Angie - Our 41 year old grandmother builds her own PAAL KIT HOME

What a great day it was for this shoot....blue skies and white clouds are great for our real estate photo shoots.Angie did a great job not only building the house but handling the heat and the bright sun and lights for this shoot. This Paal home was photographed for their web and brochures.The images are pretty much as shot .The landscaping (lawn) will be added in post production...Great work Angie.Check out these Paal Homes, they have wonderful big verandas...the beat the Aussie Sun.

LITTLE LIGHTS -BIG RESULTS...a seminar on the off camera flash

Maree and myself ran the first of hopefully many photography seminars last night. Ebony was a fantastic subject and all enjoyed the course.

This session was based on using off camera flash to create several different end products.We showed how to make a pure white ( knock out ) background to provide graphic artists with clean images....if you provide them with clean images like this they will love you forever and it DOES general repeat commissions.

Behind the scenes look at the set we built for this shoot.

Here is the cropped image we were looking for



Next we changed the lights again to create a street grunge look


Many of the students captured Ebony is strong images

Here is a quick video grab of the students in the studio setting

The next seminar is in 2 weeks, there are a few spaces left. Those interested can contact Maree by email maree@ricwoods.com or call the studio on 02 4962 1066.

Its a great night

LOCATION PORTRIATURE- a class I'm running at ProAm Photo Lab

These are a few of the images were by the participants of a workshop I'm running that was arranged by David Barnes the owner of Pro Am a film lab at Adamstown ( nsw australia)

This was the third night of the 5 sessions and I decided to take the group outside to use some off camera strobes and gels. The previous week we were shooting inside ProAm and the group had a great time with Maree ( my prod mgr/second photographer/very often photography subject). Everyone was very quick to learn how easy it can be to create beautiful light with good exposures and lighting ratios.

I demonstrated how long it takes to set up a scene using 4 strobes and how the strobes are fired by pocket wizards. I have 6 of these and this was great as it enabled me to have 2 students shooting at a time. This is easy on the recycle time for the strobes.

I have 10 + Maree in the group and its fantastic to have people so eager to learn...for me it doesn't get much better.

I used this lane way beside ProAm to demonstrate how easy it is to find and interesting shoot location when you sculpting with light.

The focus was to create not only interesting images to to use it to demonstrate how to direct the subjects, pre visualise the image, synchronise the action and the camera...Here Maree is the victim of some crazy stalker (me)

...then Maree found a bag snatcher...

Below, this is a great double page spread...I can see almost see bold text running down the right side of this image...

The group learnt how to drop the ambient light right down but retain detail

Then the paparazzi became to victim of an unwilling subject.

We then turned around and lit the wall behind us for another completely new scene and tone...

Maree as always gave plenty of great subject matter....

I really liked some of the images captured by those waiting to shoot with the radio triggers

We even kidnapped "the Pizza Guy" for a few of the images.....

I'm looking forward to the next session .We will shoot some inside portraits and Ill show them my post production tips. If your interested in participating in Location Portraiture Workshops shoot me an email enquiries@ricwoods.com

Tiarnes 18th Birthday shoot

Cherrie from O'Carrollyns private eco village at Port Stephens gave daughter Tarnie a portrait shoot for her 17th birthday.We had a great session . Here are a few un edited shots from that shoot.

We did several looks an Jo Nelson did a great job of hair and make up.

A beauty dish high camera left and a gridded spot camera right to light the chair and to drop some shine on her pants

We try to achieve several hairstyles during the longer sessions as well different lighting setups.

We shot other frames to be converted to Mono, these need to be lit differently