Orbis Ring Flash – Richie.ie

January 10, 2015July 13, 2018

[NSFW] – Nadine Pearse in London

Here are a few snaps of Nadine who I met up with and shoot on one of my 2015 London Trips. As you have guessed by now, the shots are NSFW ( See all NSFW posts here) I have up until now ( March 2106) being holding back on all my NSFW shoots.

I aim is to create classy, beautiful images showing confident women who are not afraid to rock what they got. Let me know what you think of the shots. Are the beautiful images or do you think that they are distasteful and smutty? Let me know in the comments, I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

July 6, 2012July 12, 2018

Faye Rooney in Studio

Here is another well overdue shoot to appear on the blog. The blog is well behind these days. The plus side is that it means that I am too busy to shooting and editing to be able to put up posts. Although I don’t put up every shoot that I do, I do try to get the majority of them up. So here it goes.

I recently had the pleasure of shooting with Faye Rooney (Miss Wright Venue 2011) again recently. Faye came for some new shots. I first shot Faye back in October 2011 when she was the Miss Wright Venue. She is now an employee of the Venue, looking after the VIP Penthouse.

I cracked out the Orbis Ring Flash ( www.orbisflash.com ) for some of these shots. I haven’t used it in a while so I said why not. The orbis has been pretty good to me in the past. Not the cheapest accessory, but it is great quality. It is super strong and very well made. It has taken a few knocks from me now and hasn’t got a mark on it.

In terms of a showing you a lighting setup shot with the Orbis….. there is not much to show as it is on the camera. The light comes from the same direction each time. The only thing that you can really vary to get different effects is the distance your subject is from the light and the distance your subject is from the background.

Nicole Spain from Flutterby Fashion Styling was at hand to source the cloths for this look and the other looks that we shoot on the day. Amy MaGuire ( http://amymcguiremakeupartist.blogspot.ie ) provided her fantastic make-up skills for the day.

To view all the information about booking your own shoot, you can click HERE. Also, check out my page on FaceBook or follow me on twitter @RichieButtle

April 15, 2012July 12, 2018

Rebecca Maguire – Miss Wright Venue 2012

The “Miss Wright Venue” title is a highly contested accolade. It is one of the most popular entry paths into the Miss Ireland. The 2011 title holder was Faye Fooney and she represented the Night Club very well, so well she is now an employee in fact. The Belfast Beauty Rebecca Maguire was crowned Miss Wright Venue 2012 last month.

Rebecca is no stranger to the world of pageants or fashion. She is a hot favorite to win the 2012 Miss Ireland title as she came second last year after been beaten by Holly Carpenter. It was a tough contest last year as both were great contenders, but only one could win. This could be Rebecca’s year though.

I sponsored a photoshoot for the winner of Miss Wright Venue 2012. The shoot styling was also sponsored by Nicole Spain of Flutter On By Fashion Styling. Go check the out if you are looking to do a styling course. The Hair sponsor for the shoot was Shauna Spain Hair Styling. Go check out here great deals on a blow dry at the moment. Aine Cahill was on hand to provide her Make-Up artistry skills. Aine a graduate from LA Make-Up Academy did a great job. Finally, the dresses were provided by The Ivory Closet Dress Hire Limerick. The Ivory Closet are a popular name these days when it comes to quality dress hire.

I was delighted to meet Rebecca and her Mum (Hey Charlotte) and Auntie Karen in the Wright Venue Penthouse for the craic at the after party. We started to plan the shoot straight away to get the ball rolling on it. The aim for the shoot was to shoot some elegant shots with Rebecca modeling the fantastic dresses from The Ivory Closet along with some classic swim ware shoots as well as a lingerie look. Time was limited for the shoot and we had a lot to get through. I think we managed to cover the plan fairly well though 🙂

Rebecca looks great in these swimsuit and lingerie shots though, as I am sure you will agree. You can check these shoots out in the Irish Sun Paper .

We shot on location at the Wright Venue…. well Rebecca is the Misses of the place after all 🙂 . The WV is a fantastic venue and top class club. It has some lovely features and unique places that make for a great shooting location / background. However, here in lies the problem. It is now hard to shoot there while doing so in a creative and new way. The last thing a photographer want is to be shooting a model in the same way as 2 or 4 other photographers. That is a common problem when shooting at popular locations….. how do you make it look different? Well in this case, it’s not so much about making it look different persay but trying to shoot from either a different angle or by using different lighting.

For example, the Scarface room is a cool private VVIP part of the venue. It has been shot by so many different photographers with so many different models in many different ways… its hard to get a unique take on it. Coupled with that the time limit that we had ( there was a fashion show on later), it’s often under pressure that the solutions come about. My solution was to use my Magic light a.K.a the Orbis Ring Flash. Check out all the black and white shots to see the effect of that.

The Miss Ireland Final is on the 28th of April, so there is not long left for it now. I want to wish Rebecca the best of Luck with it…. I know she will do great.

