So here they are, although not in any order in particular, other than chronological.

First up is an image I made in Spinningfields, Manchester that I submitted in the Urban View category of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 competition, which was subsequently shortlisted.

The Avenue, Manchester - Shortlisted for Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011

Also in January I made the image below with Charlie in Castlefield with one of my favourite modifiers, the Lastolite Ezybox. Details here

Charlie, Castlefield

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale car park before the security guards came along. Blog post here

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale Car Park, Manchester

Maltese street scene – First trip to Malta this year. Blog post here.

Typical street scene in Victoria on the Island of Gozo, Malta

Kayleigh, Trafford Park with the moon. Blog post  here

Kayleigh

Second trip to Malta this year. Blog posts here and here

Doorway, Zejtun, Malta

Anna – “Waiting for a bus?” with some very carefully placed SB900s – blog post here

Waiting for a bus?

Lighthouse, Vilamoura, Portgual. Blog post here and on variable neutral density filters here

View of the breakwater at Vilamoura, Portugal with a lighthouse at the end

Manchester Central Library – post here

Manchester Central Library at sunset

Jenson Button in his McLaren Mercedes tears up Deansgate, Manchester. Post here

Jenson Button

The Lake District. Post here

View up The Struggle in the Lake District on an Autumn morning

Derwent Valley. Post here

Tree in the Derwent Valley, High Peaks

And finally a shoot I did with Sophie and Pat in mid December that I haven’t yet blogged about. Post to follow in the New Year.

Pat & Sophie

So in retrospect I’m more than happy with the quality of what I’ve produced this year, though I do feel that I need to up the quantity next year. And in upping the quantity I’m pretty certain that this will also see an improvement in the quality too. I ought to write a post on my plans for 2012 too. For one, it’ll give me something to be held to, and it’ll also help me to thrash out my thoughts and plans for the next year of my business and where I want to take it. So you can look forward to this in the coming weeks.

Finally, for 2012 I’ll be releasing desktop wallpapers for your personal use. You can download January’s here in 3 separate sizes. There’s 2560 x 1440, 1920 x 1200 & 1440 x 900. Simply click the appropriate link and right click to save to your desktop.

NeilAlexander_JanuaryDesktop - 1440x900

As this’ll be my final post for 2011, I’ll sign off by saying that it’s been a fantastic year for me photographically speaking and I hope that 2012 is even better.
Enjoy the celebrations, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Wishing you a prosperous 2012.
Neil

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

Last Friday I went down to London for Kelby Training’s “On location lighting workshop” with the legendary National Geographic and Life photographer, Joe McNally. Having been to David Hobby’s fantastic workshop in Leeds, where there were about 30-40 attendees, I was quite shocked to see an auditorium packed with more than 500 eager photographers. It was a somewhat less intimate affair, but equally as entertaining and informative.

I had been planning this weekend for some time, so I booked myself into a hotel and arranged three separate on location model shoots for the 24 hours after the workshop to try and put into practice some of the tips and tricks that I had gleamed.
For the first shoot I had intended on trying to shoot in Regents or Hyde Parks, but after a ridiculous email conversation with the Royal Parks people, I quickly decided to knock that idea on the head. The gist of the final email was “if you are aiming for your images to be published/promoted in the future, then we must treat you as a professional and therefore charge you £400 and insist on £5 million worth of public liability insurance”!
So I decided to go for Hampstead Heath instead. I’d done some extensive research online and found that there’s a really cool looking pergola over on the western edge of the park that looked like a real possible for a sunset shoot. It’s raised about 10 feet above the ground and runs in an east/west & north/south direction. We got there eventually about 8pm, but only managed about 15 minutes shooting time before the sun dropped down behind the tree line. We then left here and moved to a little hillock round the corner which still had the descending sun lighting it through the trees. The vibe here wasn’t all that comfortable – there were lots of single blokes milling around looking rather sheepish and it wasn’t until later that I found out that this was the “gay cruising” area of the park!

