Bombo in Black (& Color)
A few weeks back I was fortunate enough to join a group of talented people for a photoshoot weekend down the south coast of NSW.
We started off at the coast of Bombo but ventured mainland to areas of woods and waterfalls. It was a very scenic weekend with superb company, a fantastic small break away.
My approach for shoots like this differs a fair bit to client work. Client work I have specific briefs, I bring what I have to bring in order to meet the demands. With shoots like this I can experiment, take risks and try new techniques. I decided to keep things simple and bring just two prime lenses, the rare Kipon IBELUX 40mm/f0.85 along with the XF16/1.4 (equipped on the Fuji XT4 camera body).
My intent was to shoot with a monochrome profile in-camera, but also with RAW files to fall back onto for color interpretations later on.
I went for a filmic look so set the cameras aspect ratio to 16:9 as a rough guide, in the end I cropped most of the work to the more classic widescreen 1.85:1 ratio. I do wish Fuji (and other brands) supported more aspect ratios, if only to offer as a guide for framing at the time, however the 16:9 was still compositionally useful.
I have put together a short video, if you haven’t already seen then please feel free to watch below, otherwise scroll on for some color work.
Bombo.
As I said, most of these were shot monochrome at the time, I was a little worried shooting in such bright high contrast light with the IBELUX would result in unusable color interpretations due to suffering severe chromatic aberrations (I was shooting at f0.85 after all), but really it did pretty well and a lot of the purple fringing cleaned up fairly easily in post processing. In truth I am not really that upset by purple fringing anyway…
Jerrara Dam.
A huge thank you goes out to Mick and Mick (yes there were two Micks!) who are far more industrious than I as they lugged around and took the time to set up a lot more gear for the shots such as strobes, lightstands and modifiers. I am far too lazy for that but wise enough to bring my own trigger so that I could just jump on their ID and group channels and steal all of their handywork (compositions and all!). I am the worst kind of tog to have around, lazy and a thief :D
Toolijooa Tunnel.
The evenings entertainment was brought to you by Michael Lynch and Mick Tait. Mr Lynch has earned himself an amazing reputation as the ‘light painter’, and Mr Tait… well he just loves smoke bombs and trying to set himself on fire! Like I said, I can’t really take much credit for these images, it all goes to the actors and actresses and those that brought the fun!
I especially adore Tammy with her clown and hoop work, I really regret not capturing any video footage of this. Definitely something I am keen to try again another day.
Falls Creek.
I started in mono so I will finish in mono.
I’ve always wanted to try shooting behind the waterfall. Rob and Sarina were my willing subjects and I’m pretty chuffed with the results.
Technically these were tricky shots. I wanted to use the 40mm lens at its widest aperture (f0.85), whilst simultaneously slowing down the waterfall behind them for a more pleasing effect, thus I needed the use of a lot of ND filters in order to drag the shutter sufficiently. And then lastly I had to use some kind of flash as fill otherwise they would be a complete silhouette, so here I used my own (for a change) Godox AD200 bare bulb. To top it all off it was such a tight squeeze for me to find a position, difficult to compose and get a shot… there must be easier waterfalls than this!
If you’ve made it this far, well done, thanks for looking, and don’t forget to watch the video above (acquired taste required). As always any questions please feel free to ask below.
