Alistair Hood Photography Blog

Behind The Scenes of Exploding Spices

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:32:53 +0000

Sometimes a job comes along that is a massive list of problem solving, this was one of the messiest. We had to explode different spices and capture them as stills and as moving images. The first thing was trying to get them to explode evenly without smoke and flame, I tried repacked party poppers, firecrackers, microdet FX explosives and various air methods all very professional but didnt work, too much smoke and fire or too directional. In the end it fell to my sons £6.99 stomp rocket which worked perfectly.
It was ridiculously messy, even with a tent of plastic covering the explosions it got everywhere. This made everyone have a lovely tumeric yellow glow with added paprika edges.

I tried to contain it by covering everything in plastic, even Rob.

It didnt help that much inside the tent though.

Rob looking slightly less amused

I am obviously finding Toby very funny here, with Emma and Peter from Curious.

Toby surveying the scene.

We had a couple of sets running one on explosions and one on jumping spices.

The moving image stuff worked out really well with a lot of help from Love High Speed who were amazing.

Here are the Crew ( without me annoying them ) Big Thanks.

New Images

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:40:48 +0000

I have tweaked the website and added a load of new work onto the main photography site. Go and have a look. new images

Lucid and the start of the year.

admin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:48:13 +0000

First job for Lucid and Hat Trick got started and so far so good. Quite a busy start to the year really, with a few nice looking jobs on the horizon. 2012 maybe the year things return to more of a normality. Really good working out which images we are going to use and push as promotion with Lucid, the work seems to be flowing together in quite a cohesive way at the moment and I have quite a few ideas about new things to shoot. I need to get it all together before the end of Jan to keep Hat at Lucid happy so she can keep up the good with with getting the books in front of the right people.

Behind the scenes of a recent job

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:07:43 +0000

Behind the Miners from Alistair Hood on Vimeo.

Represent

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:41:07 +0000

Big news here, I am now represented by Lucid Represents, which is amazing news and I look forward to exciting things in the new year.

Miners

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:36:26 +0000

I have started shooting this really great campaign for Trolex, it is portraits of miners looking gnarly. It was quite a tough casting request we need a good mix of ages and ethnicity who looked like they new one end of a mine from the other. Great street casting from Amelia at Mustard
Getting the right level of dirt on the blokes was hard work, there are things that need subtlety but in this case we needed to really go for it and it looks great thanks to amazing work from Di McDonald. As ever great fun working with Curious London. I love working with these guys I always feel like they want to go the full mile and the results show it, with great AD by Peter Rae.
As usual managed to get test pics of Rob and I looking like idiots ( I thought I looked quite minery, but apparently not.) Images and making of to follow soon.

The spider is here

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:23:42 +0000

Shooting Brut

admin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:04:35 +0000

So new Brut campaign is out and about on 6 sheets, press and the side of buses.
This is a couple of the shots.

Busy days in studio for AXA Campaign

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:31:11 +0000

Shooting lots of studio based stuff at the moment,

I shot 2 shots of the same person and then a short interview, it was all fairly straight forward and was surprised how much I got into the directing bit, may try and do a bit more.

It was knackering though and time scales were very tight, Rob had to manage over 200Gb of data which may have taken its toll,

beginning of job all bright and perky.

bit floppy at the end

Large Spider

admin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:13:03 +0000

So this is the little fella that i was shooting the other day, we became quite close.
Quite a smart little sucker. After about 1 hour of being prodded with a paintbrush to move him into the desired position he curled up his legs and rolled over. From this point no movement not even under prodding, fearing he had croaked I asked my assistant to pop him outside with a fitting burial. When he was dropped on the ground quick as a flash jumps up and legs it into the bushes (spider not assistant) massive faker !! I was done up like a kipper by an arachnid.

Also he was a right tricky thing to shoot, camera mounted upside down in a bath, with no chance of looking through the finder. Its times like that, that you realise Hasselblad need to do a better live view.