Due to the first day of work experience going well, I was lucky enough to be asked to assist Ian Farrell again. This time, for a shoot he is doing for the Medical Research Council (MRC) in preparation for his trip to The Gambia. This involved me travelling to Addenbrooke’s hospital with him and assisting him with lighting for an on-location shoot. The morning consisted of me helping to set up his equipment in the hospital room for the shoot – tri-pod, reflector and flashgun and contributing to figuring out which lighting set-up worked best to document the process. I was in control of the flash gun, directing the light to bounce off the ceiling or wall to reflect onto the subjects, as directed by Farrell. He also would direct me with what settings he wanted the flash gun to be on, meaning I had to adjust them when needed. He used a Nikon flashgun SB-900, Farrell taught me how to use the ‘M Mode’ to control the power of the flash, 1/16th, 1/8th, each one of those is one stop but e.g 1/8th with 0.7+ or similar alters the brightness too, like the stops, but more subtly. He gave useful advice for on location shooting, such as: if you’re in a room with standard fluorescent lights – such as the ones in the hospital room, it is often needed to adjust your shutter speed if a black line is appearing in your photos. The black line occurs due to the flicker of the lights happening at 1/50th second – so you’ll need to match your DSLR to 1/50th shutter speed to prevent these black lines from occurring.
Farrell is contributing to documenting the research the MRC are doing comparing babies health here in Cambridge to those in The Gambia. The shoot consisted of documenting the process for a 1 month old baby having a health check; the baby had an ECG scan (baby MRI) to monitor it’s brain activity, was measured, weighed and played with by their parents. The photos will most likely be used by the MRC for commercial purposes, to represent what they’re doing. Below are some of the final edits Ian Farrell created and I assisted with:
In the afternoon, I assisted him on another commission for Fuji X online magazine. This one had the purpose of documenting a tutorial of how to use tethering (connecting your camera to your laptop/computer whilst shooting). I helped him to set up a still life display for him to shoot in his studio, I also took some of the photos on his full-frame Nikon DSLR using a 24-70mm lens, which demonstrated him using tethering for the tutorial; he directed me of what he needed to be in focus in the photos. Roles reversed, he of course shot ones of me too, to document the process of tethering. Farrell taught me how to make all objects in a still life photo look as though they’re the same size, by putting the camera lens into full zoom but then moving back to get it all in the frame.
This tutorial, by Ian Farrell, featured on the Fuji X online magazine. Check out their website: https://www.fujifilm.eu/uk And his: http://www.ianfarrell.com