Sam Savage

With the challenge of an upcoming competition entitled ’50 Shades Of Orange’, eighteen of us headed into the Adelaide Central Market on Friday January 20 to see what we could photograph, orange or otherwise.

Those who attended were provided, prior to the night, with two articles on how to photograph an indoor market, one by James Allan and another by Bruce Nankivell. Before entering the market those who needed technical assistance were helped out by willing participants including Mark Pedlar and our thanks goes to these members. In future we’ll be looking to provide this sort of assistance for every excursion and asking various members to help.

The Adelaide Central Market is always a busy place on a Friday night and even more so when the city is busy with the Tour Down Under (TDU).  Some of our group even ventured to the TDU Village to broaden their night’s activities as you’ll see.

The lighting in an indoor market present a whole raft of challenges for a photographer. One of our participants made the following comment: “With my camera I was not able to take many photos of patrons at cafes due to the low lights and needed to adjust my ISO’s continually due to different lighting throughout the area.  I am amazed at how many different ways ‘orange’ can be used from signs, clothes, food, lights, flowers, cars and many more.  The challenge is to make them interesting.” From the images shown here I think we did a pretty good job, so nice work everyone and thanks for coming along.

Our next excursion will be to the Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens on Sunday March 5, which Tariq will give us all the details on when it gets closer.

Chris Schultz

Mark Pedlar

Bruce Nankivell – market life

Chris Schultz – Lollipop…Lollipop

Libby More

Bruce Nankivell – Can I be of service?

Judy Sara – Ripe Mango

Robyn Due

Kerry Malec

Bruce Nankivell – Yoghurt anyone?

Chris Schultz

Gloria Brumfield

Chris Schultz

Bruce Nankivell – Riding the fence

Chris Schultz

Chris Schultz – Waiting for the moment

Chris Schultz

Mark Pedlar

Chris Schultz

Robyn Due

Mark Pedlar

Bruce Nankivell – TDU Night Life

Gloria Brumfield

Chris Schultz – Watching you!

Posted on December 14, 2016 by James Allan

Dan Schultz : Commercial Photographer

Daniel Schultz is a young successful commercial photographer in Adelaide. He kindly gave up his evening on Thursday night to tell us a little of how he came to his career, what sort of work he does and how he has created some of his impressive images.

Dan began working in a cycle shop, a long way from photography. This expanded to working part time in both the cycle business and in a wheelchair manufacturing concern. Somewhere in here he and his partner had their first child. Obviously now there was a strong need for photographs. He started recording family history using a simple camera. However, several of his images piqued the interest of those who saw them. He was encouraged to pursue his art. Before he knew it he was on his way to commercial photography. An established photographer took him on in a part time capacity while he was still working in the wheelchair business. Then as his experience and client base grew he launched Sweet Lime Photo.

When asked what equipment he used he said he has two cameras, both Canon 5Ds, one Mark 3 and one Mark 4. These are teamed up with three Canon zoom lenses (16-24mm, 28-80mm, 70-200mm) and one Canon 100mm prime lens. His workflow is Lightroom for all the initial “post work” followed by Photoshop for final tweaking.

The aim was to promote a motorised wheel chair. This is the setting Dan used

The setting needed to show it could handle all terrain. So in the middle of summer, Dan needed to create a puddle – with 60 litres of water

The camera was set up with the product – fixed location – tethered to the laptop for each shot

Checking the images on the laptop

Checking the lighting

The final set up

Adding adjustment layers to the images – there are lots of them – the sky, the path, the chair details, star burst on the light…..

Driving the wheelchair to make a puddle would be difficult – so make your own splash by throwing rocks

And now add in the splash and blur the wheel for motion

The final shot with all adjustment layers, panoramic background (there we many shots stitched to make that), the sky (clouds from another shot) – as it appears on the product site.

The image sequence above highlights Dan’s workflow for a product shoot for a motorised wheelchair. Click on the images to see full captions

Dan makes heavy use of the layers capabilities of both software packages. Final images commonly make use of anything up to 60 layers. He illustrated his process by taking us through the creation of an advertising image for a new motorised wheelchair. The background was a panorama of multiple vertical images stitched together. Each of these was the HDR result of combining several exposures of the same shot. This panorama overlaid with a shot of the wheelchair and rider was then worked on using layers to dodge and burn various small portions of the image to enhance shadow and highlight detail and to introduce water splash and reflections.

