ramblings

I know I said last time that I wouldn't put any of my work photos up, but I've had a change of heart.. I'll do it, but just not so many. Long story short, I feel that, I am not profiting off these images, and using them for my own personal use, I should have the right to put them up on my blog!

Now that that's out of the way, there are A LOT of photos since the last time I said I wasn't going to put any up, so i'm just going to pick a handful of photos that hopefully show a bit of everything from of the past month of so.. this is going to be tough, as I love spamming the page full of photos!

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

I guess this is really quite self explanatory, but what I like about this photo is just that it gives a different perspective to the typical horse racing type shots. I was shooting this with the 16-35 f4, so, besides it being a very wide angled lens, it means that things are a lot closer than they appear. As you can see by the edge of the barrier on the top left, i was directly under the barrier and this horse would've been maybe 1-2m away from me, galloping at full speed. I was lucky enough to get the shot framed nicely, but also to have all 4 of the horses feet off the ground. I only got 1 shot at this photo, as I was told to move away, as there was a possibility that I might spook the horses being that close!

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

We do things in the paper like Me and My Ride etc. Just showing off people with their cool cars/bikes/boats/trucks - whatever the hell they want. It's a stock standard photo but I think its quite nicely composed, lit etc. Just had a single speedlight to camera left, pointing straight at the guy to light him up and make him pop a bit more against the red car.

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

This photo was quite fun, as one of the reporters was telling me we were going to be doing a story about chess. He had an idea about the players sorta, staring each other off, which I thought was a cool idea, but I really had this idea in the back of my head too. We shot his, but this one ended up being used. I had another photo, where there was a whole line of white pieces, not just the king, and I think it looked better, but unfortunately at the time i didn't realise he wasn't smiling and it made it look really serious, but still i think that this image is pretty cool, considering the story! 

Basic lighting info: 2 speedlights, one to the left and one to the right, shooting both directly at his face/body to give some nice cross lighting effects. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

Part of being a newspaper photographer means that you have to go out and get random photos, ones that sometimes make no sense to you, and sometimes ones that just seem really stupid and pointless. Weather photos sometimes give me the shits as the reporters sometimes, out of the blue, ask us to go get weather pics. This is an example of a weather pic. Sometimes I hate them and sometimes I love them. This is one that I quite like. I was doing a story about some guy and his boat, and realised his friend had some kids sitting in the car doing sweet FA. So I asked if it was ok to steal the kids and get a quick weather shot. What I hate about weather shots, is that they have to have people in them. Can't jsut take photos of flooded roads or lightning etc. HAS TO HAVE A PERSON IN IT, cos the theory is "having faces in the paper sells papers.." sigh.. anyway. Saw these kids and shot it. Turned out nice. I like it. Obviously with the umbrella, you know it was meant to be a weather pic about the rain in Gladstone. Unfortunately there was a clearish patch over where I was at the time, so the dark rainy clouds really couldn't be seen, but you can still sorta see some grey dark clouds in the corners. I've done about 4 weather pics since then, and I swear the same umbrella has been used in every single shot! 

Some quick camera info, 16-35mm @ 16mm to get nice and WIDE and see the background as well as our subjects. Subjects are lit with 1 speedlight to camera right, and I under exposed the sky by about 1-1.5 stops, to get it dark and moody. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

Now, this image is not the best but I do like it for some reason. The story was about cane toading and how to catch them etc. Just basically had a mum and her 2 little ones out near the duckpond looking for cane toads. This was obviously a staged shot, as I wouldn't be able to get that sorta lighting if it was on the run.  What I like about the image I guess is how its lit. There's a nice spotlight feel to it, and i especially like how the tree has been lit up, and the foreground is almost black and creates a natural vignette on the ground. I dunno. I like it. And yeah, Speedlight, camera left. 

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer 

Yeah I know, it's a pretty stock standard swimming photo, but again, I like it. Just so sharp. Natural light, with 70-200. great combo.

