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Brancott Estate Heritage Centre and Winery

I’ve recently completed work on a two-day shoot for Brancott Estate Winery and Heritage Centre. A fine spell of weather at the end of January saw me scurrying up to Blenheim, as I really needed sunny weather for this job.  Grey skies and dull weather wouldn’t produce the impact we were after.

Brancott Estate were pioneers in the Wine Industry with the first Sauvignon Blanc plantings in Marlborough in 1975. In fact in the very first vintage of 1979 the varietal won an award!

The Heritage Centre is a fabulous building by renowned New Zealand designers Jeff Fearon and Tim Hay, of Fearon Hay Architects. Completed in 2011, it sits on a hill overlooking the estate, with views to die for. It has been well thought out, showcases the rich history of the area and has a top class restaurant and wine tasting facilities.

So what’s involved with a job like this? A lot of planning happens before any shots are taken. After discussions with the client a shot list is drawn up. This helps to make sure I’m at a particular part of the estate when the lighting is at its best. A site visit was done on day one so, once the requisite safety briefing and clearances were obtained, I could survey the winery and work out the best vantage points and angles. A GPS is used to work out sunrise and sunset times and locations. I also used the GPS to mark off exact locations to return to. Another essential tool is a high vehicle with a roof tray – useful for shooting over the top of the vines. I also carry a collapsible ladder for the same purpose.

As for camera gear – two 21-megapixel Canon cameras were used, with Canon lenses ranging from 16mm to 400mm. A polarizing filter was occasionally used to reduce reflections and enrich the colour of foliage and skies. Other accessories used were Canon 580 flashes with Pocketwizard wireless remotes, a large reflector and a very sturdy tripod.

If you are ever near Blenheim, Brancott Estate Heritage Centre is a beautiful place to visit. I raise my glass to the staff: a more professional and hospitable crew would be hard to find.  I can also vouch for the food and wine experience – top notch!

 

 

Feb 10, 2012 | Categories:assignments | Leave A Comment »

Italy Photo Tour Video

Here is the first of a series of videos I am putting together to give www.italyphototour.co.nz a nudge for this year’s October trip. The camera used was a Canon 5D2.

On last year’s tour, I decided to shoot mainly video with the goal of putting together a few short pieces. To help things along a purchased a Zacuto magnifier and a small set of Glidetrack rails. One addition I wish I had was a decent microphone. I did use a microphone adapted to work with my iphone but in practice it was fiddly and of poor quality. This is the recorder I hope to take this year, the Zoom H4n.

I could only shoot video as workshop commitments would allow, but I still learnt a few things I would do differently next time:

  • shoot more ‘free’ video – i.e. using the glidetrack rails as a rig to walk around with the camera. It is less steady than a tripod but is arguably more interesting and spontaneous.
  • have more of a plan – although I had a rough idea, a more defined script would have helped the continuity of the final video.
  • practice more before the trip – I lost opportunities because I wasn’t fast enough or made mistakes.
  • in most cases the sound the camera records is unusable – but a separate sound recording system needs to be fast and easy to use.
  • it is difficult to shoot both video and stills well, best to concentrate on one at a time.

Video is a lot of fun and although a number of photography skills are transferable, it is QUITE A DIFFERENT BALL GAME. Oh, and did I mention the editing… if you thought editing photos took a lot of time, wait until you try video!

Feb 02, 2012 | Categories:Trips, video, Workshops | Tags: , , , | Leave A Comment »

Holiday Photos

Part of the fun of going on holiday for me is taking my camera … and tripod, lenses, filters … where does one stop?  I couldn’t ever not be a photographer. It motivates me to get up early, explore new places, and be aware of what’s around me. Sure, there are times that I’ve dragged my camera gear up hill and down dale without taking a single shot. But there are worse times when I haven’t had a camera and the opportunities have been great!

Apart from the extra baggage, is there a downside? The only one I have experienced is that it can make you less involved in what is going on, becoming an observer rather than an active participant. There are times when it is best to just put the camera away and lose yourself in whatever is happening. It takes practice to know when those times are. So … always take your camera on holiday, but don’t forget the holiday part of it..

Jan 12, 2012 | Categories:Trips | Leave A Comment »

Interior Architecture – recent work

Lately I’ve been photographing interior architecture for designer’s portfolios. Apart from having to go into shopping malls it is work I enjoy. What I don’t enjoy about shopping malls is the sensory overload. Lights, signage, canned music, it’s all a bit frenetic.

Mostly the work is about isolating the architects design and making the design the hero of the image. A favorite lens for this is the Canon 16-35 used at the 16mm on a full frame camera. With the wide angle lens in close to the subject, the background recedes and the foreground takes centre stage. I often use a polarizing filter to cut down refections from shiny surfaces. Another technique to isolate the design is to use a longer lens and a large aperture to throw the background out of focus. And lastly, taking multiple shots and stitching them together in Photoshop. This is good for extreme wide angle views but has the downside of distorting straight lines (see no.8 the sequence above).

Nov 29, 2011 | Categories:About this photo, architecture | Leave A Comment »

New Images for Orion Electricity

I’ve nearly completed work on a set of images for Orion, the electricity supply company here in Christchurch and Canterbury. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Greg Dodds from La Fabrica Design and Gina Clarke from Orion on this project. I would also like to thank the engineers from Orion who agreed to be photographed.  They’re a very professional and obliging bunch.

