…Photographing in the Blarney Stone presents some crazy lighting challenges. I have in some cases opted for flash (mainly if people want the occasional portrait group shot) but 99% of the time I’m using the existing lighting that is there… and there HAS to be lighting or else… well, how are you going to see the band? Haha. I’ve opted for very fast lenses and shooting at much higher ISO’s (like 1600 or 3200 sometimes), but I’ve found that the best technique is waiting for the rotating strobe lights to illuminate the person at the right time. My style of documentary photographer isn’t simply just blasting away frames with no consideration. I concentrate, wait for the composition, observe, breathe, move to a different angle if I’m getting nothing, feel the flow of the music, observe the rhythm of the strobe lights (they tend to operate in set sequences) and wait for it all to light up and then… click, click click! …..
…Regardless of whether it’s a model, a family, a bride and groom and their friends, a little cat or the people of Chinatown, I shoot documentary photography. It’s my passion and forms a major part of my vision and how I see things. Even on a styled shoot such as this one with lots of posing and a professional model, there’s a lot of storytelling behind the scenes that I desired to convey…So my role was that of telling the story that was going on behind the entire project….
I was in the market for a camera as I was looking to make use of the digital Mastin Lab film presets to bring my digital images closer to the way I wanted them to look (like film) and I was also considering a digital full frame that could shoot in demanding circumstances. The type of work I had been doing and the type of demands asked of me made me consider a camera upgrade. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the Leica and my Pentax 645 and Pentax digital cameras but there was a gap that needed to be filled in my line-up. In all honesty, I could probably use any camera to take a photograph but in practice I have found that some tools are much better than others when it comes to certain assignments.
