Supernatural

I had taken a hiatus from my work on gothic and supernatural art and photography but after browsing posts at the http://www.wickedlyromantic.blogspot.com/ blog for supernatural flavoured romance writers I'm inspired to get the studio busy with were's, witches and vamps again. While I've currently not a clue as to how one approaches publishers to offer art for book covers, I'm hoping to push more of my work in that way as it's probably the one market that caters directly and specifically in my speciality field.

A recent shoot I was booked for fell well into the witchy realm with the model who booked me adding a prop skull and tarot deck to the mix. (see below)


The shoot was up near Noosa, a three hour round trip but well worth it for the fun. We're due to work on a three shoot series spanning more supernatural themes over the next couple of months.

Welcome to IT Hell!

Things ground to a painful halt in the office as the PC decided that the fairly recent upgrade to Windows XP SP3 was not all it was cracked up to be and consequently... cracked up in a bad way. I discovered that since Style XP had been installed prior to SP3, a conflict arose during the upgrade and Style XP never resolved the conflict with their usually prompt updates. This resulted in pretty much ALL of my Adobe suite programs performing quite bizarre forced refresh sessions of all of its windows, slowly, and infuriatingly when I was working on fine tuning images or critically important layouts.

Thankfully a long search yielded this file which has patched my WinXP SP3 to now work with StyleXP so that my system is again looking how I prefer and much more importantly, isn't hanging on every second mouse movement or button click. I found that the lightstar forums had lots of info on Windows skinning and I'm now considering releasing a handful of pretty landscapes to the skinning communities. (with very subtle branding)

Now that my system is seemingly better, I've got a truckload of shots to process from the last fortnight in Adobe Lightroom. (ouch) Speaking of Adobe Lightroom, I'm dead keen to get my mits on the new version. Lightroom has finally caught up to other pro packages for RAW file processing in that it now gives more control over exposure and editing of shots not only on a global change level but in a more localised way, much more like traditional dark room dodge and burning! The upgrade is about $160 so I'll hit that as soon as I can.

Now that I am getting back into shooting through weekends at clubs and venues I am getting back to being able to focus in very low light manually again, manual flash an old speedlight to suit in the house strobes, lasers, smoke machines and flying hardcore drunks (don't ask) and other nightclub anomalies. This is well and good but it's mostly best for me to be ready for the next big concert shoot, so I can match or better my recent VNV Nation concert captures where I nailed 400 shots in focus through the first three songs. Having a Nikon D3 is a huge factor in this success but if I din't know how to best use it, it'd be a waste of $6000.

Before I go, have some links to sites I have thrown together in the past month or two:
My now weekly Club Blink social shots are now at http://www.greenmantle.biz/BLINK/
The Abbey Medieval Festival imagery is coming together still at http://www.abbeypics.com
and History Alive (Fort Lytton) images will be found at http://www.historyalive.greenmantlestudios.com/gallery/

VNV Nation in Brisbane

I just had the pleasure of working with the lovely lads of VNV Nation. Their warmth for the audience is so clear and the effort they put into their shows was off the charts, so I'm very happy to have been given the chance to shoot their gig as the only photographer in Australia to get accreditation!! I managed to squeeze in just over 10GIG of shots in the first three songs!

Thankfully, the Nikon D3 shot with consistently perfect exposure, most of which was captured at ISO4000, aperture priority with a Sigma 30mm F/1.4 lens (thanks Morgs - I do owe you!) which is small for this sensor but rocks anyway. (hint hint Nikon - you NEED to produce full frame wide primes - real primes - not the slow ass 2.8 shit)

Anyway - pics tomorrow!