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

In spite of all that, Roseanne was great, and most definitely game, and I got a few keepers. Somehow I’d managed to heavily underexposed most of the images, and I’m not sure why. I can only think that it can have been for two reasons; just the other day I’d been shooting in bright sunlight so had turned the brightness on the LCD on the back of the camera right up, and for most of the shots of Roseanne, I had positioned her in the sunlight and I’d been in the shade which I guess made the pictures look brighter than they actually were.

As a result of travelling down by train, I came equipped as lightly as possible. So in the way of lighting gear, I just brought 3 strobes, a couple of stands and 2 reversible brollies and decided to leave the kitchen sink behind. I did bring my Pocket Wizards, but inspired by McNally’s amazing use of Nikon’s CLS system, I decided to try and shoot TTL all weekend. The top two images were lit with an SB900 on a shoot thru either side of Roseanne and feathered a little. In fact for the second image, I left 2/3s of the reversible cover on the umbrella camera right to prevent too much fall off onto the background. For the bottom image, I just used one strobe and shoot through camera left to fill in the shadows a little left by the falling sun over my right shoulder.
More to come…..

Roseanne on Hampstead Heath by Neil Alexander

Location:Hampstead Heath, London

Natalie by Neil Alexander

As my Friday last week was spent dealing with the horror of a financial year end, and fortuitously I had a completely free Saturday, I arranged for another couple of testing shoots. In the morning I shot the delightful Linda on the beach by Hoylake (details in a future post), and in the afternoon I arranged to shoot Natalie (who is also training to be a make-up artist) and her 9 year old cousin in Buile Hall Park in Salford.
A few days prior, Garry, a fellow “tog” from Twitter had commented on my work, and asked if he could join me on a shoot to see if he could get more of a handle on the whole off-camera flash thing. Well I was a little flattered (I’m a lot more comfortable with strobes than I was 12 months ago, but still so much to learn), but also delighted to be able to try and help.
However as the light was constantly changing, and I also had a few more technical issues, I struggled myself to get what I wanted. So I hope that Garry managed to get something out of it.
Natalie and her cousin arrived with stunning ivy themed make-up. I decided fairly quickly that some dramatic lighting was required. For the top shot, I dialed out the ambient almost completely (1/250 at F11). I had one SB900 and a shoot through umbrella to her right, and one smaller one slightly off-centre to her left. I had also placed a snooted strobe behind her head to try and lift her jet black hair from the background a little. It was working well, but she moved around a little and keeping her head between the lens and the snooted strobe was a little tricky. Just by happy accident then that this occurred. I really quite like the way the flare throws a little rainbow into the picture that ends with green on her cheek to match the ivy.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad day’s shooting, and I’ve since ordered a couple of replacement hotshoes from eBay for the princely sum of $10 to prevent any further technical difficulties.

Natalie by Neil Alexander

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

Last week I had the pleasure of shooting the delightful Amy once again. I predicted that we were on for a pretty decent sunset, and as such wanted to shoot in a location where we could use the colour of the setting sky as a backdrop. Our planned location had been turned into a temporary screening area for the World Cup, but fortunately I had a plan B. So from the top of the car park behind the G-Mex centre (not the most glam location for a portrait shoot) we had clear line of sight to the setting sun, and a steel staircase construction to use as our platform. Fortunately no park wardens or narky NCP staff this time. I could see right from the get go, that my little SBs were going to have work hard. Fortunately I’ve just added to my lights with an immaculate condition SB600 off eBay for the princely sum of around £70! (it’s in original box with leather sleeve and all manuals!). A test exposure to meter the background got me a nice bluey orange sky at 1/250 @ F22 (probably an hour before sunset), but it left me with total blacks in the foreground. Tried with an ND400, but that left me with too slow an exposure even at 800 ISO, though it wouldn’t really have made a great deal of difference – the contrast range was just too much. Oh, and it was pretty windy too up there, so anything on a stand other than a strobe was going to get blown over. We shot a little to get into the stride, and then waited until the sun was a little lower in the sky. By 20 mins to go, I was up to F8, and I figured it was time to get going. With one SB900 to Amy’s right, at about 45 degrees to her on 1/8 power, another slightly to her left on 1/16, both bare. I toyed with gelling them to match the ambient, but I wanted a stark contrast in the light. By now I had quite a harsh fairly unflattering cross light on Amy, so I supplemented it with an Orbis on camera (I’m really loving this thing) to add some more flattering fill to fill out the shadows from the cross lights. This was powered by my new SB600 pretty ramped up. The 900s I triggered with Pocket Wizards, and the 600 via it’s inbuilt CLS system using the 900s as a trigger.
All in all, am quite pleased with the results. For the top image, I played a little in Lightroom adding quite a dramatic vignette which I feel more portrays the scene as I’d envisaged.

