Biiiiig Prints!

Yo!

So, it’s cool seeing you photos printed right? Totally! Books, newspapers, something hanging on the wall….

Driving around Oberhausen last week, i spotted three of my photos printed out and hanging on a wall - much larger than i’ve seen before!!! :)

Much love people!!!

© Theater Oberhausen

Off (On) the Wall

Hi!

Well, i had a nice surprise last Saturday!

It had been a fairly busy week; a band shoot on Tuesday, Ruhrtriennale on Wednesday, Kammertheater Karlsruhe on Friday. Saturday was the turn of Theater Oberhausen to get a visit from me!

Imagine my joy when i arrived in the Theater on Saturday to see these beauties hanging!

You can probably imagine, i was pretty impressed by these suckers! 180x120cm ish, and backlight!

Ego-boost ahoy!

Until next time!

Ant

Buy your own shizzle! Lightroom Presets Now Available!

Hey guys!

Anyone who dropped by the shop recently will have seen something new!

For the first time, i’m offering up some Lightroom Preset Packs! That’s right kids, now you can edit in one click - apeman style.

Currently, there are two Lightroom Preset packs available, both containing 5 presets. One set colour, and one set of bangin’ black and whites!

And whats more - they’re at a crazy stupid low introductory price - so get on it, check them out!

Just make sure you purchase and download the packs on a real computer! Phones don’t like that sort of thing!

much love

Ant

Pasties and Pints (of Cider)

Hi all,

Food. It's good stuff right!

Well, photographing the stuff is obviously a key ingredient (pun totally intended) in the marketing of any business that's involved with it!

Dan, a friend of mine in Cologne has been quietly growing his business selling Cornish Pasties to the locals, along with a few other tasty products from the homeland. He's been in the process of moving to a new, larger location, and asked for my help with some photos of his products.

Of course, I was happy to be involved, for anything else, the opportunity of free food. Oh, and english Cider - alcohol is also currency after all!

Now, photographing food isn't something i've done an awful lot of. Photographers all go through the phase of deciding we're going to make a fortune from micro-stock photography and start photographing the entire contents of our kitchens. Even i'm guilty of that one - i'm sure there are still one or two pictures of chopped-up garlic cloves knocking around on shutterstock!

Here's the set-up. It's pretty rudimentary, and although i had an arsenal of lighting kit with me, decided to use just one bare flash, bouncing off the ceiling behind (and point away from) the camera.

Yes, i know that tripod is totally unsuitable for the weight it's holding (feel free to gift me a new one)!

The plank of wood we ended using as our background was part of a seat outside the shop. It needed a bit of a clean, but ended up looking pretty nice!

I got wood

We had decided that we wanted to shoot with a pretty narrow depth of field. In the end, perhaps a little too narrow. So narrow that only part of the front of the pasties was bang sharp. It still looked good though, for sure. Maybe something to think about in the future. Although, like i said, it was what and how we decided to shoot from the start.

Tether-time

We had a bunch of different pasties to shoot, and shot 6 in the end. You can imagine how much we ate during that shoot!

And the best thing was, we shot on a second day - this time CAKE!

The new shop is due to open today (June 1st), and a couple of days ago the images returned from the printers and were mounted in the windows. More will follow for inside the shop, and we do have another shoot planned when Dan gets round to polishing up the next chunk of wood!

Looking tasty (pasty)

Check out Dan's website here - and if you get the chance, pop by the new shop at Mauenheimer Str. 28, 50733 Cologne!

I'm off now to start my new (latest) diet.

Ant x 

Dark Skies Make Happy Times

Hi! 

Last week took me down south on a first visit to Karlsruhe. I know the football team, but given the fact i thought the city was somewhere near Hamburg just shows how much i actually knew about Karlsruhe itself.

On the agenda, shooting a rehearsal for the Kammertheater Karlsruhe. The production, Gut Gegen Nordwind. Adapted from a novel by Daniel Glattauer, it's kind of a similar take on 'You've Got Mail', just without so much of a happy ending (i won't say more).

A piece played out on stage between two actors. In this production, both known for their TV work in Germany; Ralf Bauer and Gisa Zach. 

The drive down to Karlsruhe was fairly uneventful. A bright, sunny, hot day, with the usual bad drivers and roadworks every ten minutes. 

Approaching Karlsruhe, the sky was getting darker!

Arrival - dark skies and thunder overhead - from my instastory @leapesportif

I'd made a quick google search before heading down there on what i might be able to do or see in the little time i had before the rehearsal was due to start.

I found that Karlsruhe has an amazing castle and park, with botanical gardens, right bang in the city centre! Even better, just a short walk from the theatre! 

