resolution of the 5D MkII is a godsend. I also happened to be right next to the smoke machine and spent a good deal of time Lost in the Fog. C’est la vie.

5. Get some shots including the crowd. A performance is all about connecting with an audience, so try to incorporate the audience into some of the shots. Not an easy feat – the band may be badly lit but the crowd isn’t lit at all.

6. Don’t forget to rock out and have fun!  As it turns out, I love Led Zeppelin.

Here’s my faves from the night:

1. We have a lot of photos, usually with one or the other of us in them, but

2. We don’t have many nice pictures with BOTH of us in them, because one of us is usually behind the camera.

To remedy this dire situation we headed out last weekend to a favourite alleyway in Christchurch armed with a 5D and a couple of lenses plus a lightstand, flash, brolley and remote trigger. Setting up the camera on a tripod and using the self-timer function (which necessitated a lot of running back and forth), we goofed around taking photos of ourselves.

Lots of them looked pretty random, as we couldn’t ‘see’ what we were doing. We’d take a few pictures and then review them on the back of the camera and realise the angles all looked terrible or we’d done weird facial expressions. “What am I doing with my ARMS?” “Why can’t I smile like a NORMAL PERSON?”

But by doing shoot-a-few-and-review we manged to hone in on some ones that worked. We split the winners and each worked up a batch in Photoshop (we both have a fairly similar post-pro process, mainly adding a bit of saturation, selective lighting enhancement, local contrast enhancement and vignetting).

Here’s some of my favourites – these had post-production done by Sharon:

These last three had post-production done by Brence (the very last pic is our favourite).

Allison was a lot of fun to work with in the studio, and she has amazing big blue eyes which look fantastic in her photos. Here are a few of my favourites from our session:

I scouted out a location near Sign of the Bellbird that would give us a few options for nice harbour and hills background scenery, whilst also placing the sun behind the subject for the morning shoot. (Squinting ferociously in a profile picture = not a good look).

My partner-in-crime Brence Coghill came along and we fiddled around with some bare off-camera flash to get a working setup.

Here’s what the final test shots looked like. Pretty spiffy all round, even though it was a little cloudy.

So… fast forward a week or so to the day of the shoot and – phooey balooey – it’s quite overcast. The ambient light is, as they say in New Zealand, “flat as”.  It was the only day and time we had to do the shoot and, as it wasn’t actually raining or wet, we went ahead anyway.

Turns out the shots I got weren’t toooo far off the first batch of test shots. I did end up doing some tweaking in post (mainly just ‘warming up’ the colour of the background hills to sunny-ify them). I think that, given the uncooperative weather conditions, the final shots came out pretty well. More importantly, the client is really pleased with the results.

Here’s the final pictures: