Garage Studios

We have a few places left on our Creative Photography and Visual Theory course here at Garage Studios.

The course runs every Tuesday night 7.30pm-9.30pm, starting April 28th and is led by DarkDaze. The course costs £240, thats just £30 per 2 hr session, with a discount for NUS students (or college with ID) and a 10% discount if you have already attended one of courses. We have had some excellent feedback from students on the first course, which was a bit of a test run for us, but hey it worked a treat. We have all been really impressed by not just the standard of work that was completed but that each student appears to be pursuing a photography project of their own now, even though the course has finished.

The course itself is aimed at those who have an interest in photography and want to widen their horizons and knowledge, not just in technical areas but of photography in general. We set interesting projects throughout the course, and a lot of the discussions are very much led by the group- so you can improve at a pace that suits you but also, as happened last time be spurred on by the other students on the course.

I have a few testimonials from the last group, and hopefully a few of their favourite images will follow,

The whole course was excellent. having a set project each week was an excellent way to try out new photography and should be utilised more! I really enjoyed it though, seriously. Thanks for everything in the past 2 months Kevin, it’s been brilliant. Nick Blake

could wax lyrical all day about how great Dark Daze and the Garages Studios Creative Photography Course are, it’s easy - inspirational, compelling and insightful, it’s all stuff that springs to mind. All you really need to know though is that eight weeks on I’m a far greater photographer for attending it. If you need any evidence, one of my homework projects became number one on Flickr’s Explore with over seven thousand views. Stop reading this and sign up now. Ben Petrucci

Great course, it’s really changed the way I take photos. It’s actually forced me to start thinking about what I am trying to capture and create rather than snapping away and hoping for the best. Before the course my camera was just a machine that documented moments for me, but now I realise I can do pretty much anything I want with a bit of practice Sarah Ginn

Attending the creative photography course has been an excellent experience. It’s really made me look objectively at my photos. It’s given me a great understanding of the history of photography, helped to improve my technical understanding, and pushed me to think of new and hopefully interesing idea’s for future projects. By the end of the 8 weeks we depart as some tuned up, lean, mean, photographing machines, having gone on a great photographic journey together. Pete Repka

Image by Andy Parker as part of his Trash Flavoured Trash project

Trash Flavoured Trash Gets Taken Out

Worst Enemy by Ben Petrucci

I will post some more images from the other students in the week as I am gonna bump this course a little, we think its great value for money and will be a boon, thats right a boon, to your photography. Some come sign up.

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This is a shoot by Garage Studios Lighting expert, and great photographer Natasha Alipour-Faridani. We have worked with Tash for several months now, she headed up the Lighting Team on the big set shoot for DD that is in the blogs below, and numerous other shoots, assisting on Maccabees Cover shoot, some Fashion Editorial amongst others. She cant make a good cup of coffee but she sure as heck can make some fantastic images.

She has done some stunning shots of fruit before, very unusual still life work, but decided to push the idea a lot further this time.

Lighting this specific takes a long time, and removing all reflections or positioning them exactly where you need them is the key to this kind of work. When the product is covered in Gloss paint it makes it a lot trickier.

So the set up shots first.

Tash originally started out with three heads (Bowens 500w monoblocs), and a few hours later arrived at 5 lights and some bounce boards and flags.

garage studios product shoot wide set-up (tash)

In this wide shot, the beauty dish is set a 1/16th power, reading f11, the strip softbox 1/8th power, reading f8, bounce head in umbrella power at 1/32 reading f5.6, the 2 bare metal reflector heads on the back wall were set at 1/2 power, reading f11 (from each head). The camera was set at f13, 1/125 iso 160.

As you can see quite an elaborate set-up. The back light heads are just to throw the background into a poppin white. The banana is a fair distance from the wall to prevent light bleeding onto the subject. In a smaller studio you could achieve a similar result using flags either side.

The beauty dish is providing the main light and the softbox is adding some fill and the very distinctive and painterly highlight on the side of the banana. The bounce umbrella adds a little lift to the image.

garage studios product shoot banana one colour

The banana was tested numerous times before the paint was added, but was markedly different then as its not naturally reflective surface. The gloss yellow was added, more tests were done. The brown paint was added and then just a few shots later Tash had her image. The obvious reference point is the Warhol image, but tash has really brought something distinctive to this work, as you can see below.

garage studios product shoot Dandy Banana Final Shot

We are happy to shoot packshot and other product work so please get in touch if you need anything, we are confident in Tash’s hands you get a brilliant set of images. Tash is also available as a Lighting Assistant for hire on any shoots, studio or location. Contact us for rates.

We will also be uploading a blog soon of in-house photographer M.Halls Fixed Gear bike shoots, soon to be published by Laurence King Publishing house, but we are still waiting on the editor to approve which images we can use before publication date. But hold tight cos they are great.

Here at Garage Studios, we like to mix things up and use a load of different lighting techniques on our photography shoots. Including Strobist / off camera flash and constant lighting normally found in film and TV studios.

We’ve just finished a big shoot for a magazine and we needed to create different effects with the light. Have a look at the finished picture above.

We used 8 Bowens 500W photographic lights, three constant lights including a 2K Arri and 4 Nikon speedlight flash units, on this shoot.

We usually light the scene and the subjects with the Bowens heads and use the Nikon speedlight flash units to give accents to the picture.

One of the key aspects of good set design and in-turn a good shoot is creating as many real effects as possible. This is often what makes the difference between something which looks realistic and staged.

The rear wall was drawn in the photographers sketch with uplighters either side of the window and we knew there was always going to be a prop floor standing lamp somewhere in the shot.

To achieve this we, worked on using strobes hidden in these key light sources. This would allow us to control the power of the light sources, which we would have been unable to achieve with the use of continuous lighting.

So if you see the set up picture below from behind the set, you can see that we cut a hole in the set and had 2 flashes on stands, sticking though to make it look like the wall lights worked. We put orange gels on the lights with diffusers to give the right kind of glow, Starting off with the rear wall, we set both strobes to 1/8 power. Setting them in this semi-middle ground gave us the control to boost or reduce the power according to how it looked in-shot, the idea being that that they draw the eye, but sit back in the scene. Each strobe was set to its shortest zoom length this would give us a more bulb like feel to the light spread.

A similar setting was used for the upright lamp.In the lamp we tied a flash unit to the inside of the shade, and had that gelled as well, with a diffuser to look more like a bulb and to give the illusion that the lamp was on
We needed a way of firing them, it was impractical to sync chord them and as the shoot wasn’t being done with a Nikon camera body we were unable to use the Nikon CLS (Creative Lighting System). Instead we turned each of the strobes to SU4 mode. This tells the strobe to fire when it sees another flash. This meant that every time the main Bowens studio lights fired it would then cause the SB800’s to trigger.

You can also see the constant lighting in some of the shots below, heavily gelled to create atmosphere.

At the end of the day we feel at Garage Studios, that light is light and you need to use what ever means you can to get the shot right.The results speak for themselves. As you can see from the final shots, the rear wall up-lighters provide an even and natural looking balance across the wall. Although the Lamp is only jutting into shot, you can still see the important part it plays in creating a believable scenario.. after all this really did happen, we were just in the right place at the right time.

(Garage Studios and Andy Parker worked on and contributed to this Strobist blog)

If you’d like to find out more about Strobist / Off Camera Flash or Studio Lighting, why not book a place on either our:

FLASH: Improve your Lighting Techniques Course

Or our

Studio Lighting Course

Or email us to book your place.