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Shooting the "white noise" hair collection for Mai Ha at Trevor Sorbie

Shooting the “white noise” hair collection for Mai Ha at Trevor Sorbie

A few months ago I was asked by Mai Ha at Trevor Sorbie to shoot her latest hair collection. The images are for the British Hairdressing Awards and for PR.

The competition calls for four images to be submitted in round one, and if you’re successful to make it to the finals; another four images should be submitted to make to final collection of eight. I’m pleased to say that we made it through to…

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How to combine natural and flash lighting for dramatic results!

How to combine natural and flash lighting for dramatic results!

INSPIRATION

As a creative, I’ m constantly looking at how i can use or incorporate every day sights, textures, colours and forms within my work.

The inspiration for this shoot was from the light spilling through the blinds of my bedroom window and the incredible shadow it left across the floor.

I placed my hand into the light and watched how the shadows wrapped around it. I knew I had to work…

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Afro Hair Collection

I recently shot this Afro hair collection with Nicole Iroh from Headmasters. The collection named “OBSIDIAN” is a celebration of afro hair and hair with a naturally curly texture. Many hair collections of this type usually straighten or use wigs to change the colour and texture of the models hair but we really wanted to celebrate its natural and cultural styles with braiding, plaiting,…

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Getting Started With Portable Flash

Getting Started With Portable Flash

Portable Flash is battery powered flash. The main difference between portable flash and mains powered flash is that although mains powered flash can be used outdoors, either by running extension cables or by plugging the flashes into portable power solutions (basically a battery unit with a power inverter), and although portable flash can also be used indoors, it does make sense to use the right…

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Getting Started With Studio Flash

Getting Started With Studio Flash

We’ll explain the reasons later, but if you’re new to studio flash, just follow these simple steps to get started.

1. Set the camera to “Manual”. It won’t work with flash on any of the other settings. 2. Set the shutter speed to 1/125th or 1/100th 3. Set the ISO on your camera as low as it will go (typically 100 or 200 ISO) You can increase it later if you need to. 4. Set the lens aperture to f/8

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Macro Beauty lighting in Bangkok.....

Macro Beauty lighting in Bangkok…..

This was one shot from a series I shot whilst out working in Bangkok. I’m going to take you through my inspiration, the set up/equipment and post production involved.

  Inspiration:

Whilst living in Asia, i lived on the beautiful island of Koh Samui, Thailand and commuted to Singapore & Bangkok to shoot. I used to get around the island on a moped and one day, whilst “exploring” (being lost in…

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Tutorial: Shooting the Army, part 2

Tutorial: Shooting the Army, part 2

When we’re able to do it, we will produce another video of this shoot, showing how it was done. Meanwhile, let’s get on with the tutorial…

Part 1 of this tutorial covered the early, static shots, designed to show off the new sponsored Rugby Strip and Rugby Ball for the 2016 season. Jamie then did some shots using our fog machine.…

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Tutorial: Shooting the Army, part 1

Tutorial: Shooting the Army, part 1

All photos Copyright Jamie Rowland, Lencarta competition winner

Flag flying over “Lencarta Towers”

One of our customers, Jamie Rowland of Manicman Photography, won 1st prize in one of our monthly competitions, and part of his prize was a day in our studio. Jamie is ex army and for personal reasons he supports Help for Heros and…

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Tutorial: Getting a pure white background in a small studio space

Tutorial: Getting a pure white background in a small studio space

A lot of people struggle to get good results when they create pure white background shots (which some people call high key shots) in a small studio space, and the poor quality of many of the photos gives white background shots a bad name – but, with care, and with a bit of help from the computer, it is possible to do it well even in small spaces.

The reason why so many professionals choose to…

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Tutorial: Building up the light

Tutorial: Building up the light

This tutorial is about my basic approach to lighting,which never changes regardless of subject – it doesn’t matter whether the subject is a beautiful girl, a product, an ugly old man like me or, as we did in this shoot, a motorbike. The approach must always be the same. In my experience, the only people who do it differently (who use…

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Why won't Lencarta be at The Photography Show?

Why won’t Lencarta be at The Photography Show?

        We’ve been to the last 6 shows, we started small and have taken a larger stand each year, but this year we’ve decided that attending the show would be wrong for both our customers and for us.

Here at Lencarta, like all true manufacturers, we are constantly working to improve our existing products and to develop new ones, and right now we’re working on a whole raft of exciting new…

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Lighting the Bat!

  This image was from a shoot at the tail end of summer ’15. Basically, we wanted to create a cinematic look, with the hallmarks of the DC comic hero’s stomping ground. A number of things were needed, such as an interesting sky, although not necessarily a sunset. A good overcast sky, with lots of texture would have been equally good. The other main contributing ingredient, was a US style street…

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Creating a Simple Portrait

Creating a Simple Portrait

Creating dynamic portraits with only two lights

  The accent light is a Lencarta SmartFlash 200Ws head, firing at ¼ output through a 60×60 softbox frame left, and just beyond the distance of the subject. It needed to be at a ¼ output due to the distance between the light head and the subject being greater than the usual “just outside the frame”, to reduce any chance of flare from the softbox.

It…

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The Bridal Rain Portrait

The Bridal Rain Portrait

Making the most of the English weather

This image was taken at a wedding on the 14th November 2015, and the weather was particularly foul.

My main aim was to ensure I lit as much rain as possible, and also provide an interesting composition for the two girls. Behind the girls at a height of around four feet, there’s a Lencarta Atom 360Ws. This was married to the dedicated beauty dish but…

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Softbox or umbrella?

This is a question that people ask all the time, so we thought it might be helpful to explain the advantages/disadvantages of each…

The light should be adjusted so that it doesn’t quite go to the edge

Both softboxes and umbrellas are available in a range of different designs and sizes, and softboxes are also available in a range of different shapes, so to keep it simple, we’re going to compare a

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Tutorial: Lighting effects and gels

Tutorial: Lighting effects and gels

We started this mini series with Chiaroscuro lighting, then added a second light on our subject, which gave us crosslighting. Now we’re moving on to other effects.

Let’s get  creative with the background lighting…

With no light on background

Our background here is grey, because grey gives us the most options – it’s possible but…

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Tutorial: Chiaroscuro Lighting

Chiaroscuro (from the Italian for light and dark) is a simple but very effective lighting approach that has been used by painters for centuries.   It creates the closest thing we can get to a 3-D image in a 2 -D medium, and of course it can also be combined with other lighting techniques and with selective focus.

Basically, it just…