Agent Provocateur and How I Love The Surreal Nature of Reality.

I thought this street scene was pretty funny. First I saw the girl photographing the window display who very obviously was or is about to be modelling underwear in the shop (she walked back in after taking the photo, or maybe she works there but thats not as fun). I then saw the guy walking with his girlfriend who seemed quite interested in the scene himself. I love it when these funny street scenes unfold, you really couldn't make them up, thats why to me street shooting never ever gets boring, reality is so damn surreal.

When I was younger I used to escape reality in movies and stories but now all I have to do is walk about the streets with my camera. When your just out to look you can see some very bizarre, surreal and funny scenes unfold that could never be repeated, recreated or made up. It's just amazing some of the things that occur so next time your out keep an eye out.

Below are a few other street scenes I caught recently that fall into the realm of this post. So click read more to give them a look.

Testing My New White Seamless Backdrop

Testing out my new white seamless paper. I love this thing. Never thought I would like to work on seamless (or white seamless at least) but It is so liberating and challenging to omit all backgrounds and props. It really makes you work hard to get a great image. I am using this with my Lumopro 160 speedlight and the lastolite ezybox softbox. I am looking into getting either a bowens or elinchrom strobe kit soon for the extra power and ability to use them with much larger light modifiers like an octabox in order to create a much larger and softer light.

I had a problem with the paper though. When it arrived I set it up only to realise that there was a continuous weird indent pattern all the way down the middle of the roll which pretty much renders it useless for anything other than blasting light and rendering it pure white (which washes out the indent). This is annoying as I wanted to shoot a lot as a grey background by not letting so much light fall on to the paper but when doing this the indent ruins the picture and is so large and weirdly shaped that it would take too much photoshop work to erase. I got in touch with the company I bought it from and they quickly said they would send me a replacement (which should arrive today) so soon I can start using the paper the way I initially intended. I’ll post the results as they come.

Anyway this is a quick image of Cat, you can’t really see much of the paper here (it could easily just have been a white wall) but I will post some wider shots later.

I used the Lumopro 160 shot through a Lastolite Ezybox softbox from above my head, pretty much straight down at her and quite close. I really liked the result. I thought her expression was pretty funny.

For anyone who’s interested I will post a review of the Lumopro 160 and the Lastolite Ezybox kit within the week. I am going to write a lot more reviews of equipment I use in the future, focussing on how the items work in practical use, as when I was looking to buy some items there wasn’t much great info out there online (except strobist.com of course). If your getting into lighting and have not checked out this site then you need to get over there now, NOW!. www.strobist.blogspot.com

http://www.drewportfolio.com/
andrew@drewportfolio.com