VW Bus Calender

Early last year I went to Tasmania to photograph a pair of VW Van's for a image request I got from the UK. I wrote about it here last year.

Well those images were sold earlier this year to a calender company in the UK and the calender has come out and is on sale just in time for Christmas

VW Bus Photo Shoot 2008 - Images by Joel Strickland

Taking photos for the fun of it

It has been a while since I have posted a blog on here. The last few months have been fairly busy shooting and processing jobs.

Im finally finished working through all my current work, so the last couple of weekends I have gone back to my discovering my love for photography.

The first weekend I had a play with some off camera flash. The subject was the family dog who likes to play with the garden hose whilst plants are being watered.
The set up for these was Nikon D300, Nikon 17-55mm lens and a Nikon SB800 connected to the camera via a Nikon SC-28 cord.
Results are below, reasonably happy how they turned out, even though they were taken for fun

Then last night a fellow photographer friend of mine, Brandon who has just moved out from the states, came over with his fiance for a few beers and nice Aussie BBQ.

After a few beers, the creative jucies started to flow, so out came the camera's.

Brandon had been wanting to try the new TTL Pocketwizards, so I arranged to borrow a set of them for him to have a play with whilst I looked after the BBQ.

After dinner I decided to play with a couple of different products.

The Honl Photo Colour Filter kit  & the newest product from Joby, the creators of the Gorillapod, the GorillaTorch

First up were Honl Photo Colour Filter kit . I  decided to use three different Nikon SB800's with different gels on them to light the pool. Two SB800's had a blue gel on them and the 3rd one had a green gel on it.

All three units were placed at different positions around the pool

The other product I wanted to try was the new GorillaTorch. I was using three of them in the same set up and was still using the gels as well..With these instead of sitting them in one postion  I moved around the pool using the torch to paint with light.

The results below show the various images I ended up with,

The painting with the torch was a lot of fun and worked very well considering the units run off just 3 AA batteries. Even when not using them to paint with they work very well to light the work area so you can see what you are doing.

Ferrari California Shoot

I have been doing a fair amount of work recently for The Supercar Club with their drive days and track days
So just last week James called me and asked me to do a quick photo shoot of the new Ferrari California for him to use in their promotion of the new car to their members.
As their car is in Sydney for the next few months, we had to settle with shooting one at the local Ferrari dealer















So early one morning last week we met at the dealership to photograph the car, because we were on a tight time schedule, I shot the car on the showroom floor.

The light wasn't too bad in the showroom, so for most of the images I just used natural light for the detail shots of badges etc.

But for the full car shots I pulled out my trusty Nikon SB800's and my light stands and set up a mini studio. The best thing about using the Nikon SB800's and the Nikon CLS system is that once you have the units in position you can control it all from the master unit on top of the camera. This made it very easy to get just the right amount of lighting in the right area's for the shoot.

Above you can see some of the detailed images of the cars features and badging. I am looking forward to photographing this car again when it finally get down to Melbourne 

For full of Gallery of images just click on slideshow below

Ferrari California - Images by Joel Strickland

Porsche Turbo by night

A good friend of mine has decided to sell his 2000 Porsche 996 Turbo

In it he has competed in numerous events such as the Mt Buller Sprint and Targa Tasmania, with good results including a 5th place this year.

Matt recently got in touch with me asking if I would be happy to take some photos of the car before it sold as the car has had a total respray and is in better condition now then when it was new.

So on a nice warm night last week we arranged to do the shoot. It had to be late in the day due to time constraints, so we met around 6pm and headed straight to one of my spots in Docklands that I use.

It was interesting to note that the Porsche has a decent storage space under the bonnet, it fitted my rolling camera bag in there perfectly.

Once on location I had to work fast as we were losing light fast, I quickly set up a couple of shots using the available light.

