Shooting in a derelict building you had to deal with “interesting” characters passing through from time to time. However with the right mix of “ingredients”, a good bit of preparation and some creative collaboration we were rewarded with a diverse collection of portrait photos.

Ingredients

• Dodgy shooting location,
• creative and dedicated model,
• a couple of props and
• a bit of strobist lighting.

Directions

Throw all ingredients in a blender on high speed and have fun.

Credits

Model & MUA: Claire Fridey
Photographer: Theuns Coetzee

Having biked in my younger days I fully understand the philosophy of enjoying two-wheel freedom and you’re bound to meet interesting people at an event like this. So Saturday afternoon I shot down to have a look-see. The one thing I can tell  you is that everyone drools over these cruiser bikes and one has to admire the effort and detail that’s spent in personalising them. I met up with a pleasant gent from East London that after conquering his cancer had the opportunity to ride again. I was quickly schooled in the tradition of customising and was allowed plenty of time to take a couple of shots of a beautiful Wide Glide.

I returned later the afternoon accompanied by Marc Sing Key, who assisted me greatly with my lighting and gear, and we ended up get back to the friendly bunch from East London who made us feel right at home.  We managed to have quite an enjoyable and shoot and not to forget the pleasurable pinion ride on a Harley.

Other than having to get out of bed before the break of dawn and endure a cold & cloudy day the shoot produced fantastic photos.  The teamwork, effort and dedication from everyone made this shoot a pleasurable success.

Credits

Model, Make-up & Hair: Roxzanne Sinclair
Assistants: Marc Sing Key, Jonathan Scheepers

A client approached me about developing a scalable application to handle product orders & tracking. Even though initially it seemed like a simplified shopping cart, after discussing the project requirements it soon became apparent that they needed a customised application. I reviewed my options on how to develop and deliver this and decided upon using the Yii Framework.

Yii stands for “Yes it is!” and is a Model View Controller (MVC) framework written in PHP and I’ve chosen it because of its reputation of being fast and scalable. The big drawback for me, despite having used CMS’s running their own MVC framework, is that I haven’t previously done coding using this method. This means a steep learning curve but I’m quite excited about it as not only will it improve my skill set and knowledge but after having mastered it I will be able to produce rock solid customised applications in future.

So where to from here? The Yii website has good documentation and there’s a few tutorials and demo’s available on the site and forum and I’ve also invested in the Yii 1.1 Application Development Cookbook  from Packt Publishing. My first steps will be to peruse the documentation and complete a couple of tutorials. I’ll blog about this experience in the hope of providing fellow developers that’s also new to Yii and the MVC architecture with some insights of what to expect.

So with new inspiration and enthusiasm I set of to test drive landscape photography since none of my previously owned lenses truly accommodated this. My first exercise was a sunset shot down at Hoby beach, Port Elizabeth. Although this shot wasn’t “wow” it definitely allowed me to understand the abilities and limitations of the new lens and landscape photography. Knowing this I planned for some shooting over the weekend to see if I could better on the first round.

Friday night 9pm I set out for some night photography. My first stop was Hoby beach. Finally after managing to find a parking I got my gear out and strolled down to the beach. With some 80′s rock songs from a live cover band, playing at Barney’s, in the background I poured myself a hot cup of Rooibos and Honeybush green tea from my thermal flask (no photographer should do an on location shoot without one of these filled with your favourite beverage) to chase the chill of the night. I then spent the next 5 minutes looking at the pier to consider what would be the best composition for my shot.

What is HDR

HDR Photos are a combination of at least 3 photos: one under exposed by at least one stop, one with normal exposure and finally one that is over exposed by at least one stop. The 3 photos are then combined by HDR software where you do tone mapping. As an example here is a shot with its exposure bracketed photos and then the resulting HDR image.

-1 Exposure

0 Exposure

+1 Exposure

Final HDR Image

What I love about HDR is the depth of contrast and texture that almost creates a 3D feel to a 2D object and I hope to do a lot more of these.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my dear wife, Christine, for granting me a great lens that helped relight a fiery passion for photography.

With the recent official launch a the musician’s album on which she was responsible for the make-up for the relative photo shoots this was a good time to update her site. This involved adding and removing media, updating the PDF rate cards and tweaking the flash driven site to enhance the visibility of the social links. You can view the latest updates at www.renejoy.com.