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

Manchester sunset shoot by Neil Alexander

Model shoot with off camera flash by Neil Alexander

I’m getting more into environmental portrait shooting again lately, and loving every minute of it. After going to Leeds the other week for a workshop with the legendary David Hobby (@strobist), I decided to order myself an Orbis ring flash to play with using this primarily as an on axis fill. I left the workshop positively brimming with ideas and eager to experiment. So I’ve been flogging a few of the model forums of late, and have hooked up with a few willing subjects who are going to test for me over the next few weeks.
These images are from the most recent outing down to the Bollin Valley not far from where I live with the wonderful Steph Owens In total we probably spent about 4 hours at 2 or 3 different locations, and luckily the rain held off until we were packing up and heading back to the car. Competing with the sun however proved to be quite tricky. It was one of those typical British summer days where the sun was out ‘n’ about, but there was also plenty cloud. So no sooner had I got my exposure and flash settings right, then the sun would disappear. Rather than wait patiently, I’d then try to reconfigure for the changed light, get it down, and bam, the sun would come out again. It proved rather challenging all in all, but I learnt a lot.

The top image was shot under a bridge where the river and the footpath go underneath the Motorway. I placed Steph half in the shadows and used an SB900 on a large shoot through umbrella camera left to try to lift the shadows so there wasn’t too much contrast, and then used the Orbis as an on-axis fill just to add a little soft light to fill in the gaps.

Model shoot with off camera flash by Neil Alexander

For the second image, Steph was in the middle of a rather precarious & rickety footbridge over the river. I placed her with her back to the sun, and a large shoot through brolly with an SB pointing straight at her. Nothing very fancy, but it did the job.

For the bottom image, the sun was up high camera right, and there was next to no room for a light stand camera left, so I dug out a reflector and bungeed it to a tree. I had to improvise with a gorilla pod wrapped round the fence next to the tree to keep the reflector at exactly the right angle, and then used the Orbis on camera again to produce that lovely soft fill.

All in all, not a bad afternoon’s work….

Model shoot with off camera flash by Neil Alexander

Actually getting the damn flashes to fire was quite a bit tricker than I’d anticipated. I knew that I had to switch the SU4 mode off, but I still couldn’t get both SB900s to fire. So I eventually reset both strobes, changed the channel on the D300 and TaDa!

So my two lucky subjects for this shoot, were two Brahma beer bottles that I’d had chilling in the freezer for the last couple of hours.  I was particularly parched and this pair looked rather tasty – so I had to work quickly before my subjects vanished. Firstly I set the camera up on a tripod and composed my frame. I then dialed in an exposure that would completely eliminate all the ambient light (1/60 at F8 ISO200 if memory serves). I then set up a shoot through umbrella up to camera left pointing down onto the bottles, aimed slightly in front of them. As the edge of the umbrella was probably about 2 to 3 feet away from the bottles  (I couldn’t get it any closer because of the edge of the table), I had to dial this one up to +3 stops.

This gave me a nice soft light cast over both bottles. I then felt that I needed a little kicker light off to the other side. So I attached my longest grid to another SB900, dialed this down to -1 stop and directed it at the necks of the bottles producing the little highlight that you see down the necks of the bottles.

All in all, quite an interesting experiment and the Nikon CLS system is definitely very easy to use, though I am glad that I invested all that time over the last few months in full manual as it made deciding on my exposures and flash levels much easier. And more importantly it meant that I could pop the top of one of those bottles much quicker than if I’d been using the Wizards and doing!!

