Karohemd's World

To my horror I just realised I hadn't blogged about this summer's group portrait shoot at The Roost. Every year a group of (mostly amateur or semi-pro) photographers get together and hire a venue in central London. The Roost (or its sibling, The Perch) is ideal for this as you get three floors worth of different rooms, all individually furnished and stuffed with interesting, weird and wonderful props. Most rooms have huge windows so there is plenty of natural light and I usually don't need to rely on extra lighting equipment. There is always a number of models available but many photographers bring their own. We usually work on a collaboration basis, i.e. nobody gets paid and it's an exchange of time and skills. In the end, models, photographers and designers will have new material for their portfolios.

This year I had only two planned sets, one with the band Last July and the other a collaboration with the dress designer Jezebelle's Boutique, the model Druidess of Midian and the hat designer Off With Her Head.





A few more shots incl. some from behind the scenes on flickr.
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Friday: Finished work at 2:30, took the train to London, trekked across London to Hackney and checked into my hotel room. Freshened up a bit, got changed into a nicer shirt and went to have the dinner experience of my life at Roganic. Being very happy and full, I took tubes and trains back to Hackney, showered and chilled before trying to find some sleep in my hot room (it cooled off later).

Saturday: The Victoria Line was out (which links central London to the Overground nicely at Highbury&Islington) so I had to take the Overground all the way to West Hampstead and then the tube to King's Cross for the Vivian Maier exhibition (which warrants its own short post) and then lunch at Pollen St. Social (blog post in a bit). Walking back from lunch towards Oxford Circus, I happened across the Pride parade which was ace. I guess I probably caught the second half and was a bit sorry I missed the first because it was really good fun to watch all those delightful characters, even those with a rather serious message. Because of the train/tube outages I didn't bring my camera because I wasn't sure I'd manage to take it back to the hotel and make it to the gig in time so I only had my phone. Just two samples, the rest are on flickr.



I then made my way to the Southbank where I wandered around a bit, watched a few performers and the world go by before I got some early dinner at Pitt Cue Co.'s trailer underneath Hungerford Bridge. They provide their take on American style BBQ with various and repeating dishes throughout the day. When I got there, they Pulled Pork had just come out of the oven and I leapt at it. Served in a cardboard container on top of a portion of zingy 'slaw, dressed with a spicy sauce and hot pickles and a chunk of excellent bread, this was excellent street food indeed. Considering the location and the quality of food, 7 pounds was still acceptable, I thought.



Another trek across London to Hammersmith for an evening I'd been waiting for almost all of my life or at least since '85 when I bought the Scarecrow album, to see John Mellencamp live (again, a separate blog post for that but just to say it was amazing). Then, the worrying bit of making it back to Hackney on public transport began, various lines were partially or completely closed so I had to take first the Piccadilly and then the Central line to Stratford. Despite various delays, I caught the last overground train and made it to Hackney Central, saving a wad of money which would have been the taxi fare.

Sleep was hard to come by as tunes from the evening were still going through my head so eventually got about five and a half hours of sleep before getting up, packing and walking to The Roost for the day's photo shoot. Quite a few people were there already and the place was buzzing with photographers and models getting ready. I only had two things planned: Last July in the morning and druidess1982 in vintage dresses by bethany_eowyn in the afternoon. Here are two preview shots, a full post will follow after I'm back from holiday:



nevla was kind enough to give me a lift back and I was home just after 8, being rather shattered. I backed up the photos, caught up with telly and got a relatively early night.

I had this funky tin so I thought I would try my hand at some product photography.

(found in photographers)

My thoughts: "Sorry, engaged." - "Engaged? This is my house!" - "Try and make me leave, you tit."

My alarm went off at 6, I hit snooze once, SSS, get dressed, spend too long faffing about to have breakfast, lift arrived, bought breakfast before setting off, pretty much smooth sailing to and through London to The Perch.
Said Hi to Gothindulgence and other early arrivals, chat a bit, scout out venue which had a few changes and then did nevla doing Ghost Dog/Ninja impressions on the roof, incl. some wild wideangle shots and an experiment with multiple exposures.
A short bit with the rather unconventional Angel of Darkness (the first of my replacement models) was a lot of fun and included a tricycle, a dollhouse, an accordion and odd but cool poses.
Then a short and fun bit with Beth Ryan and Hal Sinden (who has the sharpest beard ever and is thankfully not a mad AI) involving props and some extreme perspectives.
After a spot of lunch, Amaranth was next in a high contrast black/red set, followed by another trad goth set in various locations with Dark Morte.
The final set was with an incredibly flexible and bendy Canadian ballerina called Danielle. I'd run out of steam (and ideas) so the outcome is probably not as interesting as if we had worked in the morning. Still, I have at least one stunning shot.

After clearing up and packing, we set off again, the TomTom sending us round in circles (or so it seemed) on a longer route through London but we got out eventually and back to Cambridge in good time. After 12 hours on my feet and often crouching in awkward positions at a rather hot location, I am thoroughly exhausted and will sleep well tonight.

This tiny brolly is awesome:



Apologies to those of you who read the strobist feed and have seen this already.
Speaking of strobist, this is quite ingenius, too.

On my way from work I noticed how clear the sky was and you could see the various shades of the full moon very clearly so when I got home I grabbed camera, lenses and tripod (which took a while as various pieces were in different places) and went into the garden. I tried to cheat the automatic lights but failed so there was a bit too much ambient light for my liking but I think it was OK regardless.
Having only 400mm (the Sigma 70-200mm plus x2 teleconverter) to work with was rather restricting so the shot below is a tight crop. At least the D700 has enough resolution to still make it work.

Mars is in opposition this evening and it was just visible as a reddish spot but I failed utterly to get a good picture of it. The only one I have is in the same frame as the moon but in that it only came out as a spot.

I was in a weird mood last night, too bored to watch TV/DVDs or read so I unpacked the SB-900 speedlight I'd bought earlier in the week and mucked around a bit, first with the washing machine and then with myself. These were the two best results, both taken with the Sigma 12-24mm and SB-900 at full power remotely fired via CLS trigger, handheld.

new_brunette (via twitter) pointed me at this.

Portraits of Power (New Yorker), photos by Platon of world leaders taken during a UN conference. Excellent stuff and the audio commentary is very interesting (and, for Mugabe, scary). I agree with most of it, except the one of Ahmadnejad because I think his eyes make him look particularly evil.

Many of you will by now have seen the photo of the D12 on this In Pictures page but I can't get my head around it. At first look, it looks like a fantastic photo but the more I look at it, the more it's not. The 8 is wrong, the angles are wrong, the 7 can't really cast a shadow (at least not without the opposite 6 casting one as well).

Dice don't look like that. As I don't have a direct reference shot, I'm going to try and set this up tomorrow evening or sometime over the weekend to see if I can recreate it. The setup is simple enough with a snooted flashgun.

Shame, really, because the other shots in that series are brilliant.