I won't bore anyone with the details of the brief here. To cut a long story short, I decided to produce a series of photos of a violin-maker in Sheffield. And yesterday was my first visit to his workshop.
Stefano was wonderfully accommodating and gave me free rein to take whatever shots I wanted. And I came away with more than enough strong ones.
I do have one dilemma - and it is one I have faced before. The university wanted to see a test shoot before a final shoot, but Stefano is a long way from home and although he is happy for me to visit again, the 'test shoot' turned up so many decent shots I am quite happy to use them as final images.
I'm not sure whether some of yesterday's preparatory shots would suffice as examples, instead of having a completely separate test shoot. I've been doing my own little test shoots at home that involve testing my lighting set-up and working out the best positions of lights for shadows etc. But these were at home - 150 miles from where I actually carried out yesterday's job. To be honest, I'm still feeling my way with this kind of thing.
I was pleased with how things went yesterday. It was a situation where I would once have been stressed out and consequently would have made mistakes galore. But for once I managed to stay calm, even when I had a major setback.
I use PocketWizard radio controllers for the flashes and before driving north I searched high and low for my replacement battery for the transmitter - just in case the battery already in the device failed on the job. But I couldn't find it anywhere. So I said to myself, 'The chances of it failing are slim, so I'll take a risk.'
You can guess what happened halfway through the shoot! So I had to ditch the PocketWizards and use TTL instead and operate the flash compensation on the camera to control the intensity.
The lesson learned was that you should never leave anything to chance. Fortunately, it didn't screw up the shoot, but once upon a time it would have sent me into meltdown!
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