London | Damian Comans - Photography

The bright side

by Damian Comans|on April 6, 2009 |in Commercial, Location, London, Model, Photography, Portfolio, PR, Studio |Leave a comment

I recently photographed the UK’s leading life coach, Mr Rasheed Ogunlaru. Rasheed wanted some updated PR imagery to go along with his new website www.rasaru.com. I wanted our studio pics to look really fresh, warm and welcoming, so opted to go for a nice seamless orange

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Next we hit the outside world to grab a few shots around Tower Bridge. This location appeared along the way with funky spotlights that were on the surrounding walls. A quick climb up the wall to reposition them, add in a reflector and away we go

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It was getting quite dark and poor Rasheed was getting a bit frozen, so we headed to our final destination to finish off the shoot. First image is lit with plain white flash through a white umbrella

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I felt it was looking a bit cold, so added a blue gel to the flash, then corrected the colour back in camera to a neutral foreground. This results in sending any areas not lit by the flash orange

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Warm background achieved, so we worked on the last few pics and wrapped up Rasheed in his jacket again!

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Cheers Rasheed for a fun PR shoot and pushing through despite the cold London evening!

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Permalink to Bukky and Miss Harriet portfolio shoot

Bukky and Miss Harriet portfolio shoot

by Damian Comans|on April 3, 2009 |in London, Model, Photography, Portfolio, Studio |Leave a comment

Male model Bukky Oni contacted me about a shoot he wanted to do for his portfolio with Miss Harriet. I called in hair and make up superstar Ana Popescu and together we worked on a few different images.

The guys had a couple of dynamic poses they wanted to try, so we shot these first with a large soft box placed to camera left. Can you tell their thighs are burning?!

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Much easier on the legs standing upright!

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And even better sitting down

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For this shot of Bukky while Miss Harriet was having a re-style, I used a single flash with a very tight snoot pointing down across his face

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I kept similar lighting for these next few shots, just opened the beam up to cover both of the models

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And finally, one of my favourite images of the day. Again a snooted flash to camera right

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Big thanks to Bukky, Miss Harriet and Ana !!

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Permalink to Ashleigh’s portfolio shoot

Ashleigh’s portfolio shoot

by Damian Comans|on April 2, 2009 |in Fashion, Location, London, Model, Photography, Portfolio, Studio |Leave a comment

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. Have been absolutely flat out! The upside of that is I have a stack of cool images to share with you all.

First up, my shoot with the lovely Ashleigh Cleave-wallace. Ashleigh wanted to update her modeling portfolio with a few new looks. We decided to shoot 3 scenes in one 6 hour session around Shoreditch.

Of course there’s more to strong imagery than good lighting, so I called in my new favourite hair and make artist, the uber talented Ana Popescu

Abi at lastminutefashion.com supplied this cute 40s red dress, so we shot that first

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A super quick re-style, then we headed outside to catch the falling sun. Being London and all there was bugger all of a sunset, so I gelled my flash blue (camera geeks, I used a Lee Full CTB)

so that we could then correct the colour back, in camera, to a neutral foreground. This removes blue from the image, which has the consequence of sending the sky orange. Flash was powered about 1.5stops above the ambient, which makes the sky darker and therefore a touch more interesting

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Note it was pretty cold and windy, but Ashleigh pushed through just wearing her jacket between takes!

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We all headed back inside for Ashleigh to thaw out, whilst Ana worked her magic again with another hair and make up change

I set up the hallway with a red gelled flash hiding in the back. This pic is taken from the back, you can see my strip light (used in the foreground) way at the other end

The strip light, un-gelled, so that we could get a small section of Ashleigh lit with clean white light

A quick change of background gel and we rolled off the final images

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Thanks to Ashleigh and Ana

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Permalink to And then it was white

And then it was white

by Damian Comans|on February 3, 2009 |in London, Photography, Tutorial |Leave a comment

Old news to everyone in London, but to my overseas readers: London was blanketed in snow yesterday. Here’s a few quick shots taken with a compact camera on my way to the gym.

Quick tip for photographing snow: if most of the scene is white, your auto exposure will try and make it grey. To get around this, just set your camera to overexpose by about 2/3 – 1 stop/EV.

View from the balcony

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Our frozen outdoor temperature guage

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And the canal between Angel, Islington and Hoxton

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Permalink to Parallax

Parallax

by Damian Comans|on January 27, 2009 |in London, Photography, Tutorial |4 Comments

Ok, today’s post is going to be uber geeky. If you’re not into photography maybe skip this one!

When working as an architectural photographer or shooting any other kind of panoramic scene that needs to be stitched together, you need to be concerned about your no-parallax point.

What am I waffling on about? Well, sometimes a wide angle lens just isn’t wide enough. Take today for example, I had to shoot a 10 story building from front on. Which meant shooting from literally just across the street. Near impossible without using a fish eye lens and getting a massive amount of distortion.

To give you an idea of how close I was, here’s the scene shot with a 35mm lens (as wide as most compact cameras go):

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Here’s the scene, shot with an ultra wide 17mm lens, which still couldn’t do the job:

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When that happens, we need to take a series of vertical images which will then be stitched together digitally in photoshop:

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Sounds straight forward enough, right? Well here’s where it gets tricky. If the camera is mounted on to a standard tripod, the axis of rotation is miles from the front and centre of the lens:

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Therefore when you rotate the camera around to get your series of images, the scene is not actually captured from the same point of view. This causes items in the foreground to not line up with objects in the background at the overlapping parts of each image. This then obviously makes for a nasty stitching job which is far from ideal.

To get around this, you need to use a special panoramic head for your tripod. This dramatically changes your axis of rotation, then allows for very fine adjustment to ensure that every single thing in the image lines up.
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The bad news is, you’ll need to set the no-parallax point for each one of your lenses individually. If you’re using zoom lenses then it’ll be different at each point of the zoom as well. The good news is, you only need to do it once! So write down your measurements and carry them along with your gear.

If anyone would like to know detailed instructions of actually setting the no-parallax point, fire away in the comments and I’ll do another post. But for now I think that’s geeky enough!

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Category Archives: London

The bright side

Bukky and Miss Harriet portfolio shoot

Ashleigh’s portfolio shoot

And then it was white

Parallax

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