March 7, 2012July 12, 2018

Rachel Wallace – The Hotel Room Shoot

Rachel Wallace is back on the blog for her second outing. Rachel is another one of my subjects becoming a regular on my blog. Although this is just our second shoot, we had our third a few days after this one and the fourth is in the works. She is tied with Alyson who is heading for shoot no. 4 also.

Score keeping aside, there was a business end to this shoot, and indeed all my shoots with Rachel. The brief for this shoot had two parts. This shoot was filmed for parts of Rachels bio/introduction piece on ICA book camp, which will be on RTE next month. The first part of the brief was to stage a shoot for TV. The shoot images were also used for a spread in the Irish sun which was Published on Feb 23rd, that was the second part of the brief.

Rachel is fantastic to work with. A re-cap of Rachel’s story can be found in the post on our first shoot HERE. She is still with Assets and going strong, getting plenty of work. The ICA book camp should be a real boost to Rachel’s profile once it is aired and no doubt she will go great in the final.

This shoot was in the Bewley’s Hotel in Ballsbridge. They kindly lent us a room for a few hours for the TV crew to do an interview and for us to shoot for a bit. This is the second time I have shoot here, the first time being over a year ago with for my Day with Hannah.

This shoot was styled by Nicole Spain of Flutterby Fashion Styling. This was my first time to work with Nicole directly. She styled the shoot for Lisa and Faye before but unfortunately could not attend that shoot. It was great working with Nicole on this shoot. Penny’s supplied the lingerie, which looked great on Rachel. The hair extensions were by Hotloxs Hair Extensions and styled by the great team at Blow Salons.

Ironically, the images that you see here are none of the images that you will see being shot on the TV show. After Rachel finished her 15mins interview, we had to get cracking on a shoot…. or pretend to shoot so the camera can get some footage of a shoot in progress. I didnt really set up lights proper or anything. We were just shooting for the sake of shooting…. so you have been warned in advice of watching the shot and thinking that they are crap shots :).

So the shoot had two briefs, a shoot for the sake of a shoot and a shoot for getting some press images. Upon arriving at the hotel early with my gear to recon the location, I had the sneaky suspicion that the room that was organise would be the standard hotel room that they have. Under normal circumstances, this would be a fine room but it is just too small for a photo shoot, let alone a TV interview. Lights, sound man, camera man, director, assistance, Nicole, Rachel and my self, it was going to get cramped.

I got the key card and went up to the room and my suspicions about a small room were realised. I didn’t unpack any gear until the TV crew arrived. I was hoping the the producer who organise the room initially would be able to see if there was a larger room available, and so their was. We moved a few floors up and we now had a bigger room with more space.

So the TV crew got into prep mode and started to set up the camera, hot lights etc etc. I set up my Elinchrom lights and softboxes to be used as some props in the background…. Rachel was supposed to be on the set of a photoshoot after all. The Elinchroms worked great…. apart from the cooling fan that kicked in every so often. The noise from the tiny fans was enough to put off the sound in the interview. Luckily they cool down pretty quick, so after a minute of it being off, we turned be back on and it was good to go again for another few minutes.

Once the TV crew got that they needed…… which was mostly some random photos been taking and some useless direction by me, they were off. Once they were gone, that left Rachel, Nicole and my self to work away and start getting our stuff done. Nicole had a selection of items for us to shoot. Some of those included lingerie from Pennny’s and t-shirts from another company.

Lighting wise, there was nothing new or ground breaking here. I did how ever crack out the Orbis Ring Flash out of hibernation. I haven’t used it since Aug of last year. I used it for all the shots of Rachel on the bed as I wanted to give it a try….. no other reason really. I could have used the other lights that I had with me, such as the Elinchroms. I suck with the Orbis anyway for this look. It was armed with a 580-II and triggered via E-TTL cord. I was shooting in E-TTL move with +1 EV Flash compensation. This is needed as I find that I need to up the juice a bit of the flash when using the Orbis.

Thats all for now, any comments or questions, holla below.

January 25, 2011July 12, 2018

A Day with Hannah

You might remember this lady from a previous shoot. I originally shot Hannah on Portmarnock beach in June ’10 for some surf / beach shots. Since then, Hannah has been signed with Galway Catwalk Model Agency. Although the beach shots went down very well with the agency and it was enough to get her signed, they need to see more range in her portfolio. We managed to organise a full days shooting ( about 14 hours in total) to get as many looks as we could to widen the range on the portfolio.

The brief was to get a good mix of headshots, fashion, lingerie, casual and other shots. We done pretty well in covering the brief, as the images show. We had the assistance of a professional Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist, Rachel Cleary and Conor Clinch was assisting me for the day. It was a good team for the day, which was very cold and long. Styling advice was also provided by Jennie Moore, who could not be with us on the day.

