Portraits: A favourite portrait & a fantastic moustache to be proud of!

December 2, 2011 by Chris Ridley

A recent portrait photography session in Norwich this week – featuring the famous beard of Mark Scott, a great fun photoshoot with an excellent guy. Definitely a couple of photographs I’m pretty happy with! Gotta love that tache.

Mark Scott - Portrait Photography Norfolk

Mark Scott - Portrait Photography Norwich

For the lighting nerds – 4 lights used here on black seamless. Elinchrom head shooting through a honeycomb 17″ BD about 2ft in front of subject.. one gridded head back left as a rim light / hair light, one small speedlite with red gel for background, and one gridded speedlite for his arms. Also a gold reflector to give a little edge to the side of his right arm. Canon 5Dmk2, Canon 24-70 2.8L, Elinchrom DLite4s, 430ex etc.

Brand Evolution & new markets – a review of the new plan from Manfrotto.

November 22, 2011 by Chris Ridley

Last Friday I had the opportunity of being invited to the press & blogger morning of a new worldwide touring event by Manfrotto, a pop up interactive photolab entitled ‘Imagine More’ which was about to open for the weekend in the idyllic setting of Covent Garden in London. The event has already been to Berlin, Hong Kong and Beijing and has had a great reception so far.

Over the weekend the event allows the public to get creative with two pre-designed photo sets on site ready for the public to get involved and have some great photo’s taken. These photographs are all uploaded to their facebook page which in turn gets people connected, sharing and enjoying the photographs and experience, and ultimately leading to brand promotion and awareness.

Brand evolution

To complement the social event, Manfrotto have launched a new range of products aimed at this new group of users, which have been named as the ‘social recorders’. Up to this point, Manfrotto has targeted the professional and advanced amateur user group, so this signifies additional markets rather than divergence away from the pro crowd – I’m assured by Manfrotto they will always continue to make premium professional equipment.

Manfrotto are tapping into a crowd that are currently enthused and experimenting with photography in a social way and the new products launched complement these users – products include a new style of messenger style camera & laptop bag, LED lights and great looking light tripod range, I’ll get to these later on and how they fit with the brand.

Some images from the weekend from the event facebook page

To me, Manfrotto products have always been part of my studio & grip setup right from the beginning when I was just an amateur photographer and these same products have stuck with me over time, it’s definitely kit I can always rely on, it just works. Every professional knows Manfrotto, a brand renowned for creating professional level photographic supports, stands and heads, Manfrotto has created a constant good reputation because of this.

Manfrotto is part the much larger Vitec Group plc, who “provide vital products and services that support the capture of exceptional images” – and I got the chance to speak with both the Imaging Sales & Marketing Director and Supports Managing Director Marco Pezzana, and Communications Director Simona Colombo. Marco talked about having identified a new niche of consumers, which they have named ‘social recorders’ – which as I understand, to be the iPhone / compact camera / social user that want to just explore photography in a social way, IE using pocket sized cameras or smaller entry level DSLRS capturing fun and daily photographs for social and personal use, rather than a professional creating image for commercial use.

Some of the new products that caught my eye:

Manfrotto Red Messenger Bag and White Tripod
1. Messenger style bags. (Unica V Messenger Red Limited Edition) I have one of these now, and as you probably know I have more photography bags than I know what to do with as there is not a bag on earth that ever ticks all the boxes. I’ve been a fan of LowePro bags for many years, and recently added a big Vanguard Skybourne to the collection – but this new style bag from Manfrotto changes it again. When I’m not on a photoshoot, I generally just carry my Macbook Pro & Canon 5Dmk2 in satchel / rucksack type bag for day to day use, so this new Messenger style bag just fits in perfectly into my current ‘offline’ useage. Although Manfrotto have had messenger bags out for a while – to have such a good looking, bright and modern bag rather than the usual black bag that account for 90% of all photography bags.

The messenger bag is colourful, well made, and definitely a premium product thoroughly thought out for the DLSR & Laptop user, with a padded inside sleeve for a laptop (fitting my 13″ Mac Book Pro perfectly) together with separate padded areas for my 5Dmk2, alongside a 24-70 2.8L as well as fitting in the 16-35 2.8L with loads of room to spare for batteries, cards, flash unit etc. One of the best features of the bags is that it has a dedicated space underneath with a zipped area where you can fit one of the new awesome looking white travel tripods. This bag is going to be my new favourite – and it doesn’t even look like a photography bag which is even better for walking around London with.

