Gladstone Taylor - Taylor G Photography Blog » canon-30d

On Assignment: Horace and Rochelle

taylor — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 06:00:31 +0000

and another weekend of couples deeply in love. Today we were working with Rochelle and Horace. Location: Hellshire, Assistant: @linkinmchenry and his friend Brian (dunno his twitter handle).

The original idea i had for this day was to shoot in a cave I had visited once however I had no idea how to find it so we improvised with another location I knew of. We had to park and trek through bushes and over some serious rocks but it wasn’t that bad.

We didn’t waste much time after arriving at the location as the weather didn’t seem like it’ll hold out for much longer. @linkinmchenry was my key light controller and brian the fill and some times kicker.

Setting for the main light didn’t change from 1/4 power at all. The presence of those clouds kinda kept the ambient diffused and fairly constant for the time we were out there.

@linkinmchenry kinda pitched in some artistic direction which I tweaked a bit.

Let’s break Down the shot that I’m showing you guys.

Here we have Horace in the foreground as the main subject, and Rochelle goofing off in the background the softliter was the only lightsource illuminating Horace and a sb900 in su4 mode at 1/16th was used to light Rochelle in the background. It all came together nicely though.

Portrait Session – In Studio

taylor — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:13:29 +0000

A few weeks ago I was commissioned to do a small portrait session. What was cool about this was the client knew exactly what she wanted which meant all i had to focus on was Light, exposure and the rest was history. This time I threw the backdrop stands up and used a 6ft roll of studio white backdrop paper.

Lighting

Sb 28dx as Key-light shot through translucent umbrella Camera Left above subject about 3 – 4 feet away at about 1/4 flash power
sb 400 as fill, shot into a reflective umbrella Camera right on subject height about 3.5 maybe 4 feet away at about 1/8th flash power

The session took about 30 minutes give or take 5 minutes. Client was happy with her images and all’s well that ends well .

My next entry should have something to do with Caribbean Fashion Week 2010.

A Tribute To Micheal Jackson

taylor — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:06:09 +0000

A friend of mine had this idea to do a Tribute to Micheal Jackson both in imagery and in writing. I’ve got zero rights to his penned Tribute but here’s the image I shot for him. This was also the last time I’ll be shooting with the sigma 28 – 70 f2.8 – 4

Strobist Studio Meetup April 3 2009

taylor — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:46:22 +0000

Hey y’all its been a while since the last Strobistjamaica meet up. Partly because of drama with a location that we really wanted to shoot on. Water commission duped us twice in a row with access to the Mona reservoir. We’ve so over that location now though so its all good.
This week we were able to shoot at pulse’s (yeah super model making, cfw presenter pulse) Studio. This was the fist indoor shoot for a strobist meet up. So our lighting was pretty consistent Didn’t have to tweak shutter speed or aperture much as everything stayed the same. And thanks to Greg there were some pretty powerful strobes (novatron 500′s x 3) and as a result of lack of communication we had 2 models (which is better than 1 so lack of communication for the win). Total crew was up to about 12 people i believe which included Tamara (MUA), Ayanna (model 1), (Gio’s model), Greg, Dameon, Ricky, Don Gio, Tonian, Peter Chen, David Madden (pass through), David (new to the group but talented), Taylor (me), our biggest turn out to date.
What I learned from this exercise is it doesn’t only take a beautiful model. I mean it certainly makes it easier but You’ve gotta use the meat between your ears. Prepare, plan , prepare and then plan some more. have your concepts down before entering that studio and after nailing what you want.. if there’s still time go ahead and try some free styled / fun stuff.

The weekend of Light

taylor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:11:48 +0000

February ended pretty cool in my opinion. Friday night I had a field day.. erm night lighting glass followed by smoke at home in my recent studio (pics coming soon) which i turned a room at home into. Used foam core as the backdrop and base. Plexi Glass to pick up a reflection of the glass and the strobe behind the foam core backdrop to give that rim lighting effect on the glass. Here’s a sample shot from that whole session. I had a bit of color problems cuz of my horrid tungsten lighting. but a piece of white paper which i used as my white balance card to use a custom white balance sorted all of that out.

Now for the Smoke, My favorite part of the night. I took some incense sticks I saw my mom with n decided to try this experiment out. I’m sure you’ve seen tonnes of photos of people lighting smoke so this is nothing profound however I just loved the results. I lite the smoke off axis and had the light a bit behind the smoke and off to the right so as to not light the foam core background at all. The results were great. to the left you can see a composite of the glass and the smoke.

On Sunday there was the Strobist Jamaica meet up but I have yet to process those images so that post will come later. video included .