What an amazing amount of open space to have in the centre of a city!

This place looked a perfect place to get my drone up in the air and have a look around! 

So, i arrived, and thunder was already rumbling in the distance!! I headed to the castle, unpacked, and got the drone up! 

Within a minute, the lightning was every few seconds - time to land, and quick - just the one photo shot!

The only shot from the bee. The palace, with rain already falling over the south of the city. © Ape.Photos

As i landed, the rain came down. And not just a shower, but full monsoon stuff!!! 

The ten minute walk back to the theatre, with several shelter stops in between, left me looking like i'd actually swam there!

Shelter stop number 3. Back-werk. Coffee was definitely needed!

Simone, the PR officer from the theatre was waiting for me, and as i had a now watered-down coffee in my hand already, got me a towel instead!

No matter how un-stylish you may feel, doing one's jacket up in heavy rain really makes sense!

Meeting the rest of the team there, and the cast, was a really nice experience! A great little venue, and an entertaining production!!

Stage - Set

I'm already looking forward to making another trip down there, and hopefully getting to have a proper look around!!

Oh, and the drive back - wet!

Here's a few images from the production. For more info, visit the Kammertheater Karlsruhe here.

'til next time!

View fullsize

Ralf Bauer © Ant Palmer/Ape.Photos

Gisa Zach. © Ant Palmer/Ape.Photos

Ralf Bauer and Gisa Zach. © Ant Palmer/Ape.Photos

Gisa Zach and Ralf Bauer. © Ant Palmer/Ape.Photos

In Search of a Street Lamp

I've been pretty busy lately. Who hasn't I hear you say? Busy is good right?

A big chunk of my recent work has come from a new customer. A theater in Oberhausen. How this relationship started is very random - a real case of 'right place right time', but i won't go into that right now.

Part of the process of promoting a production is of course taking pictures of it. Not just of rehearsals, but also a preview photo. An image that the theater can put out into the world to whet the appetite of it's patrons.

Last week, my theater colleagues and I headed out to shoot a promo photo for an upcoming production. 

The location had been found already. Some old workers houses, with street lanterns attached to the wall, to give the photo the feel of the period in which the production is set (WWII).

Problem was, arriving at the location, all of the houses with lamps attached had cars parked nose-to-tail in front of them. An actress in a 1930's costume, in front of a house from the last century with a new mercedes wouldn't really work!

We scouted the area and found a house with no cars, but no lamp!! Time to improvise!!

In the image below, you can see what i'm trying to do: balance the ambient light so that it's still visible a little, bringing in some soft light from across the road to light the subject but not cause to much shadow, and a flash from above mimicking a street lamp similar to the other houses. The next consideration here is keeping the aperture small enough to make the new street lamp look like a burst of light, and not a flash gun, while still achieving some kind of balanced exposure!

Balance the ambient, flash from front with as little shadow as possible, and a street lamp from above - easy right?

The final image below was a bit of a funny one to edit. It's pretty much as it was in camera, from an adjustment point of view not much has happened. Trying to decide what to do with our new street lamp was the problem!

Anna Polke

I added several vectors of street lamps in photoshop. I even borrowed some street lamps from other images i found on the web. Nothing looked right, or better or more realistic that what came out of the camera.

It almost looks like a street lamp. And the stand it's on is not really dissimilar to the ironwork of the actual lamps on the other houses. 

To the untrained eye, thats looking at the subject, it looks fine. 

To me and you, it's a flash gun on a stand being held above a guys head who's hiding behind the house :)

For more information, click here. 

Product review - Saal Digital Fotobuch

A couple of weeks back, i received an e-mail from Saal Digital asking me if i wanted to take part in an offer to review one of their products.

I took them up on the offer of a photo book up to the value of €40. It's free, so why not.

After they approved me, i received an offer code to use on their website. The €40 covered the cost of a standard 26 page hardback book, with padded cover and delivery.

Creating your book should potentially be straight forward. Downloading their software was of course easy, and the software itself is full of templates for various designs. The designs are fairly standard. Baby, family, holiday, etc etc.

I went for a completely empty template which is where i had some issues. Photos could be easily aligned with each other on opposite pages (you know, blue lines pop up when the photos are level with each other), however, on following pages you can't line photos up to the photos on previous pages, or at least i couldn't find out how to do it.

The outside padded cover

Delivery was quick. I ordered Wednesday night, and the book was dispatched the following day, arriving Saturday morning.

All in all, a decent product. Although a little expensive, the quality is very good.

*i ordered a standard sized A4 hardback with a padded cover and matt paper.