For the next image in my Boundaries project, for which I have now I chosen the title “Crime?” I wanted to photograph someone photographing something that in the current climate, would quite likely warrant a stop & search under section 44 of the Terrorism Act or some other similarly preposterous grounds for infringing a photographer’s fundamental rights. I figured I’d try and make an image of a “model” photographing planes at the airport around the perimeter fence of Manchester AIrport. So whilst researching, I stumbled across this location on Google Earth. Now I’ve lived in this area for over 30 years, and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time at this airport over the years. When I was a kid, we used to bike up to the service area of the airport and sit on a large grassy mound literally a stones throw from the main fuel terminal, probably about 1/4 mile in from the perimeter now. Manchester Airport has grown to a bit of a behemoth for us that live around it, it sprawls out in every direction, and there are planes overhead constantly. Anyway, I digress. When I found photographs taken by ordinary people of this area online, I figured that was where I was going to try this from first. I got out the OS maps, and worked out a route. I hauled my camera bag, lights bag, 2 lightstands, tripod & kitchen sink through waterlogged squelchy boggy fields for about 25 minutes. I negotiated a turnstile, rounded a corner and then suddenly the trees stopped and this view presented itself. I was right at the end of 05L in amongst the landing lights, just a few hundred yards from the end. I figured this was the perfect area to try for this shot.

It wasn’t quite dawn when I first arrived, probably about 30 minutes to go, but bloody freezing! And I thought I’d go on my own this time and not risk taking a model as I didn’t know what lay ahead. But if you’ve ever tried to photograph someone photographing something else, yet wanted to get both the photographer, and what he’s trying to shoot in the frame, compositionally it’s really rather tricky! This is kinda where I ended up. I set up an SB900 on a stand just to the front of the fence frame right, 3″ gridded it and directed right at my, sorry “the model’s” face. I’m zoomed out at about 80-90mm on the 70-200 F2.8, so it was quite a trek to and from the camera to check the frames, and the frost beneath my feet very quickly turned to mush. Eventually I was set up, and happy with my composition and lighting and then out of nowhere the fog descended. It go so dense in the space of about 15 minutes, that all I could see in the frame above was lights. Everything else disappeared! Then unbelievably as soon as it appeared, it went, replaced by the sun cresting the horizon. I am using a cheap eBay purchased remote to trigger the camera, which at the kind of range I was asking it work, was firing about every 7-8th button press. Which meant that co-ordinating a plane in the frame whilst fighting the now rapidly changing light, and checking the camera which meant a trudge through a now muddy trench, it all got a little testy!

So all in all as an image, it kinda works. I think the face is a little blown out, and the white balance may be off a little. However as the wife put it, “You just look like a weirdo plane spotter” – I think it kinda scuppers this from meeting the requirements of the project. Next…..

So I finally managed to get the permission I needed to stage the next shoot for my Boundaries Project. I wanted to stage an Arson attempt, and I had in mind the clubhouse of the local tennis club. In keeping with the theme, and just to make it that bit harder for myself, I wanted to do this at night too. I’d arranged with the fantastic Patrick, to meet at the club around 9, so I got there an hour before to survey and set up. I started by taking a few test shots with my new EP-1 to try and get some idea how I should compose the frame, bearing in mind that the last time I’d been here was as a child many moons ago. I’d remembered the layout pretty clearly, but some fairly major alterations had taken place since, so it was just as well I’d got there so early! I decided that I wanted the basic composition to appear like this:-

