After carving a couple of pumpkins for our 3 year old and 1 (almost 2 ) year old boys for Halloween last night, I thought I’d take a couple of snaps for posterity before they ended up eventually being chucked in the bin.

It was supposed to be a couple of quick snaps with my camera and a flash but as there was nothing on TV, and being a photographer, I soon found myself digging out some lighting equipment and tripod!

I can’t imagine there are any aspiring pumpkin photographers out there!, but I thought as a bit of fun it may be of use to someone and could be the first post in my blog about photography techniques.

First thing was to put the camera, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, on a tripod with a Canon EF 24-105mm f4L IS USM lens as the exposure for the flame inside the pumpkins was going to be far longer than could be hand-held.

After positioning and framing the first pumpkin the first step was to determine the exposure for the flame, so I lit the tealight inside the pumpkin and turned the room lights off. Camera was set to 400 ISO and f11 and I used a Sekonic hand-held meter, with spot facility, to read off the inside of the pumpkin, which gave a reading of around 1 second. Test exposure showed that it was certainly a good starting point.

Pumpkin 1

Next step was to add some light to the pumpkin exterior. It didn’t need my Elinchrom studio flashes (overkill!) so a Canon Speedlite 580EX II was put onto a lighting stand with a Lastolite 38cm Ezybox Hotshoe positioned to the front left of the pumpkin. The speedlite had a Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 transceiver  attached to it and with the MiniTT1 transmitter on the camera allowed for wireless triggering of the flash. This system is absolutely fantastic as it allows full E-TTL communication to be retained between the camera and the flash. The additional AC3 ZoneController slotted on the top of the MiniTT1 transmitter adds the extra capability of being able to dial in +/- 3 stops of flash exposure compensation (in 1/3 stop increments), or to switch the flash into manual mode and dial in a manual power (again in 1/3 stop increments) all without touching anything on the flash itself.

I opted for manual power and started the flash on 1/8 power, shot a test, then upped it to 1/4 power and added a small reflector board to the right of the pumpkin for some fill-in. To give me a bit of choice of exposures I bracketed the shutter speed to alter the level of exposure of the candelight inside the pumpkin, from 1 sec to 4 secs in half-stops i.e. 1, 1.5, 2, 3 and 4 seconds so a total of 2 stops range. 3 secs turned out to be the best exposure for the effect I was after.

Once processed in Adobe Lighroom 3, this was the final result for the first pumpkin – the one yours truly had carved for our three year old.

Pumpkin 2

My better half had carved the other pumpkin for our one year old so I thought I should shoot that too!, so with the same process as above this was the final result for that one…

Pumpkin 3

She actually had the much nicer shaped, smoother shaped pumpkin which really helps the final result.

If I’d wanted to I could have spent longer and fine-tuned it more, added another light to the right rather than just a reflector board for example, but as it was just a bit of fun/playing around I wasn’t going to go to those steps.

So, all a bit of fun ultimately but I hope some useful information in there, for anyone interested in photography, with regard to balancing candlelight with added flash lighting. Obviously the techniques don’t apply to just pumpkins!, but will apply to any situation where there is candlelight in the shot and additional flash lighting needs to be added without overpowering the candlelight.

An hour would be enough for a single corporate type portrait, a few simple products etc. If you needed a longer shoot then the additional hours could simply be added and charged accordingly.

Simply visit me at stand 109, pop your business card into the draw box and a winner will be chosen at the end of the exhibition.

Full details of location/times etc. are here – http://www.letsdobusiness.org/hastings/

Eastbourne Chamber of Commerce hold a chamber lunch at The Eastbourne Centre each year. Apart from the very nice lunch, the highlight is being able to go up to the roof terrace of what is one of the tallest buildings on the seafront to get an absolutely fantastic view of the Eastbourne Airbourne airshow.

Unfortunately the weather was a bit cloudy and grim, so visibility was not so good and a backdrop of grey skies wasn’t so good for photos! – but still great to see the Typhoon, Red Arrows etc. The following day was sunny and beautiful blue sky so headed back down to The Eastbourne Centre again and up to the roof – timed to make sure I was there for that day’s Red Arrows display and other displays.

Some of my ‘snaps’ from the day. Click the thumbnails for larger versions.

Hope you enjoyed. Looking forward to Airbourne 2011 and catching some more shots!

After trying to decide how to set up my stand at Let’s Do Business Eastbourne, I ended up with this as the final layout….

Duncan Lawson Photography - Let's Do Business Eastbourne 2011

Had really good feedback from visitors and other exhibitors, which is always nice!, and had a steady stream of visitors to the stand. Stand position was really good, certainly helped by being right next to the massive Identity Signage stand…

Duncan Lawson Photography Let's Do Business Eastbourne 2011

Overall footfall to the exhibition was, I believe, over 1000 and I had a good number of visitors to my stand with a number of promising enquiries, a couple of which are ongoing.