The brief was to show Orion technicians working in the Christchurch and Canterbury landscape. This was challenging for a couple of reasons:

  1. It is tricky to co-ordinate availability of vehicles and technicians along with the weather and the best time of day.
  2. The images needed to be high-resolution panoramas so they could be cropped for a variety of uses.
In a project like this most of the time is spent on planning and location scouting. The actual photography takes the least amount of time. Location scouting can be done at any time and is quite a pleasant part of the job. It involves visiting possible locations, predicting at what time of day the sky and the light on the land will look best. Often it involves reporting back with sample images to get approval from the client to organize vehicles and technicians.
All of the images are panoramas made up of 6-8 images.
I enjoy projects like this as they draw on a wide range of skills, from landscape photography to post production techniques such as panorama stitching and compositing.

 

Nov 11, 2011 | Categories:About this photo | Tags: , | Leave A Comment »

Italy

The twin spires of Montecarotto in the Marche region of Italy

I’ve just returned from our annual trip to Italy.  We were lucky have Tim Stephenson and Ann Worthy along as participants and they were great company. Ann shot people and food for stock photography and Tim was working on multi-exposure street scenes.

As a new challenge I shot mainly video using the Canon 5D2 and a couple of essential accesories. This gave me new challenge and should soon result in a short HD video promoting next year’s trip. In the meantime I’ve got a hard-drive of video and audio to massage into a few minutes of meaningful video. I hope to share my experience here as I go. Although there is some crossover, shooting video is VERY different to shooting stills.

Nov 01, 2011 | Categories:Trips, Workshops | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Mt Somers Walkway

I recently spent a couple of nights on Mt Somers Walkway in mid Canterbury. This is a great area to take those new to tramping who want to experience the mountains, forest and waterways without too much ‘hard yakka’. Two huts spaced about 3 hours apart, open tussock tops and streams running through native bush make for a varied experience in a short space of time.

Oct 03, 2011 | Categories:Trips | Leave A Comment »

River Poem by Hamish Mack

The Rakaia and Wilberforce rivers with snow capped Southern Alps in the background. (Photographer: John Doogan)

The Rakaia and Wilberforce rivers with snow capped Southern Alps in the background.

Hamish Mack has written a lovely poem inspired by one of my recent images. Enjoy.

Braided.
From this point,
you can see the strands
that make up your life.
Winding their way across
the flatland where the
going is easy and
there is time to look around.
Trying different courses
to find the best fit.
Leaving some islands of
untested experience.
Things that didn’t appeal
or you just ran out of time for.
See how it narrows
in the distance, where the options
become constrained.
Until, quite suddenly,
you are amongst
the cold, testing mountains.
They have their own beauty
and the sombre majesty of age.
But you cannot help
looking back to the plains.
Where it all began.

Hamish Mack, 2011.

Sep 29, 2011 | Categories:About this photo | Leave A Comment »

Night Sky Photography


Canon 5D, EF35mm f1.4 L lens; Sky exposure: 29 sec, f1.4, ISO 1600 Foreground exposure: 481 sec, f8, ISO 1600

Over the past year I have been experimenting with night sky photography. It has been a challenging but rewarding venture.

Along the way I have purchased a wide aperture 35 mm lens (Canon EF35mm f1.4 L). The bright lens helps freeze the motion of the stars by keeping the exposure to around 30 seconds. Even at 30 seconds, if you look closely you can still see motion blur, but at normal viewing distance the stars look sharp.

From the beginning my goal has always been to include the landscape as part of the image. This presents a problem – how to keep both the foreground and the stars in focus, given the extremely shallow depth of field due to the wide aperture of f1.4?

My solution has been to take two exposures, one with the stars in focus and one with the foreground in focus.  These separate exposures are combined in Photoshop. Below are the two separate exposures for the image above. You may notice I have been able to use a much longer shutter speed for the foreground exposure. This is because I am not worried about the tracking of the stars in this exposure and the smaller aperture (F8) allows me to have more of the foreground in focus. In practice it has proved hard to get all of the steps right every time and I have quite a number of duds!

481 seconds, F8, ISO 1600

29 seconds, F1.4, ISO 1600

Here’s a few things I have picked up along the way:

  • Try and keep the ISO as low as possible, 1600 works well on the Canon 5D. High ISO noise can degrade the final image quality and cameras vary in their high ISO quality .  There is a trade off here though – you do need to keep the shutter speed down and this requires increasing the ISO. Do your own tests.
  • Use the ‘infinity’ setting on your lens focus scale to focus on the stars. Just screwing the focusing ring around as far as it can go will cause the stars to be out of focus, and focusing by eye is not precise enough at F1.4
  • Watch for condensation on the lens! This can happen because of dew or cooling air temperatures. I have seen custom made warming pads for lenses but I haven’t had to go that far yet.
  • You will need a torch! To aid focusing on foreground objects and to help manually focus the lens.

Here’s some other night sky pictures.

Canon 1Ds mk3, EF24-105 F4L IS USM lens, 297 sec, F8, ISO 400

Sep 02, 2011 | Categories:Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Christchurch Snowstorm August 14-15 2011

What’s a photographer to do when the biggest snowstorm in years hits town? Having missed the July snowstorm I was keen to get out and have a play in this one. On Monday morning I attempted to walk up to the Summit Road via Huntsbury hill but the wind drove me back just before the top. I couldn’t stand up and the last straw was one of my gloves sailing off towards Bowenvale Valley.

The main challenges were keeping the lens dry and keeping the hands warm.  For the hands I have (had) a pair of thin gloves I can handle the camera with and some thicker gloves to slip over when I’m on the move. The camera is in a Kata E-702 Element Cover and is usually slung around my neck. Although I take a tripod I find I can cover more ground and be more responsive to changing conditions by keeping the camera around my neck. Rain spots on the lens is the biggest problem, the only thing for it is to point your camera down and have plenty of spare cloths for wiping it dry.

Extreme weather may take the most preparedness to photograph in but it’s quite rewarding and if you can keep warm and dry it is actually fun.

Aug 17, 2011 | Categories:Trips | Leave A Comment »