Once I’d surveyed the scene and decided on my composition, I then had to figure out how to light it all. I had to contend with a whole barrage of unpredictable security lights and motion sensors skirted all around the outside of the clubhouse. I decided that I could use one of the security lights to my advantage, but the rest created too much light, or lit parts of the scene that I wanted to stay dark. By using the floodlight on the front of the clubhouse, it nicely lit the middle part of the scene, so I then had to work out how to light Patrick. I also wanted to highlight the jerry can that he’d brought along, as this was a principal part of the final scene. After quite a bit of farting around, I concluded that the best spot to place lights to light Pat & the can was to tuck them just behind the wall at the end of the front of the clubhouse. Setting them up after that was a little of a challenge. As I moved around, I kept triggering security lights, and then seconds later I would be plunged into absolute darkness as they timed out and switched off again, and my eyes re-adjusted. The solution was to move the gear away from the sensors, and piece it all together in the pitch black. Which I’m quite pleased to say that I managed without too much cursing. Connecting pc-sync cords and tricky hot shoe mounts in the dark is quite an art! So in the end, I set up one SB900 on a stand set at F2.8 1/32 power. Set quite high up and pointing straight down at the jerry can. For some frames, about 3 feet to the right, I placed another SB900 and used this as a key to light Pat, but for this particular frame it wasn’t used. I placed the camera on a tripod at the far end of the building and using a cheapo wireless remote, to trigger the camera which in turn fired the strobes via Pocket Wizards. Camera was set to 1/4 sec F2.8 ISO200. I put the remote on the camera so that I could adjust the positioning and the level of light from the strobes whilst Pat moved around – I didn’t want to be running up and down the front of the clubhouse all night!

Anyway, all in all I’m quite pleased with the final image, and I think its a keeper for the project.

As I mentioned in this previous post, I finally managed to get out with my new off-camera flash set up and shoot some on location portraits with a couple of models from Model Mayhem. Amy & Pat were really cool to work with, and you’d never guess that Amy was just starting out! Once I’d got my shots in the bag, they offered some ideas and I did some portraits for their own portfolios….

As part of the A-level I am currently embarked on, I am working on a project based around the theme "Boundaries". In light of the recent goings on with completely innocent photographers being tarnished with the "terrorist brush" (see numerous articles on the BJP for example – here, here or here), I have chosen to focus on the suspicious nature of people, and how often their snapshot vision of a scene is interpreted in a completely incorrect manner.

So I decided that to try and highlight this flaw, I was going to shoot a series of potential crimes in progress, in various locations, with different models and lighting. I have garnered a rather alarming looking list of possible offences, and I am trying to construct scenes in my head and then on paper for how I would like the result to look.

I’ve been preparing the first two for too long, and finally managed to get off my sorry ass on Monday night and shoot them. It was to be my first real shoot with models and my new off-camera lighting set up. I’ve been playing with it with several weeks now, but it was finally time to put it to proper use.

I’ve had this particular location in mind for a shoot for some time now. It’s an alleyway / car park right in the heart of Stockport. You would never know it was there. At one end there is a long alleyway and I wanted to stage it so that the girl coming through the alleyway could have been about to be assaulted by the bloke hiding round the corner, or he could have been her boyfriend waiting to meet her from work.

For the car shot, I wanted to give it a similarily ambigous feel. Someone could have been about to try and take the vehicle, or it could have been a friend coming to say Hello.

This shot hasn’t come out quite as well as I had anticipated as I dont’t feel that there is a sufficient level of ambiguity in the resulting photographs for it to meet my requirements for the project.

Strobist: Both images were shot with 2 SB900s. For the first shot of the girl down the alleyway, I positioned a strobe behind the wall in the middle, about 2 foot off the ground zoomed to 200mm with a 3 inch homemade coroplast grid to pick out the girl. The second unit was positioned camera right, also with a grid, zoomed to about 100mm if memory serves. Quite challenging with the lighting as there were 3 security lights in the frame and they were on a 5 minute timer. Though by knocking my shutter speed right down to 1/60 sec, and pumping up my ISO to 800, I found this to be sufficient to cut out most of the ambient light. These were triggered with my fantastic new PocketWizard Multimaxs which true to their word, have never let me down. Looking at the first series now, I could probably have used a slightly longer grid as there is quite a bit of spill around the girl onto the door frame and surrounding walls which I’m not all that pleased with.

I’ve learnt such a lot lately from studying David Hobby’s Strobist DVD set that I mentioned in an earlier post. This truly is an awesome tutorial and I’d highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about off-camera flash.

As the models had offered their time in exchange for prints, I felt that once I’d got my ideas in the bag, it was only fair that I offer to shoot a few portraits for their own portfolios. These were shot with one SB900 and a shoot through umbrella, quite close in for the head shots, but a little further away for the full length shots. I’ll post some of these images over the next couple of days.