September | 2009 | Garage Studios

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Win Louie Banks print- competition up now

We blogged about the Louie Banks, GangUp Magazine print competition earlier in the week and we are happy to say that the competition is online now, just click the link below…..

Latest7 if you scroll down halfway on the main page you’ll see an option to view an online flash version of the mag, on page 4-5 there is a write up about GangUp and details of how to enter the competition. Good luck all.

You can see some of the work on the link if you click the left of the main image, you’ll see the gallery of Louie and Sam pop up.

Latest Magazine are featuring GangUp this week and for one lucky reader (or one sneaky ‘out of the target distribution zone’ but with access to email reader) they are offering a one-off limited edition print of this image below. (The Competition will be run from the Latest site).

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The print is approx 20″x16″ Giclee print, mounted on Aluminium, by our good friends at Colourstream. and is worth hundreds of pounds, and is the first print this size that Louie has made available. Believe me you’ll want to win this, as its a solid chance of getting this guys work before it becomes far too expensive to buy first editions of.

The competition, as far as we know, goes live tomo (tuesday) but we’ll post a full link as soon as we have it.

In the meantime if you’d like to buy copy of GangUp then click the link. Its a beautiful 104 page magazine, packed full of some fantastic photography, and is priced at £12. If for some reason you cant order online then its available in numerous outlets including Borders, and RD Franks, Crane Kalman and more…. (we’ll update this with links asap).

Georgie Hobday- Storm Model shooting with Garage….

DarkDaze has been starting a few projects this month as part of the Creative Photography course he teaches at the studio, which encourages photographers to seek inspiration in others work and then take shots that they wouldn’t normally find themselves shooting.

Your life is my Vanity Project

This is the first week of an ongoing idea with Storm model Georgie Hobday, all shot on a Olympus mjuII, a tiny little compact camera with the worlds worst viewfinder but an incredible little sharp lens. They were all shot on Fuji Neopan 400 and processed at Colourstream, the shots were taken all within an hour, in various locations in Brighton. The model was shot in the clothes she arrived in for the shoot- the necklace turned out to be a really strong element of each shot.

Georgie Hobday and DarkDaze

Georgie Hobday- DarkDaze

Your life is my Vanity Project

He will be working with Georgie each week so keep a watch on the blog to see what comes out of this. There is a second project underway with another favourite model of ours, Elin, but apparently he’s not sure what shape that will take yet.

One day flash course - Group Shot

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Hot off the press and straight outta Photoshop is the latest group image from the one day flash course that we run at Garage Studios.

Every flash / strobist course that we teach we try to get a group shot of the students on the course. You can see more of the group shots on the Garage Studios Flickr Account.

This was inspired by watching the students check the back of their cameras to see how the shots were coming out. Its a common photography practice which is affectionately known as Chimping. Each student is lit by their own flash and the whole seen is lit by one flash on an umbrella and two table lamps on the floor in the background.

If your interested in finding out about the one day flash course click on the link. We’ve just worked out the next dates for the course and they are Sunday 22nd November (half the places already reserved) and Sunday 17th January. If you’d like to reserve a place CLICK HERE

GangUp Print Competition

For a long time we have championed the rise of Louie Banks, a photographer we have supported for almost a year now. He has a great talent for fashion editorial and as you may know he was one of the first people DarkDaze got onboard for GangUp magazine. and he ended up shooting 3 editorials for the first issue.

You can see some of the work on the link if you click the left of the main image, you’ll see the gallery of Louie and Sam pop up.

Latest Magazine are featuring GangUp this week and for one lucky reader (or one sneaky ‘out of the target distribution zone’ but with access to email reader) they are offering a one-off limited edition print of this image below. (The Competition will be run from the Latest site).

Louie Banks_Suburbia_GangUp

The print is approx 20″x16″ Giclee print, mounted on Aluminium, by our good friends at Colourstream. and is worth hundreds of pounds, and is the first print this size that Louie has made available. Believe me you’ll want to win this, as its a solid chance of getting this guys work before it becomes far too expensive to buy first editions of.

The competition, as far as we know, goes live tomo (tuesday) but we’ll post a full link as soon as we have it.

So have a look tomorrow and see if you know the answer to the competition question, this print will look amazing on someones wall.

Off-camera flash adventure

We’ve been so impressed with some of the shots we’ve seen, from one of our past Off camera flash / strobist course students, that we asked her to write a blog post for us.

Juliet Greig came on our FLASH: Improve your lighting course back in June and has just done an amazing shoot. Here’s what she wrote:

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“In the last few weeks I’ve been working with Charlotte, who is looking to build up a modeling portfolio. We had already done a few shoots of Charlotte with my photographer friend Katariina, who has bowens lights at her studio in Newhaven. This time we wanted to give off-camera flash a go, and take advantage of the natural surroundings of Brighton beach rather than a neutral studio environment. I wanted to re-create the atmosphere of the 1950s style beach photographs of the girls sitting on the railings, as Brighton is the perfect location.

