Okay, so I was bored. I got out the macro and went playing. Theoretically i was going to play with nail varnish but somehow wound up playing with two model Renault Spiders I happen to have lying around. And a couple of candles. I played with fire as well.

I like this. I have absolutely [...]]]>

Okay, so I was bored. I got out the macro and went playing. Theoretically i was going to play with nail varnish but somehow wound up playing with two model Renault Spiders I happen to have lying around. And a couple of candles. I played with fire as well.

I like this. I have absolutely no idea why.

I had just two ideas going in there. 1) emulate one tiny snippet out of a Ricky Martin video (start of Living La Vida Loca for anyone who is [...]]]> I was at Japfest yesterday, a guest of Mondello Park who invited 21 photographers in on a photowalk to see, basically what they would come up with.

I had just two ideas going in there. 1) emulate one tiny snippet out of a Ricky Martin video (start of Living La Vida Loca for anyone who is really interested) and 2) try and emulate some of the colour work I see in Car Magazine. Well I didn’t watch the Ricky Martin video so wasn’t looking at the back side of the cars really, and the light didn’t really lend itself to having much fun with colour.

Also, an awful lot of the souped up Japanese cars in Ireland are black, and black does not work on a day when the sky is dark and murky. Yesterday it was horrifically bad.

So I took 400 plus photographs and although I’m not all that happy with that many of them, I should be able to pick out about 5 for Mondello’s benefit.

John Fair took care of us while we were in Mondello and I have to say hands up, he did a terrific job for us. I spend a lot of time shooting dangerous sports – not maybe as dangerous as motor racing can be but I know what risk is. The staff at Mondello were really helpful.

I didn’t get that much of the racing. I can’t pan so I have to fake it.

This is about as good as that gets. I much prefer the static stuff. Ironically, Neill Watson is involved in a supercar shooting tutorial the day after tomorrow and there’s a part of me sorry I didn’t make an effort to go. I like shooting cars, supercars and I think that I could have fun with these things.

On September 6, I will be running off to Mondello to take photographs of JapFest as part of a photo walk organised by Mondello Park. I’m interested in [...]]]> I am not sure which friend in a high place pulled off this one for me but I’m guessing that either Ryan or John had a helping hand.

On September 6, I will be running off to Mondello to take photographs of JapFest as part of a photo walk organised by Mondello Park. I’m interested in doing it for a few reasons. Not very many people know that long before I ever took a picture of a surfer, my first lot of sports photography was at a Formula 1 race in Belgium in 1998 when anyone I actually cared about actually crashed out on the first bend of a rain sodden mess of a race. I haven’t done much car photography in years (yeah, I did do some back in the film days), so I’m going to have to do a little reading up on what the current trends are, and more to the point, whether I can get away with some of the things I’ve tried with cars elsewhere, like this one in the Ghosts in Clontarf photograph over on RiseCreatives. I got the colour effects using Photoshop white balance settings before desaturating.

So, it will be interesting…