The locations being used were around the Ballsbridge area. Shooting out doors is great, because every corner you turn there is a new location that you can use. The only problem is that you can not control the weather. We battled the cold, which was ok, we fought against the wind, which was awkward at times with hair and we went to war with rain… which was going to mess with the gear. Despite it all, the team did well, didn’t complain and the shots turned out good. We ended up taking 400ish frames through out the day and managed to pick out the top 40 or so images. These images were whittled down again even further until we were happy with them and the editing then began. I picked my favs, or what I thought were the best of the day and they are the ones that you are seeing here now.

The stream of photos above are the best of the day and are actually in reverse order of when they were taken. So if yo wanted to imagine the days photos start in the bedroom, then Hannah gets up out of bed and beginning her day. The day started off with nice sunny spells (along the canal) but it only lasted a few hours as by the time we got back to the hotel then cloud cover was patchy and rain was on the way ( jump suit shots).

Having a Hair & MUA on set during a shoot make a huge difference to the outcome of the final images, like wise with the calibre of the model, which should be evident on this shoot. Both model and MUA worked very well. Having the model and MUA been good friends was an added bonus and it made the day go by that bit quicker.

My work is getting to the stage now where its the model who can influence the image more than I can. In terms of pose, attitude and general look etc. A photographers vision and direction giving are one thing, its the model’s interpretation and execution of those directions that makes the difference. Some models can get what you are trying to go and go with it. Some even put their own little twist on it and make it their own. When that happens, its great.

The same goes for the MUA and Hair. As I get better at the technicalities that goes along with taking the pictures, it would be fair to assume the same level of skill from MUA’s and Hair Stylist. The really needs to be perfect as there is no sense in having to spend a lot of time afterwards fixing it in photoshop.

As you can see from the shot on the left, the make up is pretty spot on. Generally I am not a fan of photoshop, or to be more specific – retouching. Retouching being the editing of skin, spots and patchy makeup etc. Stuff like making legs and arms and legs smaller is time consuming. It is time spent sitting at a computer when I would much rather be out taking more photos or indeed doing other stuff.

I don’t mind processing images as much. Processing the colour corrections, contrast and brightness etc of images. Converting images to B&W is also something that I don’t mind doing, once the image lends it’s self to be converted to mono. Some images looks good in black and white, some don’t.

The lighting setups for this shoot by the way, will be going into another post over the next few weeks. I have a bit of a back log of photos to edit ( see 2 paragraphs up… last line) and once I have all that cleared, I will then compile setup info for all the shoots from as far back as Caroline.

All in all, I was very happy with this shoot. We managed to cover a lot over a short space of time and all the team got plenty from it for their portfolios and experience. I got a chance to try out some new lighting setup, one of which is similar to the inspiration post from a few weeks ago. I look forward to working with Hannah again when she is a famous top model 🙂

Just a another shout out to Rachel who done the Hair and Makeup, check her out. She is available for hire for commercial and domestic work. Also, cheers to Conor for helping out. I hope that he learned a thing or two. Even at 15, he has got skills, more than I did at 25, so keep it up Conor.

I am going to end this post on a nice quote I seen on twitter to describe photography. I thought it was a great description, at least for me:

“Photography is for people without manual artistic talent”

Thats all for now, hit the comments link below if you want to leave or view the comments.

Credits:
Hair & Mua: Rachel Cleary – Facebook: FaceBook or her Blog
Photography Assist: Conor Clinch – http://conorclinch.com/
Style Advisor: Jennie Moore – http://fadingintofashion.blogspot.com/

September 16, 2010July 21, 2018

Kurtis Hughes in Dublin

Kurtis is a model and singer from Dublin. He is signed with the Bscene Agency Compton now in Dublin. Thanks to the power of FaceBook, he seen my work and asked to set up a portfolio shoot. The rest as they say is history. If you want to get some fresh portfolio shots taken, drop get in touch via the links on the left there.

After some email exchanges, we narrowed the style of the images that he wanted to something with a fashion feel to it and out on location. Location portraits are my speciality so I was confident that we would make it work. We shoot around Dublin’s fair city is some cool locations that I did not even know existed until I found them scouting the few days before.

The shot above of one of my favourites from the day. It is so simple it works. The umbrella is not just for looks, it actually was raining on us so it turned out to be a functioning prop. The lighting makes this kind of shot. My mate Adam was once again there to help me out on this shoot. I will be putting up the usual Setup Post in a few days to give the details on how each shot was generally done.

The beauty about location portraits is that to get a different shot, all you need do is turn the camera a different direction. This garage door was right next to the area where the above shots were taken. There were also a few more taken that were used, but these are the strongest images I think.

By the way, all the shots above were taken just off Grafton St.

The last three shots were taken in a small shopping centre just off Grafton Street. The Orbis Ring Light was used for these also to get that fashion look. I liked the white walls with the black doors when I saw it on my scouting and pictured it working like this in my head with a black suite and white shirt.

Any comments or questions stick them below.