Oliver Edwards Photography Blog

This is one Job I have completed recently which I am particularly happy with of and haven’t posted anything on it for quite a while as the product had not been released until recently.

Ayrtek are leaders in their field (excuse the pun) in making lightweight cricket helmets. The Job involved 3 shoots of mixed media; one shoot with famous ex England Batsman Vikram Solanki who wears Ayrtek Helmets, one shoot was the product itself both packshots and more moody atmospheric photographs for advertising and the last shoot was a video which was very well put together, edited and finished by my client.

Below is a selection of the packshots and moody advertising images.

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The Second shoot was done in a makeshift studio in the Worcester Couty Cricket Ground chnaging Room with ex England opening Batsman Vikram Solanki. He was really helpful and gave me alot of time and was great in front of the camera.

Below is a selection of the images from Vikram

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The last part of the shoot was a video in a local cricket ground in Bristol. I am happy with the result as was very well directed and edited by the team at Mr B and Friends.

Ayrtek Video

A few months ago I was involved in a music video with some of my good friends FTO Films and Zeroscale. Zeroscale are a multi discipled design, web and creative sevices company based in London. They are good friends who I grew up with and seem to be able to do just about anything in their industries to a very high standard.

The music video was in a huge old disused barracks in London I went down to shoot behind the scenes and general stills of the band but went early to help with the set build etc. It was great to be surrounded by a load of other young professionals as I nearly allways work on my own or with one or two people to help being a stills photographer.

Please take the time to have a look through the Zeroscale website.

Zeroscale is a West London based Web Design and Creative Media studio that work on projects that span from corporate video, short films and music pro-mos to websites, graphic design and event coverage. We are a young company that pride ourself on our close relationships with all of our clients and our constant pursuit of projects we personally find exciting and engaging.

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Here are some behind the scenes photographs documenting the making of this music video.

Please view photographs in Full Screen (click the icon on the bottom right of the photograph below)

I also did a timelapse of most of the set build

I went some somne really good training a few years ago with some great and very talented people, Benjamin Chestertron and David White at Duckrabbit . They also have an awsome blog read by tens of thousands (probably more by now) every day. I cant recomemd these guys highly enough and are at the top of the game at multimedia jounalism in the UK.

Here is the piece that Ciara Leeming and I produced in a weekend workshop in Weston Super Mare.

I recently bought a replica canon timer remote from ebay to do timelapses amounst other things.

I had a play with it the first day it arrived, I was suprised how easy they are to do, you just push a few buttons then quickime and all done.

Timelapse Photography is a very simple and effective fun way of starting out in the world of video with a stills camera. I see it as a great tool which can be mixed in with other video in order to set the scene or be used as an ‘establishing shot’ similar to the first few pictures in a photojournalism story.

To get started you only really need three things;

1. A camera

2. A tripod

3. A timer Remote.

Being a photographer I allready have a tripod and camera, I just needed to get a timer remote and after a bit of research I decided to get a cheap ebay one for about £20 like this.

Then all you have to do is set it up on a tripod preferably a scene with alot of movement e.g traffic, windy/cloudy areas, high st. etc. Then set the remote off to do its work. This bit can be quite boring so bring a book.

Because when you create the timelapse every photo will be (roughly) 1/30th of a second you have to bear this in mind when setting the intervals between shots. For example if you set the camera to take one photo every minute and you were sat there for an hour, you would only get two seconds of footage.

So if this is your first timelapse I would recommend setting the interval to 10 seconds and sit there for half an hour and you should end up with 6 (30 fremes per second) to 12 (15 (fps) seconds of footage. Then I would move on and do the same thing somewhere else, I different scene to see how they comapare.

When you have finished plug all the jpegs into Quicktime Pro, click open image sequence, choose 30 frames for second then export the timelapse in a smaller format (1080 or 720p HD) to view it properly. You can play around with these settings and import your sequence at 15 frames per second therefore doubling the legnth of your timelapse without too much difference in the look of the timelapse.

Here is a great example of a really funny timelapse which sparked my interest. It is done using a tilt shift lens which makes everything look very small.