Copyright Christopher Chan/The Observer

Those of you who are familiar with F1 photographs, a lot of shooters like to drag the shutter (long exposures) and get blurry shots of cars. Well, blurry background and sharp cars. I went to shoot go karting the other week and seeing as there is only SO much you can do with car photos, I experimented. I'm annoyed cos I asked for this photo to be used in the paper, they ignored me. stupid. I think i was shooting the lowest ISO my camera could shoot and at like, F22. Normally, you'd never do that for so many reasons, but I needed the shutter speed to drop to about 1/30th to get it slow enough to get some movement in the shot. It took a lot of trial and error to get it right, mostly  always it was because the driver was never in focus or sharp. Took a lot of tries but then they turn out, they look pretty cool!

Copyright Christopher Chan

This photo. Is not from or for the paper. I mentioned a few weeks ago when I took photos down at Tannum beach I wanted to take photos of Gladstone, something like a little project, that I could take away with me and remember this town by. I've had this 'shot' in my head since i first moved to Gladstone. I was driving around and saw it, tried to take a photo, but it just never worked. Granted, I wasn't using an ND or Grad ND filter, so the images looked bland, flat and just ugly. Today, I wasn't planning on shooting, as the clouds were low and dark, gloomy, just not ideal landscaping conditions, but, for some reason or other, I went out there and knew I had to come here. As soon as I arrived, there was a break in the clouds and due to the humidity in the air, the light created these beautiful shafts and glow around the power lines/station things.. i dunno what they are.. But yes.. the light, just created this light. Just magic. Unfortunately I didn't have time to switch over to my telephoto, put on the ND and Grad ND and then take the shot at a much tighter view, but I think this wide shot still gives a good sense to the atmosphere at the time. Bit of a composed image, I had a long exposure of the water, and blended it with a shot of the clouds to get this dreamy sort of look. I hope you like it, I really do!

THat's it for now, thanks for reading, be sure to check me out time to time for more photos and adventures. Until then,

Ciao.

-Edit- that horse photo has been used before but... oh well.. doesn't matter! 

New year, new post

I haven;t been posting on here as much as I said I would. My bad. Apparently i'm not allowed to show my photos on my blog anymore.. which is kinda shit. I'll still post some up but I'm afraid it'll be limited.. we'll call it self imposed censorship.

Anyway, went out and did something that I haven't done in a while, which was shoot for fun. Headed down to Tannum beach and took a few landscapes with my ND8 filter and Cokin graduated ND filter. They basically stop the light from coming into the camera, so you get nice slow shutter speeds, ie. milky smooth water. 

This is the first photo I took for the day. well not first first, but. the first one I liked. I used my special technique of using welding glass and putting it infront of the camera, to get ridiculously slow shutter speeds. This was about a 20second exposure, at 5pm @ f5.6? something stupid like that. THe welding glass is so dark it looks black. Unless you put it up to the sun, you wont see any thing through it. The drawback is, that the welding glass gives off a terrible green cast...

Yeah.. not very pretty. I mean, if you were going for an, outer space, martian green landscape then, yeah, welding glass is perfect. Unfortunately for this application, green was not the desired effect we wanted. I like black and whites, so converting it to b/w didn't bother me at all. I've been wanting to do the whole 'slow shutter speed black and white' look for a while and have never really gotten the chance to. Lack of subject and not caring enough to do it, being the 2 major reasons. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out, however I have a few problems with the welding glass, eg, light leaks, so i've bought another one and i'll look to improve it so it will be more reliable in the future. Until it does arrive, this works fine. 

I haven't used the Grad ND filter for a long long time and i've forgotten why I used to love it so much! This is one exposure, no HDR no photoshop, all one photo, with a few contrast tweaks. Using the Grad ND and ND8 filter combined really saturate the colours and make the image pop. Something photoshop can't do. Nice slow shutter speed to get the waves looking milky and smooth. Haven't done landscapes in a long time and I really miss it. Will definitely go back to Tannum and get more shots. 

The last 3 shots were.. how I would say 'art wank' more abstract artsy photos. I really liked how the slow shutter speed made the water look like smooth milky carpet and the Graduated ND and the ND8 filter really saturated the colours creating some really nice, minimalistic abstract photos. It's a shame the horizon was hazy and obscured the moon to show its full potential. The moon was a beautiful red from the sunset and I loved how it just rose above the horizon and the boat sailing across as well. Quite unnoticeable but i think it adds to the image. Hopefully if I go back next time, there wont be any haze and I can get a nice clean image.

Anyway, short post this time, hopefully I can put some more of my work up there, otherwise it'll be more of this stuff! 

Ciao.