In the shots above you can see some of the city lights starting to give that awesome orange glow

Once the light was gone and the city lights starting coming on, I then switched to work with my flash units to light the car and balancing for the city lights in the background. For the first few images I had my Nikon SB800's mounted on light stands which I was then triggering using Nikon's CLS system from another SB800 mounted on top of the camera.

But as we started to loose the ambient light, it became a lot darker and the flashes just wouldn't light up the dark black paint work.

So it was time for some exercise as I painted with light. I bet a few of you have never heard that term before.

Painting with light is just as it sounds painting your subject with light. But instead of a paint brush you use a torch or flash unit as your brush and paint and your subject becomes your canvas.

But because the camera shutter is open for still a fairly short period of time, you have to quick and be on the run, hence the exercise.

By this time I was working with around a 20 second exposure time, it doesn't give you a whole light of time to get the car exposed correctly. In this situation I double up and use two flash units to help speed up the process.

I was pretty happy with the results, for the small amount of time I had.

When I shot the first lot of images when we still had some daylight, I shot a range of exposures to then turn them into some HDR's, the end result was some surreal looking images, but it is still nice for a different effect

2000 Porsche 996 Turbo - Images by Joel Strickland

CrankandPiston.com

I meet many different people through my job, and as a result I have been given some great opportunities to promote my business. As well as being able to help provide content to other websites.

I recently met Luke Ray, who I think is actually busier then me. Luke is one of the founders of an automotive website called Crank & Piston. Luke is based here in Victoria and has a big love for Hot Rod cars and has even created a hot rod magazine called Fuel. Speaking to him tonight, he was preparing to head off very early tomorrow morning to a Hot Rod Show in Victoria's West.
The other half of the site is run by Phil McGovern who is based in Dubai in the UAE. Phil has very cool looking and fast VW Golf race car. He writes about it for the site as well as covering all kinds of motorsport & automotive news and action from the UAE.

So Luke and I got speaking about the site, the content they run and the kind of events that I cover. We could see a benefit to both of us for me to get involved.

So my introduction has hit the site and Im currently working on my first couple of posts, so keep a eye out for them to hit the site soon

Meanwhile check out some of the cool stories on the site as well as Lukes intro of me on the site

Aston Martin Vantage Shoot now on www.themotorreport.com.au

Aston Martin Vantage Shoot

I recently found a new photo location that I have been wanting to try.
So when the TMR guys rang recently to ask if I could do a night shoot of an Aston Martin they were testing, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try this new spot.
So we met just on dusk on location, down on the edge of the Yarra River near Southbank.

As light was fading fast, a issue you have when shooting outside of daylight savings time, I started off making the most of the available light and shooting a couple of HDR shots. The shot above was the best one by far.

Next I moved onto my mini studio set up, using my Nikon SB800's and light stands

I love it when a plan comes together as said by Hanibel from The A-Team TV series. It so true when something you have planned and imagined in your mind, turns out just as you want.
The images above show exactly how I envisaged they would turn out.
I used 4 Nikon SB800's on light stands at different heights pointed at the car and then I balance their exposure with the city lights behind. As always the Nikon CLS system did not let me down in triggering the units.
The only real issue was the huge number of cyclists riding thru the area, I think quite a few of them got the shock of their life as the flashes went off. I did have to re shoot a couple of frames as I had light trails in the images but that was a easy fix.

A couple more HDR shots from a different angle














A couple more from the flash set up shots

As we were starting to finish up these shots the weather started to turn bad, so we hurried and packed up the gear and headed for cover as the heaven's opened
We moved to a undercover car park to finish the shoot, but I only had the detail and interior images to do, so being inside wasnt a issue.
The Vantage has some great dials and guages so these were fun to photograph as they gave off some great colours

I do like on the dash in the above picture, you can see where it shows up three little words every time you start the car, POWER, BEAUTY and SOUL. Only Aston Martin could think of something cool like that

Rest of the images from the shoot can be found in the gallery below, just click on it to be taken through to my website

2009 Aston Martin V8 Vantage - Images by Joel Strickland