Manfrotto White Tripod
2. New white tripod. This is a genius idea – it’s almost like the white iPhone idea, break away from the usual black colour of tripods and supports and make a easy to use, compact and light, but still uber premium product in white and grey high quality metal & plastics. Looks great, and extends to a whopping 130cm, I was shocked considering it’s packed size – I had assumed it’d just be half the size. A great product that can be slung in a travel bag for quick use in a non pro environment. It has a smooth compact ball head on it too – allowing you to use both video and stills on the same head – as you can move it to both landscape and portrait positions and anything else in between, great for an quick and light all-round solution.

Manfrotto Red Messenger Bag & LED Light
3. LED Lights – these are great, little battery operated bright LED lights that have a hot-shoe mount (removable) so that you can add some extra light to your photos and videos without having to use a big flash unit. Surprisingly powerful, and properly pocket sized. My biggest excitement with this was that you can use it is a video light for your iPhone, great for videos when you are out and about and the light just isn’t quite bright enough to light a face. I’m looking forward to testing the full range later in the month so I’ll let you know then. Looking pretty promising so far.

Conclusion:

I love the direction that Manfrotto are headed, using the existing pro level premium product ranges twinned with a brand carrying an excellent reputation and quality, extending a hand into a more dynamic and wider audience of this new developing niche of social recorders. I have a great feeling that they are about to take a big market share imminently.

I’m sorry if I’m coming across a little obsessed – but it’s not often I meet a photography company that have such a genuine enthusiasm about their products and the industry, especially considering they are at such a premium and influential level. It’s great for the photograph industry as a whole and ultimately great for the hobbyists and amateurs that might just become the next pro’s – in my opinion I really do think a rising tide floats all boats.

More information:

»» Manfrotto product range & website
»» Imagine More Facebook Page
»» London Event Press release

Manfrotto Event

Review – Vanguard Skyborne 51 Laptop & Camera Backpack

October 5, 2011 by Chris Ridley

Gear bags – my arch nemesis. I can never find the right bag to carry my photography kit around with me, and I feel I’ve tried a million bags so far and nothing ever is quite right. I’ll be honest, the majority of bags I have used in the past have been LowePro bags, great bits of kit assuming you can find the right fit for your gear. This new bag from Vanguard certainly helps fill a void in my gear bag conundrums. For most of my photoshoots I take a fair amount of flash kit, both small flashes like speedlites as well as studio Elinchrom lights – so I’m always taking around 2-5 bags of kit to the smaller shoots. My standard bag that I use more than any other is the Lowepro Vertex, which has a decent laptop pocket to take my 13″ Macbook Pro that I always take on location. The Vanguard Skyborne 51 certainly is a much bigger bag than it seems, loads of space, 2 main compartments with ample space for most kit. I won’t go overboard listing every specific about the bag – you can find that online.

Main compartment: You can easily fit a decent sized DSLR in there with a couple of lenses and enough kit for day to day use, although it has foam dividers, once you get your main camera in there you’re pretty limited to other arrangements, but that is pretty standard across similar camera bags. Pretty deep though, which is a great advantage for carrying multiple lenses or flash units.

Second compartment is a bit odd, a great open size, but the lack of any dividers rather limits what you can put inside, but I guess it’s designed more for putting day to day stuff in, like a raincoat, bottle of water etc or food inside, as the backpack is definitely designed for walking around with, rather than just moving kit around. The bag is very comfortable to wear, and I definitely recommended it for people who have just one camera body and a couple of lenses, with a load of accessories & a laptop (It comes with a decent sized laptop carry case which is excellent) – but who will actually will be moving around with it their back.

Overall I think it’s a great bag, very padded and feels pretty rugged – I think this bag is perfect for someone who is outdoors a lot, and perhaps doesn’t just want to carry around ONLY camera equipment, but also day to day based clothing / food / drink / hiking equipment in a very comfortable and protected back pack. The bag feels well made and will keep up with my pretty tough usage of bags, I’ll definitely be adding this bag to my collection, and will probably become part of my primary setup going forward. For worldwide travel it could be a great bag to use, it’s on the bigger side – but will still fit in overhead baggage lockers on most planes, but double check your airline as it’s always changing. The bag has a great heavy duty Tripod strap system on the back which is very useful. It’s great to see all access is from the back (your body side) so that nothing will be able to be stolen, or fall out as you’re walking around – a great touch.

More information:
To find out more about the Vanguard Skyborne 51 please have a look at their website here, and there is a video here which helps put it in perspective too.

A great new addition to my wall!

