With everyone locked down due to CV-19 and the majority of photographers not being able to shoot and especially those that have people as the main subject, the question has arisen as to what to shoot? Many photographers have taken to being creative with things around the house or members of their family, and many have taken to the garden with some fantastic bird tables and wildlife sets being built. I embarked on the learning curve of presenting webinars and my regular mentoring sessions with photographers.
I have seen many models advertising remote shooting where they run the studio side of the shoot and you run the camera via internet software and camera tethering software. When Helen Wykes messaged me asking if I would be interested in trialing one of these shoots I thought why not, as it occurred to me this might be the way forward for quite a while given the current situation.
Time and date was duly arranged and we discussed before the shoot what we each of us had in mind image-wise, as I wanted the images to be in my style and have some relevance to our current situation with CV-19. Helen agreed and we set about shooting on the due date.
Having a few small technical issues with connections and having to learn software platforms the first minutes of the shoot were a learning curve, but from there on it went well and we spent a couple of hours being creative. Helen supplied a prop in the form of a military gas mask which I thought very apt and we set up the camera to look out of the window, which too, is the only thing many people can do during a lockdown. This did pose a lighting issue as the sun came out and the lighting ratio and contrast went off the scale. What was funny was the fact that I didn’t know that outside the window was a petrol station and Helen being sat on the edge of a sofa in the window was causing issues with the public filling their cars with fuel!
With a little bit of clever camera setting tuning and some editing in Adobe Lightroom, this is the image we ended up creating together.
This remote shooting experience did raise a few questions technically, which have been answered now with a little research. It has left me thinking that this shooting technique will open many avenues to photographers to shoot with people not only in this country but all over the world.