Not only was Dan’s talk enlightening and instructive it was fascinating and a good night out. We are indebted to Dan for the very open way in which he took us into many of his secrets. I now need to settle down and practice what I saw.

Mark Pedlar

Stephanie Mallen – Personal Training

‘Sports’ was our subject and according to the Oxford Dictionary sport is ‘an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.’ In Stephanie’s example above we have an individual who looks like he’s sneaking in a bit of personal training during lunch break. I believe this is Stephanie’s first entry, which was in the Novice category and it scored a perfect ten….congratulations Steph!

As with all of our previous competitions, an excursion was arranged prior to competition night to provide an opportunity for members to create entries for the subject. The excursion this time was to the City To Bay Fun Run and pleasingly there were some entries as a result.

Bruce Nankivell – City Bay One foot after the Other

Our judge for the evening was Benjamin Kerr who is relatively new to the world of judging and it has to be said he definitely impressed as reflected with considerable positive feedback. For me it was enlightening to have a judge who looked upon each photograph for what it was and judged it as such rather than judge it perhaps less highly because he didn’t quite understand the image.

Benjamin states: ‘Photography for me is about validation and connection – giving the viewer something that they might desire or simply identify with and to provide a perspective that gives you an opportunity to think and contemplate.
Having recently graduated with my Diploma in Photo Imaging (June 2016) I must be honest and say that I am yet to find myself as an Artist with a definitive and recognisable personal style.
I enjoy what I do and yes I intentionally flit around and experiment between Commercial Work, Portraiture, Weddings and Formals, Landscape, Abstract, Macro, Astro, Architecture and a whole suite of other categories.’

This range of interests in his photography came through in his judging with a wide understanding of what is required to make it all work in the different scenarios.

You can check out some of Benjamin’s work and find out more about him at: http://www.snapshotdigitalimagery.com/Pages/home

Just grabbing some of his feedback for a moment:

• ‘Need to be sure the focus of the image is in a dominant position ‘eg not too far to one side of the image’. The word balance comes to mind.
• Many shots impressed with their clever inclusion of ‘leading lines’.
• He enjoyed the strong contrasts in many images
• Ben showed understanding and appreciation for photos that are difficult to take due to light conditions, reflections, shadows etc.
• A comment we’ve heard from other judges again raised it’s head: ‘Be mindful of what is in the background and if it’s a person and it’s going to be distracting, wait until they have moved out of the frame’.
• Be careful of empty space
• ‘Everything you need to know is in the picture’
• He enjoyed the play of the intentional slow shutter speed in some cases which created a mix of sharp and blurred
• With sports images ‘slower shutter speed gives an increased sense of movement’

Thanks Benjamin for a job well done.

James Allan – A Sea Cave

Bruce Nankivell – Pedal Prix Power

James Allan – Hoping for Recovery

Jennifer Williams – The Snowboarder

Helen Whitford – How to Impress your Mates

Our Open Category once again resulted in plenty of stunning and high scoring images:

Helen Whitford – Elephish

Chris Schultz – Portal

Chris Schultz – Dome

Tariq Mohammad Abdul – Solitude

Jennifer Williams – Back to the Future

James Allan – Steel Wool

Alberto Giurelli – Galaxy

Alberto Giurelli – The Boxer

Chris Schultz – Smoking Violin

Chris Schultz – Street Meet

Alberto Giurelli – Ghost Tree

Steve Walace – Pacific Gull

Helen Whitford – On yer Bike!

Jennifer Williams – Hotham

Jennifer Williams – Tiahn

Chris Schultz – Liquification

Chris Schultz – Che and Me

This was our last competition for 2016 and we hope you’ve enjoyed all of them. Our thanks go to all the judges who’ve helped us through the year and to those who’ve done all the organising behind the scenes for our competitions, something that should never be taken for granted.

Now we can look forward to finding out what the best photos of the year are via our 2016 Annual Exhibition Awards Night on Thursday November 17.

Click these links to view other Top Prints and Top Digital Images.