I spent this weekend in London with my friend and photographer Michael Myerscough taking and editing the photographs for ‘Smiling From The Heart – Qigong Techniques For Emotional Well Being‘. As a result I haven’t had time to write a blog post this week. So I thought I’d share an overview of my visit to London with you.
Friday
9am to 6pm was spent in the excellent Pramdog Studios in London taking the photographs. Aided by the incredibly helpful (and knowledgeable) owner Nick White we were able to save hours of time as he helped us with the lighting set up.
Photo by Nick White.
I tell you, as a Qigong teacher, I never realised that light was such a tricky subject. It goes everywhere, leaks out where you least expect it and is very badly behaved.
With the aid of poly’s, elinchrom packs, bowens, stands, tripods, background roll, the biggest octabank you’ve ever seen and my favourite a few ‘pocket wizard radio flash slaves’ – we were ready for action.
Luckily I’d gone through the skeleton text that I’ve got for the book and pulled out a pretty accurate list of shots I was going to need. Fingers crossed I don’t discover in later drafts of the text that I’ve missed some out =)
By 6pm Michael and I were more than ready to call it a day. We ended up with over 15 GB of of photographs and it felt like it too.
Saturday
If I thought getting the pictures was an endurance test, editing them was the mother of all marathons. I was still making the finishing touches at 9am on Sunday before running to catch my train back to Devon.
The results have been worth the effort.
Take a look at the pictures below for the Qigong exercise: Lifting the Sky.
Photo by Michael Myerscough.
Claire Demaree, the photographer and editor for all the pictures in the Shaolin Chi Kung book, first created what I jokingly refer to as ‘Transition Shot Technology’ or TST and it lives on in ‘Smile From The Heart’ as you can see in the picture below:
Photo by Michael Myerscough.
And Claire, if you read this, I knew at the time that you put a massive amount of work into the Shaolin Chi Kung pictures, but now I REALLY know how much work and effort you put into the pictures! A big thank you to you.
Well the work is far from over.
Now I need to assemble all of the photographs in the correct order, label them correctly, format them for the page size of the book and be certain it all makes sense.
Should keep me out of trouble for a while.
Bye for now
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
looks great
It`s very easy to learn with this kind of photos. Great Job!
Thanks Ricardo =)
I’m glad you find this type of photo helpful. I’ll be making extensive use of ‘Transition Shot Technology’ – as I jokingly refer to it – in the new book. I’m also going to be making some videos available too for those who buy the book to help them even more.
Stay tuned!
Bye for now
Marcus