This doesn’t have too much with the sort of photography I normally do but I thought it was a pretty interesting and random thing to happen today. Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton came by our university today for a question and answer period on the struggling economy. My buddy and I were lucky enough to grab a photo with him after he was done! Photo credit goes to Mr. Layton’s Executive Assistant Ira D. ! We ended up staying for the two and a half hour session and got some good photos out of it for the yearbook. It was an awesome experience.

Introduction:
I was shooting with a couple models for fun and found out one of them did some modeling one summer for Calvin Klein underwear! Now I can totally see where his style of posing/modeling comes from. For the other model he had a very dark brooding expression and while we were just going to shoot him topless with jeans we found two random strips of black cloth that we quickly “fashioned” into a Dark Jedi cloak!

Camera Details:
This type of lighting is easier than it looks. Just place the light and umbrella above the model aiming downwards and towards the face! Changing the angle of how you position the lights changes the shadows on the face. Try it out it is super simple and effective. Works better for people with chiseled abs though.

What I Learned:

• You can make “fashion” out of anything. You can even make your own clothing out of a few scraps lying around!
• Flat lighting is boring. Play with shadows and the absence of light.
• Strong people make better human light stands as lights and stands are HEAVY.
• EXPERIMENTING IS GOOD!

Photos:

Introduction:
The big day of the Vogue Charity Fashion show at my university finally came. This year the venue was a lot larger and we were able to hold the show at the newly renovated Grand Theater in Kingston Ontario. The show was a lot harder to shoot as it was no longer a single long runway but it was now the whole stage plus a weird “C-shape” runway. It made for a good show but boy does it make things more difficulty for the photographers. Instead of posing at the end of the runway the models posed EVERYWHERE (as there was no literal end to this runway). In the end the lighting was decent, got some good images out of it, had fun, and raised a ton of money for Camp Outlook who are an organization that provides at-risk and underprivileged children a chance to experience wilderness camping!

Camera Details:
Here is a quick and dirty guide on how to photograph a fashion show. For performances such as this where the background can be very dark and where the subject is well lit I suggest using the manual mode of your camera and no flash. A lot of people make the mistake and try to use flash. But honestly the stage is well lit in venues such as this and you should have no trouble if you have a decently fast lens. I was using a Canon 70-200mm F2.8L IS but was shooting at F4 for most of these shots. For runway shots people move pretty fast so get a decent shutter speed of at least 1/160th of a second and set your aperture and ISO speed appropriately. Remember a sharp noisy/pixely photo is better than a blurry clean photo! I use AI Servo/Continuous Focus (for you awesome Nikon people!) assigned to the EV-lock button on my camera but it’s a personal preference if you like the old “focus-and-recompose” One-Shot method instead.

Photos:
More photos in high-resolution format can be found HERE.

So I’ve decided to change my blog layout in order to accommodate bigger and larger photos. Hopefully this is what people who frequent my blog come to see. I will slowly be updating previous posts to include larger photos as well. Let me know in the comments section what you think! Hope everyone likes it.

-Spencer