September 29, 2011 by Chris Ridley

I need to have a quick shout out to Canvas Dezign in Lancashire for sorting me out with a massive canvas of a recent photograph taken in Cambodia earlier in the year, the canvas looks awesome on our wall. Great quality canvas, solidly made frame and quick postage, I chose to have full colour print (you can get black and white or sepia too) and the image not wrapped around the edges, personally I prefer this look in most situations. Highly recommended! You can find them on twitter too. @canvasdezign

Canvas

Lucky photo – Half a second before my Canon 5Dmk2 gets soaked in sea water…!

December 24, 2010 by Chris Ridley

It’s my own fault – I know it, but still, these things happen! Wide angle lenses = things seem further away. There I was, minding my own business, trying to photograph a half built and abandoned dug out canoe on the beautiful beach of Port Olry, in Vanuatu.. when this thing called a ‘wave’ took me by surprise. Idiot. This is one of the major downsides to always using, and loving using a super wide angle lens.. you really do forget quite how close you are to your subject. Note to self, pay more attention. The camera got properly soaked, but still continued to work, never missed a beat. A few weeks on and it still seems fine, I think I got away with it. It got a little cloudy behind the screen for a day or so, the humidity was crazy high there also which didn’t help, but other than that it seems to have survived. I remember reading in the tech specs that the Canon 5DMK2 had ‘extra weather sealing’ and now I am very glad to have had it. I’m not sure my 40D would have survived.

Phew. Although insured and covered, it makes no difference when you’re in the middle of nowhere..

Canon 5DMK2 gets a soaking

Big decisions – which Canon EF Lenses are best for travelling?

December 17, 2010 by Chris Ridley

I thought I would take a moment to talk about the lens choices that I have made for travelling around for 6 months. I wanted to be able to fit my main camera body, laptop and lenses into my carry on aeroplane bags, so the weight restrictions imposed by the airlines make it quite difficult to choose the right kit suitable to what I (perceive to) need.

The difficulty is that you just can’t take everything, it would be too expensive in extra baggage allowance, too heavy to backpack around, and just too much to worry about. With the rest of my kit accounted for I worked out that I could only really take two Canon EF lenses, to fit my Canon 5D Mark 2.

Most of my photography is at the wider end of the spectrum, I knew that much already, so it was a logical choice to take one of the best Canon EF wide angle, low light zooms. I selected my 16-35mm 2.8 L lens, nice and wide, super sharp and great in low light. I knew from the start that I would always be taking my work horse 24-70 2.8 L lens, it just covers pretty much everything, an awesome lens that is on my camera when I don’t know what to expect, it’s fast, reliable and tack sharp. I don’t use my 70mm plus lenses at all most of the time, and although I knew that I would miss out on a number of shots where I needed a longer reach, it would spend longer in my bag and breaking my back than actually on the camera – so the decision to leave the telephoto at home was made.

So I ended up choosing just the 16-35mm 2.8 L and the 24-70mm 2.8 L, to last me 6 months photographing whatever situation arose. I knew it would be difficult selecting lenses, believe me I spent a lot of time trying to decide, I had many options available – trying to account for everything is a daunting task, but you can’t take everything!

If you have a look on the Canon EF Lenses website you can have a look at the complete range and decide what you need for your travels, there is a lens for every situation, it’s just trying to pick lenses you think mesh with your photographic style and situation. The Canon EF range covers from 14mm ultra wide angle to 600mm super telephoto – with over 60 lenses to choose from.

At the end of the day, the less kit you take, the less decisions you need to make, and the less worry. Just choose a couple of lenses and forget about it, you’ll soon make allowances for lack of reach, in pretty much most situations you can just use your feet as a zoom lens.

For more information on the Canon EF Lens range have a look here.
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This post is sponsored by Canon

Underwater photography with a Poseidon rebreather – Testing kit

September 2, 2010 by Chris Ridley

We had the opportunity to test out a new scuba diving rebreather courtesy of Poseidon UK and my local scuba diving centre in Norwich, Norfolk. This Poseidon Diving Systems MkVI Discovery rebreather is the first truly recreational closed circuit rebreathers, perfect for the professional underwater scuba diving photographer.

Without boring you with the details they allow you to spend a lot longer underwater, and you expel no bubbles whatsoever, thus giving you a massive advantage by allowing you to get much closer to the underwater world that you would normally get with a standard scuba diving setup. This was my first time on a closed circuit system like this, and it was pretty enjoyable – I can definitely see the advantages to this kind of system for underwater photography. I only tried this new Poseidon MkVI Discovery rebreather in a swimming pool – so apart from a few rogue plasters there was little life to be scared away… not an adequate test.. but maybe next time I’ll be using it properly.

