Willy Cleary, a band in Northeast Ohio asked me to shoot an album cover for them. I’m happy to admit this put me a bit out of my element, but it was a good group of guys and so we got together near Akron Ohio for a early evening mini-shoot.
Here’s a blast from the past. While organizing my archives I came across this project from my time at the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane Australia.
This was meant as a photo-illustration of the concept/trend of Organic Foods by making a fully food-based table setting.
This was captured on Astia 4×5 film using an overhead view camera.
My friend Julia, owner of Pearl and Company, was the stylist for Patxi Pastor Band at a charity event to help a Miami marine biology magnet school. Each member of the band has accolades, awards, and achievements in spades, but with the millions of viewers the face most likely to j0g memories is Christina who was in the top ten of American Idol (YouTube Recollections Anyone?). Though frequent viewers of this blog might also recognize Cameron.
The band sounded great and the event was a blast.
I prefer to remember this game as it was in the middle of the third quarter: OSU 12, OU 14.
I had the great opportunity to see my Ohio University Bobcats take on the 3rd best team in the country, Ohio State. Thanks to Dr. Richard Suk for getting me an all access press pass so I could photograph the band, the cheerleaders, the crowd, and, at one point, the clouds in the sky.
I’m not a huge football fan, but even I was enormously proud of my school. We held in there with the best of the best for the entire game. In fact, though the end score doesn’t show it, we were winning for more than half of the game.
The last day of my vacation I was determined to take a scenic flight of the Whitsunday Coast. The only aviator who had a slot free was an old gruffy Aussie who did acrobatic stunts in a bi-plane. I opted for the scenic flight, but at the end he threw in a few flips and rolls for fun.
In between loud obscenities and gasping for air I was able to shoot a short clip of the acrobatics.
During the more relaxing half of the flight I shot some stills.
The Whitehaven Beach (above and below) which is supposedly has the purest sand of any beach in the world. Looks like a man and a horse to me.
Several months ago I ran across a nerd-toy called the Time Machine. It is an external dedicated intervalometer and sensory input triggering device. In other words, it is a box which plugs into a camera and triggers a picture to be taken at set intervals and/or when a sensor (e.g. laser, motion, noise) is triggered. Seeing some of the possibilities on the Time Machine website my interest was immediately piqued. Then several weeks ago I ran across the work of Martin Waugh who uses a similar system to take pictures of splashes from water drops.
I loved the images so much that I bought a Time Machine and made my own water-drip setup. That attempt failed miserably, mainly because I tried to setup a water drip reservoir, so that drops would fall at regular intervals without intervention. For my second attempt I replaced the reservoir with a water dropper and got some decent results. Finally, I was able to setup a water dropper system that was sufficiently repeatable that I could focus on lighting and image design.
When using a water dropper to produce a single drop, water splashes are only a few millimeters across. This size creates two problems. First you need a macro lens that can focus REALLY close. Second, with a macro lens focused that closely the depth of field is often less than the width of a splash, which means precise focusing is critical. After all the effort required to perfect a water drip I wanted to make sure to capture the result in the highest practical quality. Therefore I used my Mamiya 645 Manual Focus camera with one of my favorite lenses, the Mamiya 120mm Macro. If you are so inclined, you can experiment with the numbers using an online depth of field calculator.
As it happened, just as I was perfecting the water-drop technique, my university received an invitation to submit images to a corporate client. The client had blue/white corporate colors and wanted generic images that showed energy and fit with the feel of their current website. Water drops seemed to fit the image request quite well. Shown below are the images I submitted to the client, which they accepted for a hefty sum. The return from this investment will cover the cost of a scuba diving trip around the Great Barrier Reef that I will be going on this coming week.
Use of my photos:
As a professional photographer my photographs are my life’s work.
In this case Santos Energy bought the rights to these images by paid contract, and are used here under the Portfolio Use terms of that contract. The images may not be reproduced in any form. Leave a comment if you wish to discuss the creation of similar images
UPDATE: My submission to Santos Corporation was used on the front page of the annual Sustainability Report (an addendum to the financially-focused Annual Report). I was particularly pleased that they repeated the predominate color of the image throughout the report.
Further Details after the jump
My Studio Photography class had the following assignment: Using white paper and a white background, make the viewer feel or think about something other than paper.
My original idea was to produce gentle rolling hills at sunset, but paper will only bend into nice curves in one direction. So instead, I crumpled the paper up and then shaped it into jagged mountains. Using blue gelled lights I made the paper the color and shade of Nordic mountains, and with a red gelled light I created a sun in the orangish color of sunset. Finally a white light hit the mountains from behind to give them the nice “rim lit” look of a sunset.
In retrospect, the sky is black, when in fact it should realistically be red/orange and fairly bright. However, I think the surreal mood the black sky creates ends up being a positive. I’d love to hear comments for or against on this.
Shown below is the final image and a snapshot of the setup. For the uninitiated this type of camera shows the image upside-down and backwards when you look through it, so it’s not unheard of to shoot your subject upside down when the situation allows. In this case though, the paper is mounted upside-down because I thought I might add fog using a water-heater, allowing its steam to rise and fill in the valleys. I ran out of time before I was able to try this idea.
This was shot on 4″x5″ transparency film. This type of film costs US$2 a sheet and processing costs US$8. The resulting film can be scanned to 100-150 megapixels, which translates to a file size of around a gigabyte. A print can be made at 40″x48″ and still have every part of the print show sharp detail at a viewing distance of 10″. A print of this size or larger is not viewed at 10″ but at several feet, so in the practical sense there is no limit to how large a print can be made from this type of film.
Use of my photos:
As a professional photographer my photographs are my life’s work.
You are free to use any of the photos I blog in any non-commercial use, provided you do not change the image’s content and you link to my website: www.doug-peterson.com
