Halohid

So Halohid, Gaz and myself decided a day up around Lal Lal might be a good way to do a bit of location hunting…. Lal Lal (about 2 hours North East of Melbourne) is nice countryside, and I personally wanted to see if the Canola fields were starting to bloom for a shoot I wanted to organise in a few weeks. But the wheels fell off pretty quickly once we got underway.

We arrived at the first location, a nice-ish old pine tree that was so heavy it provided a shady canopy and a deep bed of pine needles. We get out of the car, start to get the gear out and encounter the first issue – Gaz had left one of his many backpacks at home accidentally!! Not normally an issue, except this particular backpack contained his DSLR and lenses – so all he had with him was a couple of film bodies and some old film of unknown status!!

“No problems Gaz”, said I, laughing. “You can use my stuff, no issue!!”. So we gather up the gear, take the short trek to the tree (through the deep, dry grass on a hot sunny day – surely no snakes!!), and get ready to test shoot. I get out my camera, kit on the lens, do a bit of area re-arranging, and prep for a test shoot – to discover an unresponsive camera?? What the??? Closer inspection reveals a problem I’ve never encountered in all the years I’ve been shooting – the battery (and the spare, as I quickly discover) are still on the charger at home!!

So I’m out of gear as well!! Two photographers with a reasonable collection of pro Canon gear between us, and neither of us are looking like we’ll be shooting much!! But Halohid jumped to the rescue, with her Nikon!! Oh noes, would us Canon shooters be able to make do?

Halohid has a cool setup that I’d never used before – a Nikon DSLR, paired with a variety of old (historic? ancient?) manual Nikon lenses – the quality of old manual glass is amazing, but it’s a little finicky to drive until you get used to it!! The images in this post were shot with a manual fixed 50mm f2.0, and a manual 80-200mm f4.5 (I think), and I’m more than pleased with the results!!

Normally photographers hate admitting when things go wrong – apparently we are supposed to be awesome, every single time – but in truth, it’s NEVER like that. Some days we’re on the groove, and other days we are so far off it we don’t even have working gear with us (it was an omen, we should have heeded the warning and gone to the pub!!). But we enjoyed the experience all the same, and I’m even thinking about looking into some of the old Canon glass for my own collection!

And more importantly, I still had a great day with friends and visited some very useful locations!! And even got some good images in the deal!

Model/Photographer: Halohid
Assistant/Photographer: Gaz
Location: Lal Lal, North East Victoria
(And huge thanks to Halohid for processing the images and letting me use them!!)