Having recently done Garage Studio’s off-camera flash course, I was able to get things set up without too many problems. I put the nikon SB600 flash on a lighting stand and attached an umbrella to diffuse the light. Unfortunately the wind was blowing so strongly that the umbrella crumpled and broke within the first 5 minutes. That was an important lesson, umbrellas and wind don’t go together very well! Anyhow, I used a plastic stofen diffuser on the flash for the rest of the shoot.

As the sun began to set, the golden glow was visible through the glass of the promenade shelters. Katariina had the idea of asking Charlotte to pose in front of the shelters, which turned out to be the best idea of the day. The golden light in the photographs behind Charlotte is exactly what we saw. The settings for the camera for these shots was 1-200 sec shutter speed, f 6.3, ISO 100 with the flash off-camera on a stand at 1/8th power.

This shoot was the first time I had used off-camera flash outside and it was a valuable learning experience. Charlotte, Katariina and myself are very pleased with the shots and we will definitely be trying this kind of photography again!

Juliet”

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We’ve just set the new dates for the FLASH: Improve your lighting course and they are Sunday 22nd November & Sunday 17th January. If you’d like to find out more or to book a place CLICK HERE.

You can see more of Juliet’s photography on her Flickr stream here and you can see some more past students work here in an old blog post

In the mean time have a look at Juliet’s amazing photos:

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If you’d like to find out more or to book a place on the flash course CLICK HERE.

Actors Head Shots

Actors head shots are a funny thing to shoot. Looking at the images on Spotlight, the style of photography for the headshots that are required for actors, doesn’t really have seemed to have changed for a very long time.

Its also a big challenge to try and capture someones versatility in one shot, knowing that this image will be used for a few years and will be the picture that may or may not get them work.

Saying all of that, we’ve just had to lovely people come to the studio looking for shots for them. Both are Brighton actors who’s credits include such cult TV as Minder, The Sweeney, Dr. Who, EastEnders, The Proffesional and Grange Hill.

So we did a head shot session for them with the classic 10×8 format. After that shot was in the bag and they were happy, we did a few different set ups to give them something else to use should they need it.

Paul Moriarty

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Stephen Churchett

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Hasselblad Studio Day

On Friday we had one of the worlds best camera manufacturers, Hasselblad, hold one of their studio days at Garage Studios. This is a day when professional photographers can come and use one of their latest models in a studio environment. Garage Studios provided the model and studio space as well as all the lighting equipment and Hasselblad provided a hand full of their H3DII camera bodies up to 50 mega pixels and more lenses than you can possibly need as well as doing the styling, make up and lighting set ups.

The day was a great success with lots of different photographers of all kinds turning up to have a go on the cameras and software and be shown how everything works by some very knowledgeable Hasselblad staff.

We managed to have a few goes on these legendary cameras and also managed to convince the MD to get in front of the camera so he could take a shot of him. What a sport he was, as within minutes his face was blown up on screen to the detail that most people would be horrified at. Thats the beauty of these cameras, the level of detail captured is just mind blowing.

Have a look at the shots from the day and although the final two were taken on the H3DII as they are so lo res you just can’t get an idea of the quality of the image, but take our word for it, they are like nothing we have ever seen before, oh and these are straight out of camera with no post processing.

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Lomo Style Wedding Photography

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Yes thats right we’ve shot a wedding lomo style

The bride Abi, is known as Microabi on flickr and is a very accomplished photographer herself. Her camera of choice is the Holga. Its a plastic fantastic camera that uses medium format and a square crop. She loves this camera so much that she asked us to shoot the wedding with a Holga and a Lomo LC-A as well as our digital cameras. Its the first wedding that we’ve been asked to shoot in a Lomo style.
There are some really different style shots for a wedding and we are really proud of the images that we delivered to the happy couple.

If you want to see some of the digital shots you can see them on our other blog post.

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Plain Lazy kids

We did some photography a while ago for a great fashion company called Plain Lazy. The shoot comprised of quite a few different sets and trying to convince babies and young kids to keep still and act up for the camera.

Amazingly there was only one tantrum and we caught that on camera just at the right moment! The kids (with a little encouragement) got into the spirit of things and didn’t mind at one point lying down next to very smelly 3 day old Chinese take away.

You can see some of the shots on the Plain Lazy website here.

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One Day Flash Photography Course

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Our most popular course, FLASH: Improve your lighting is being run on Sunday 27th September. If you’ve ever had an issue with your flash photography or wanted to learn off camera flash / strobist techniques. Or just wanted to get the most out of your camera and flash, then this course is perfect for you.

The photo above was taken on the last course. To see more group shots click here

If you’d like to find out more info or take one of the remaining places just CLICK HERE

Oh and while your at it have a look at the site of one of the students (Justin Hall) on the last course and see what he’s been up to with the techniques picked up on the course…..it makes you proud to see

this is a small sample of the work he’s been doing:

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Garage Studios