Managed to have a couple of people help man my stand so I could go off to visit the other stands, so a good day all round. Fourth year this exhibition has been running and fourth time I have exhibited and it gets bigger and better each year!

The venue is the beautiful Floral Hall in The Winter Garden, Eastbourne.

Always difficult to know what to do for the stand each time, especially doing two of them each year. On the one hand I have my favourite images to show, but on the other there’s no images to show as well. Some companies have ‘gimmicks’ on their stands (nothing wrong with that BTW) but not my thing, plus, hopefully!, my images simply speak for themselves and don’t need anything else. This is what I had at the last show at Hastings in September last year…

Duncan-Lawson-Photography-Let's-Do-Business-Hastings-2010

I’ve decided that with the small images I’m going to have it that it’s only anything that was shot for a local company (i.e. East Sussex) given that the show is aimed at local businesses. The only exception will be the Virgin Megastore shots (left hand board at top) as it’s such a great client to ‘show off’

New prints, 27 x A3!, are arriving tomorrow so will be mounting those onto foamboard, also arriving tomorrow. Found a place online that sells self-adhesive foamboard at a good price, so that saves the nightmare job of trying to mount them all with spray mount!

I’ll of course have my recent Lighting Design Photography Award on display , and chained to the desk! along with some of the recent press generated from winning the award.

Busy day tomorrow with everything. Setting up on Wednesday for Thursday so will post an update after the show.

As my house overlooks some marshes, therefore no houses blocking the way, I grabbed my camera, tripod and coat(!), crossed over the road and set up.

Shot for about half an hour and then the clouds went as quickly as they came. Here are three of the best from what I shot….

The moon was so bright that it looks like it could be the sun with a sun filter on the camera to expose correctly, couldn’t believe that it was the moon!

Once the clouds had gone I had a nice clear shot of a very bright moon…

Lunar eclipse is tonight (Wednesday) but not holding out much hope of seeing it if the clouds are still around.

I’ll be aiming to post up interesting ( hopefully!) articles be it about something I have seen, have a view on, recent jobs/shots I’ve done, equipment reviews/discussions or anything else related to my photography business.

Bear with me whilst I tweak the layout/design and content of the blog as I get up to speed. I’ll also probably be adding archived articles i.e. things I would have blogged about in the past as they still have a relevance, as well as adding more content to the blog!

What an absolutely fantastic evening! Arrived not knowing a single sole, but soon met one of the other shortlisted photographers, Andy Spain, during the pre-awards drinks and mingling. Really nice guy and we ended up being at the same table as we were guests of the magazine that ran the awards.

The compère, comedian Alun Cochrane, was brilliant, and there were a few stunts involving motorbikes and twelve times world trials champion Dougie Lampkin!

After a fantastic three course meal, it was time for the awards. The photography category was up first, which at least meant that I wouldn’t be in suspense all evening! As my name was mentioned it took a second for it to sink in, and even as I was walking to the stage I was thinking “Nah, it can’t be!! and waiting for them to say they’d read the wrong name out! But no, it was indeed me and I was duly presented with the fab trophy…..

The rest of the evening was brilliant, seeing the other winners and then being up on stage again with them all at the end for a group shot.

The after awards party was also a lot of fun. There was a fun casino where you bought some ‘funny money’ for charity and then traded them in for chips, playing blackjack and roulette. I ended up having the most winnings at the end for which there was a prize, which I hadn’t realised, and won £500 of Selfridges vouchers! I should’ve filled in a lottery ticket the same evening given how my luck was going!

Photos from the evening.

Awards supplement on magazine’s web site, with me receiving the award at the start of the video.

Lighting magazine ran a whole awards supplement in the subsequent issue, with these two pages on the photography award.

And last, but by no means least!, the images that actually won me the award! The requirements were to submit two images – one commissioned and one that fulfilled the theme of ‘Contrast’.

Duncan-Lawson-Golden-Jubilee-Bridge

Duncan-Lawson-Steps-at-La-Defense-Paris

The Lighting Design Awards have been going for 10 years, with categories for lighting manufacturers and lighting designers, but this is the first year they have had a photography category so it’s all very exciting. Could possibly be the first winner of this award! (fingers crossed!).

Online voting is now open so please vote for me if you can!  (link now removed as online voting closed and page no longer active). Further voting at the awards ceremony will determine the winner.

The awards ceremony is being held at the London Hilton on 10th March 2011 so I’ll be there to see who’s won, and enjoy the evening.

Wish me luck!