Guestblog Bradford Bird

As you might have already know our blog is featuring one photographer each day we are away in Orlando for Photoshop. The photographers/images were chosen after one of the critique days on twitter which I sometimes do. During these days people can send me images and I will give small tips/remarks twitter style. The best ones are chosen for a guestblog (kind of a picture of the day) on this blog.

Today it’s time for Bradford Bird.
Because I love fashion photography and movies this image had a real attention value for me personally (and I hope also for you guys).

Bradford Bird, Guest Blog Post
Firstly, a big thank you to Frank for this opportunity! Resources like Frank’s Blog and the kind sharing of numerous others like Scott Kelby, Zack Arias, Jeremy Cowart and Chase Jarvis have been an invaluable tool for me to learn, get inspired and get shooting!

So, let’s get started..
I’m Bradford Bird, I’m originally from Cape Town, South Africa but I now live in London. I’ve been shooting part time for around 6 years now and will soon be making the jump into becoming a full time photographer. It’s been a bumpy road to get me into a position where I can actually call myself a photographer. I’ve worked as a glass collector and barman in a live music venue, in the cruel world of media sales, as a sound engineer, music promoter and production manager. I currently split my time between taking pictures for my growing client list and paying the rest of the bills by working at an online marketing agency. Needless to say, I’m more of a 7days a week, 13 hours a day kind of guy – But I love it!

My first real introduction to photography was in the mid 90’s when I briefly assisted my good friend, Pieter Hugo, well before he became the internationally known photographer he is today. It took me ages to finally buy my first camera which I got from my brother in law in 2005, a second hand Canon 60D with a 50mm 1.8 and a Speedlight 550. I had a trial by fire approach to photography by working as a second shooter on weddings and sports events and while this was a good way to make some extra income, it really didn’t inspire me as much as conceptualising and creating my own images. I can’t really say whether I’d consider my work ‘fashion photography’ but I certainly try to make commercially appealing and beautiful images based around a certain conceptual and ethereal mood – I’m always striving to establish my own unique voice through my imagery which I hope will one day allow clients to come specifically to me to achieve a certain outcome. I really believe the only barrier to doing something you love for a living is yourself, you obviously have to work damn hard to build up the skills but everyone started somewhere and if you’re determined enough to try, keep working through the tough times and keep shooting, you’ll get there.

My gear:
I sold the Canon D60 body in 2007 and saved every penny to splash out on a Canon 5d body and 24-105 lens, which is the camera I use today. The past few years have really been about improving my craft and learning the art of big flashes. The chaps at the Flash Centre have been invaluable in this and I’ve trialled and rented out a bunch of gear from them over weekends. I often rent in Elinchrom BXRI heads, Ranger RX packs, strip boxes, Ranger Quadra packs and just experiment! I also occasionally rent in the awesome (but ridiculously expensive to buy) 85mm 1.2 lens. The best decision I made to further my photography was taking on a studio space – mine is a tiny room in an old biscuit factory in Bermondsey which is just affordable being in Central London. I do have use of the whole building for location shoots which was a real clincher for me. The image I want to share was shot on the roof of my studio building in Bermondsey.

ISO100 f13 1/200

About the shot:
I’ve wanted to shoot in this location for many months and I planned the shot well in advance. I worked with the make-up artist Sharka Potocskova and stylist, Emma Pulbrook – I also roped in an assistant friend, Tricia Baines. I really wanted the series of images to be moody and contemplative, to show off the beautiful clothing leant to us by the designers Tim Rhys Evans and Eliane Sarah Millinery but also to make the most of the dramatic London skyline. London seems to be rapidly changing from an old world city to a new futuristic one and I wanted to convey this idea somehow. We had a big issue with the weather on the day, besides being absolutely freezing, the sun kept breaking through the clouds and completely changing the lighting of the shot and I had to re-adjust both the position of the flashes an f-stop a number of times for consistency across the whole series. I used a combination of lighting for this; I had an Elinchrom Ranger RX pack attached to a beauty dish overhead with the second Ranger head to camera left shot through an Elinchrom strip softbox. I was using a Skyport as a trigger so I also fired a bare Quadra pack to add in the light bleed on the right of the image and the second bare Quadra head from behind to get a bit of definition on the hair. I really loved how the light bleed made the skyline look so I experimented with how much spill was let through.

Here is an iphone snap of the lighting set-up:

Post production:
I use Lightroom and CS5 for editing. I find Lightroom on a Mac to be the fastest solution for me to make a quick selection of the final images, apply a few basic adjustments and then export them to my ‘to be edited folder’ which is saved separately from my main backup drive. I back up all my completed shoots and save them by date shot on my Drobo drive. As should be common practice, I try to get the image right in camera. There are times when a simple tonal adjustment and a skin tidy up are all that is required in post. That said, I’m a big fan of enhancing a certain mood in an image through the use of textures, particularly in the soft light setting in Photoshop. There are plenty of great resources out there to find free or non-commercial use textures, try Deviant Art or search Flickr groups for this. I also occasionally shoot my own textures should I spot something interesting while walking around. Textures often really don’t need to be hi-resolution either; I’ve used textures in the edits of high-res fashion images that I’ve created from a simple iPhone snap. For this image, I cleaned up the skin using the healing brush, brightened up the background slightly and tightened up the toning a little. By the time I actually shot this, the sky had returned to its usual grey London self, so I decided to add a little more drama to the sky using a few sunset and storm cloud textures. I was careful to erase any overlap over the model and buildings using a quick selection and the refine edge tool. The final step was to add a white-to-grey gradient running from right to left and to tighten up the frame slightly with a crop.

I’m in the process of seeding this series out to a magazine, so hopefully it will appear in print soon (yes, paper magazines still exist:) We used 2 locations on the day, the roof and a large abandoned hall in another part of the building. I followed the exact procedure above for the other roof shots and then shot another look with the 85mm 1.2 using nothing but natural light and a bit of texture manipulation.