It was an interesting feeling breathing through a rebreather, once I got my buoyancy sorted it was incredibly easy to use (within reason – it is a piece of mega tech!)
Getting my head around the fact the air is just going round and round and being injected and mixed, cleaned and pumped to make it fresh again was a weird feeling! They retail around £5000, with around £20 per scrubber replacement every 3hrs.. a mere snip! Found some cool scuba diving t shirts whilst looking for scuba kit though…

Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 coming out soon, but I want it sooner! | Review

August 27, 2010 by Chris Ridley

Great news today for techy Canon lens fans, Canon have decided to release a new wide angle lens, and as anyone that knows me will know I’m a little obsessed with using wide angle lenses – and this isn’t going to make my addiction any better.It is has been designed to offer both circular and full frame images, which will appeal to both markets and sensor sizes.
For instance if I want to use my old 10-20mm Sigma wide angle on my Canon 5DMK2 it’s just creates a wierd looking fisheye image that just doesn’t work -

Canon 8-15mm L lens (Image from DP Review)

so hence why I bought the 16-35L 2.8 Canon lens, to get a nice and sharp wide angle for my full frame camera. So this lens offers everything, I could use it on the 5DMK2 at 8mm and get a full 180 degree photograph, or use it at 15mm and have a super sharp ultra wide angle photograph, but having the choice ‘on camera’ is excellent – I certainly think this could be a big seller perhaps?

Update: 01/09/2010 – This lens has now been put on sale to pre order at certain stockists, here is a link if you want more information on current price or to pre-order this lens on Warehouse Express: Click here.

More info:
Original article
Press release here: DpReview
Pre-order & Buy Here and check prices

Blogging with wordpress on the iPad – Is it really worth it? | Review

August 6, 2010 by Chris Ridley

A review of writing blog posts and blogging with the wordpress on the iPad. Problems and annoyances with and without the app. This is the same app as the WordPress for iPhone, as far as I am aware there are no more features in the iPad version than the iPhone version.

I love my iPad, I really do, but there are somethings about it that are really becoming a pain in the neck. Blogging, I update my blog 4 or 5 times a month, and quite often I am abroad or away from my laptop – so you would think the iPad would be perfect for this.

For simple blog posts:
For simple blog post, i.e. mostly text and simple formatting, it’s not bad at all but if you want to start adding images and adding links in the text to enrich the readers viewing pleasure it’s a but more problematic.

WordPress iPad app:
For instance, I’m writing my blog right but I’m not using the word press ipad app to do it. I find the spellchecker and typing experience better in something like iPad ‘pages’ which is auto saving which is a huge bonus. To be honest although i can get the iPad word press app working fine back in the UK, its been giving me problems even connecting to it from abroad.. So I’m sort of stuck without the app at the moment.

Writing drafts in the app:
A great thing about the iPad word press app is that you can draft posts offline which helps in the situation I am in now, although it offers no more features than just writing in the iPad pages application.

Adding links:Still a pain, but its still more a case of lack of multitasking and the hassle of finding the page, getting the URL, pasting it in etc, it just takes so much more time in the ipad than on my laptop.

Speed of typing on the iPad:
Not bad at all, in fact better than I expected it to be, especially with a bit of practice. I would say that although it, for me, is as quick as typing on the iPad as the laptop, the time taken still increases as soon as you want to go back and edit the text, especially if you are getting lots of mistakes along the way – but to be fair, the majority are self adjusting and correcting which is pretty great.

Adding images.
Pain in the neck. WordPress app is ok, but still limited in what you can do. Using the online original version has its problems too.. Such as flash based image uploader. So what do you do? Well, I took a photo on my iPhone, emailed it to my iPad.. which I couldn’t upload because I don’t have flash. The wordpress app does allow for image upload direct from your saved photos folder, but if you need to resize and optimise your image for the web you will need to find a app that does that before you upload it.

Personally I am a little disappointed with wordpress blogging on the iPad, the wordpress iPad app could have so many more features to make it perform more in line with normal web version.

I think if i wasn’t having this weird XML parser error when trying to connect to my blog from abroad then maybe I would like it a little more, but with my 4-6 month trip to the South Pacific in October I need to get a solution sorted by then. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

Final thoughts. It’s good enough to do a basic blog post, but in my opinion not as good as it could be. I’d love to see a third party app developer get their teeth into it and see what comes out the other end. I think i’ll just keep drafting them on the iPad, and then wait until I get to a computer and give it the final touches.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and your own review of the WordPress iPad application too!