Monday, February 8, 2010 Posted in Studio
I recently did a couple shoots for Vanessa Vo, an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist and singer. She plays a number of traditional Vietnamese instruments including the dan tranh as seen above. I’m a huge music lover so it’s always thrilling to work with musicians and even more so when I get to work non-Western instruments into the shot.
For this shoot I pulled out a 22″ gridded beauty dish for the main, a gridded medium softbox for kicker or fill if needed and a 7″ grid spot to light the instrument. Grids, have I ever mentioned that I love grids?!
Friday, January 29, 2010 Posted in Travel
Of course I shot more than just monkeys during my time in Japan. I visited Roppongi Hills in Tokyo where there is an amazing view from the 52 floor of the Mori Tower. There’s also a killer bakery in the complex with this amazing honey toast, mmm. The view is also great from the top of the building, 2 more floors up, but hold on to your belongings and small children, it’s like a wind tunnel up there…
Friday, January 22, 2010 Posted in Travel
I’ve been on a little vacation, finally! I was even mostly away from Wifi so I was never tempted to pull out the iPhone and check email and the web. Nice! I’ve been in Japan and had a great time, even if I got really sick at one point and ended up in the emergency room in Iwata. But everyone was nice there and I can now say I’ve experienced a Japanese ER.
Anyway, I saw so many great places on this trip. We visited the Jigokudani Yaen-Koen in Yudanaka. It’s a hotspring where all the snow monkeys get some relief from the cold and snow in winter. I could have spent all day there just watching their different behaviors.
I used the Nikkor 135mm f/2 for most of the photos here. I would have loved to have had my 70-200mm lens here but I would not have loved lugging that thing all over Japan so it stayed at home. Luckily the 135mm ended up being an ideal focal length on a full frame body. It was COLD and mostly overcast. The snow created very difficult shooting conditions as I moved from location to location. I kept my aperture at f/2 and tweaked the shutter speed as needed, which was very often.
Ok, so I finally got a clip up of the video I’ve been working on. It’s been a long project with one almost disastrous computer failure in between, but it should be wrapping up this week and then going out for replication. The project seemed to grow and grow but luckily I had the privilege of working with many great people during the two day shoot and during the many weeks of post production. The concert was shot on 3 Panasonic HVX200’s. All editing was done with Final Cut Pro and graded in Color.
I’ve been MIA for a while now. Just been really wrapped up in a video project. I’ve been promising a short clip for a while now, well, it is coming soon, I promise. For now here are a couple pics from an interior shoot I did a little while ago. Cheol-sa Kim is a really talented artist, actually multi-disciplinary artist. Not only is he an incredible fine art painter, he also makes great sculptural furniture out of wood, metal and concrete. I never really knew there were so many visual possibilities with concrete in terms of texture and color. It’s pretty cool stuff. All of these photos were shot with a 5′ octobox as main and a white shoot through for fill.
Friday, September 18, 2009 Posted in Concert
Mixing Celtic harps with flamenco dancing sounds a little weird. Surprisingly it went together better than I imagined it would. I guess it also helps that you have a dancer as beautiful as Fanny Ara onstage.
All the flamenco shows I’ve shot have been loud with multiple singers, furious guitar picking and strumming, hand clapping, and often percussion. This one was much quieter with perhaps the loudest instrument being the castanet… So I was somewhat reserved in my shooting so as not to annoy too many people with my shutter noise. This was not a show to unleash a 9fps shutter blast. I’ve always thought about investing in a Blimp to muffle camera noise during quiet shows but those instances are so rare that I’ve always put it off. Also, I just can’t imagine shooting anything where the lighting changes quickly and to an extreme degree and having to open up the case each time to change camera settings. For now, I guess I’ll just have to wait until Nikon comes out with a mirrorless EVF body…
by jasonlewphotography
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