Phantom Parkor

The aim of this shoot was to capture some action shots along with some portraits of Adam practicing parkour, At the time i was based in DCU which leant itself perfectly to the shoot. The high modern buildings acted really well as the back drop for this modern street art and discipline. Living there at the time I had plenty of ideas of where to shoot, but with the building of the new entrance with wooden poles this allowed me to create some unique shots.

A word From Adam " Phantom"

In the beginning I was a gymnast, I took it up during my fourth year in secondary school, and for a while I was really into it. I started training with my younger brother every weekend and as the club grew in people it moved to a bigger hall, giving it a chance to run more classes more regularly and eventually began running this thing called parkour. For a while I had been getting this feeling of being tied down with gymnastics, I never really got into the regimented style of it. I had been trying it outside for a while, applying it to what I could, trying all these movements outside with no mats or safety nets. When I finally joined this class all I could think was 'Wait, there's a name for what I've been doing?' and I suppose that's where the romance began. I was hooked and never missed a class, in fact it's probably justified to say that it was the only thing getting me out of bed on a Saturday morning. Eventually I struck out on my own, in search of others in the sport and in its wider community. All of this has lead me to where I am now. To me, parkour is more than a sport. It's more than a hobby, a past time or something that gets me out of bed on a Saturday morning. It's a movement, an expression and a liberation. It lets me be who I am and explore the boundaries of what I can or can't do. My favourite thing about it is how after starting it nothing looks the same again, the whole city scape changes in turn with your possibilities. With parkour, you take what has been built, the ugly, cold concrete and monolithic buildings, and you make it yours. It gives me freedom.

Fashion Shoot

Recently I was asked by a good friend and layout designer of DCU's Look magazine to shoot some fashion photos for a few pages in the magazine. We were lucky that we have access to a fully kited out studio, with a multitude of strobes and modifiers.

Starting out I decided to use a very simple 3 lights set up, using two large soft boxes on camera left and right and one light to light the background.  I set the lights to give a 1:2/3 ratio to give nice tonal contrast across the faces and bodies of the models.

There were several outfits to shoot, the challenge was to use poses that were fun but were unique across the range of outfits.  I was then told that they wanted some head shots, for this i changed lighting set up to a 2 light and reflector set up, using a beauty dish and reflector in a clamshell set up and the same back ground light.

This set up gives by far the most striking images of models when they know how to work  with your and this set up.  Although a huge amount of work would still need to be done in post to get the effect below, when it is shot with that in mind, it make the post production very easy.

For the shoot I spent 3 hours shooting and then there was over 9+ hours spend in Photoshop and Lightroom editing these photos. To get the look i wanted from the dull looking RAW files, I had to use a myriad of techniques such as dodging, burning, selective shaping and masking to achieve the look. Some images such as the one directly above were edited for colour, converted to monochrome and then re-edited to suit the look I was after in the monochrome images.

To see more of this shoot pick up a copy of the Look Magazine in DCU or head over to my website www.photocps.com