Event Photography - Wittering Summer Ball

July is proving to be a busy month with weddings at different ends of the country, but I also had the immense honour to be booked as the photographer at RAF Wittering’s Sergeants’ Mess Summer Ball. Their previously-used photographer was already booked, so thanks to some speculative communications on my part, their committee already had my contact details.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll see that I’ve done Balls at military bases before – however, this time there was an interesting request: could I do ‘green screen’ and offer a choice of background?

This is something I’d not previously even tried, let alone accepted payment to do. So, wanting to secure the booking, but not leaving myself in a position to fail, I asked for a couple of days to check out the options. Some parts are quite simple, such as buying a plain green backdrop, and shooting tethered to a laptop. However, the actual processing of green screen at a speed and simplicity required at an event was a new proposition. I did the usual Google search and tried out a couple of software trials, before finally selecting an application called ‘Green Screen Wizard.’ As the name suggests, it automates a great deal of the processing, and allows the preview and selection of a number of different backgrounds.

further trial at home in the living room proved that I could create a work-flow that not only ensured I could offer the service, but that it could be done pretty seamlessly and swiftly at the event (guests are quite rightly more interested in enjoying their evening than waiting an age to choose their photos.)

So, on 8 Jul I set up at the Sergeants’ mess, with my eldest Niece acting as my glamorous assistant for the night, in one of their rooms and prepared to see if what worked in testing would work in anger.

All set for the green screen magic! 

In the interests of speed and reliability, I set my camera up to store 2 copies of each picture: a full-resolution, maximum quality file that would stay on the memory card in the camera, and a small, low(ish) quality file that would be sent to the laptop.  In this way, the guests could rapidly see a preview of their picture, and choose their backdrop.  This actually worked really well, as the preview was of high enough quality for viewing on the screen and allowed the laptop to rapidly process the green-screen with no glitches or slowness.  Once back at the studio, I then processed the high quality version, and produced their final image.  Also, for the images that included areas of the room outside of the green screen (large groups for example) I could then open the image in Photoshop and fill-in those areas with a green fill, re-import into Green Screen Wizard and produce the final image.

With the green screen.

After the background is applied.

If you went to the event, your pictures have been printed by my pro lab (the excellent Loxley Colour based up in Glasgow) and I’m now waiting on the mount frames (from the equally excellent Photovalue) with the correct event info printed on them – I hope to have them this weekend for a bulk delivery to the mess.

A Great Event Shoot for Christmas.

In my previous post, I promised that I’d not leave it so long before my next update – and here it is!  The headline piece of activity is that we were really honoured to do the portrait photography for the RAF Cosford Officers’ Mess Christmas Draw.  We had a fantastic evening, with all the guests having a great time and loving having their photographs taken, the fun props ensured people kept coming back for more!  If you were at the event, and you ordered prints on the night, they are right now being produced by my favourite pro print lab (the excellent Loxley Colour)  and will be with me later this week ready for mounting and sending back to the Mess for you to collect.  If you didn’t order on the night, you can still get prints and downloads direct from my sales website – just follow the link under ‘Client Galleries’.

You may have seen on my FaceBook page that I’d ordered a ‘roller banner’ for advertising at events, wedding fayres and the like.  It was a really good ‘Black Friday’ deal from Colour 24; I was especially pleased that it arrived in time for the Christmas Draw and that it has come out looking fantastic (if I do say so myself!)

A relatively short update this time around, but I should have a couple more posts before Christmas, as there are a couple of interesting assignments coming up.  This is the first blog post that I’ve integrated with an e-mail distribution service – so if you’re getting this in your in-box it’s because you’ve booked us previously or bought images from us. I don’t want to fill inboxes unnecessarily, so if you’d rather not receive future blog posts, then there should be an ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the e-mail (I won’t be offended!)

Thanks as ever for the support and messages.

Al.

Where has the time gone?!?!

Soooooo, it’s been quite a while since my last blog update – and I really have no excuse apart from being busy busy busy!

My last post was about the great time I had photographing the Summer Ball at RAF Cosford – and the good news is that I’ve been given a repeat-booking to cover their Christmas Ball next month!  I’ve got lots of ideas for this next ‘event’ assignment, not least a better way of wirelessly getting the photographs from the camera to the laptop.  At the Summer Ball, I tried to use an EyeFi Mobi Pro memory card – essentially a memory card that generates a WiFi bubble for transferring photographs over to a laptop or tablet.  Although it worked flawlessly in testing ahead of the night, it wasn’t playing ball at all and I had to resort to a very (very!) long USB cable.  I’ve since invested in another WiFi solution, this time from Nikon themselves – again it’s been totally reliable in testing but I’ll be keeping the long cable handy just in case!

Should've been great - but was a big frustration.

Those of you with eagle-eyes may have noticed my FaceBook feed has had some more wedding pictures appearing, it’s been a great year for weddings, and it’s been an honour (and lots of fun) to be able to document these really special days.  At the most recent wedding, I offered the couple an extra of a photobooth-style setup for their reception.  That was a great deal of fun, with the addition of a few props their guests really let their hair down and it added a wonderful extra set of pictures for the couple.

On a personal level, I’m building a portfolio of sufficient quality to qualify for a Licentiateship of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), which will allow me to use the post-nominals LRPS, which shows that the quality of my work has reached (or exceeded) the very high standards of the RPS.  To that end, I attended an advisory day in Nottingham to have my current set of images examined with a view to suggest improvements.  As luck would have it, my set of images were first up – and I got a lot of positive feedback, with some pointers on areas for improvement.  These were mainly related to technical aspects rather than artistic ones – the LRPS process is largely aimed at proving a photographer’s technical ability ahead of their artistic vision.  For example, I have a photograph on the site of a bride looking out of a window; I hope you’ll agree that this is a great image; however, as much of the picture is pure white, it’s deemed not up to standard.  No big deal, I now know what the judging panel is looking for, and I need to get a collection of 10 images that meet the full guidelines.  I should (other commitments notwithstanding) be ready to apply early next year.  I will of course let you know how I get on!

My 10 images ready for critique (along with my daughter's ballet bag!)

Shooting the Ball

I recently had the privilege of being booked to take the (semi)formal event photographs at the RAF Cosford Officer’s Mess Summer Ball.  This was a great evening taking photographs of the guests in front of a classic car.

At most of these events, the photos are taken indoors, with very stable and constant lighting – effectively, get set up and then you don’t have to alter your settings all night.  However – this wasn’t such an easy setup!  The location was outdoors, starting at 7pm through to 10pm.  So I started in quite bright sunshine (setting behind the guests) and ended up in pretty much pitch black night!  So, pretty challenging…  I also had to contend with the wind blowing my lights over, or making them swing around so they weren’t pointing in the right direction -  luckily a swift application of tie-wraps sorted most of the issues!

Choosing their picture.

In order to make it really easy for the guests to choose their pictures, I was shooting tethered into my laptop, with this connected to a flat screen TV.  My original plan for tethering to the laptop was to use an Eye-Fi memory card, that sends the pictures over a Wi-Fi link.  Whilst this worked flawlessly in every test running up the event, it stubbornly refused to send any more than 2 pictures when I’d got set up.  So, I swung plan B into action – which took the form of a 5 metre USB cable!  Whilst this limited my movement slightly, it did give me a robust way of getting the pictures to where I needed them.  More testing is required with the Eye-Fi card before the next event, as when it works, it's a fantastic way to work giving much more freedom of movement.

Despite my difficulties, I adapted and overcame and most importantly I got some great pictures, and some very happy customers!  A good tally of sales on the night, and download and print sales from the website in the week that followed made it a really worthwhile event.