Joe Launchbury, dancing and a new monitor

Happily the Independent pushed out a nice large picture of Joe Launchbury yesterday. This is one of the series from my portrait shoot with some of the young England rugby players last week. This also goes into the record as my first published shot from my little Sony RX1 camera which I'm liking more and more as I use it. I'm very chuffed to get just one publication from that series of pictures as it's somewhat unusual to send in a portrait set on spec like that.Talking about the Sony RX1, I was with my favourite group of dancers again yesterday morning. We made our way through the wet, winding Surrey lanes to a derelict brickworks near Ewhurst which I've used as a location several times. It's a great spot, with loads of very colourful (and often thoughtful) graffiti. It's a very different sort of scene to our previous shoot on Thursley Common - more gritty and urban looking.Rather than taking absolutely every single piece of photographic kit I possess, I just had the RX1, a Canon 1DIV with 70-200 2.8 and 24 1.4, a pair of light stands & umbrellas, and a bunch of flashes. This made it much easier to move about from one spot to another and faster to set up the pictures. I did however miss my big octabox which is just a wonderous thing, but a simple white shoot-through did a fine job. I figured I'd shoot with a good mix of both cameras, but ended up not taking a single shot with the Canon. Everything was done on the Sony RX1.One of the main reasons to use the RX1 was again to get remote flash sync at a high shutter speed. Mostly at 1/1000th of a sec and above to freeze the motion of the dancers, the setup was generally much simpler than previously with 3 flashes on a tri-head triggered by a Pocket Wizard shooting through a white umbrella, and occasionally a 4th flash as a rim light. Of the 3 flashes on the tri-head, one had a Pocket Wizard attached and the other 2 were optical slaves, as was the rim light. With it being somewhat overcast, optical triggering was no problem. Unfortunately I did have one equipment casualty - one of my £50 Yungnuo flashes dropped off its lightstand due to numbnuts here not tightening it on properly. The flash head came off the body but was still connected by its wiring. I've since had a play about with the remains of it and the flash still works, but the display is FUBAR at the moment. Having pulled it to pieces I can confirm that Yungnuo know how to make things - it's very nicely put together. There may be hope to fix the display....I'm not giving up yet.I also used the "DMF" focus mode on the RX1 for the first time. This allows you to autofocus and then adjust the focus manually, with focus peaking showing the outline of the sharp ares in the frame. Quite handy to double-check that focus is accurate. On the shot below I also had the camera locked onto a tripod as I needed a shot of the scene without the light stand in it as I'd clone it out of the actual shots in post. Generally I set the exposure of the camera to be a bit below the ambient light, and then built up the subject light with the flashes.There's a load of potential in this location. As I only had a couple of hours spare before I had to shoot a football game we only really scratched the surface. I reckon a return trip is in order. The inside of the brick kilns were particularly interesting, and the sun came out for a moment or two to zap some very nice light inside. With a nice archway for perfect framing, and a gentle pop of light from behind the shoot-through brolly inside the kiln, a very sweet set of shots resulted.The quality of the images from the RX1 continues to amaze me. They are just stupendous! For such a tiny camera, the picture quality knocks socks off anything else I've ever used, period. From f/2 onwards, get used to sharpness to die for, excellent dynamic range, colours etc etc. Just awesome. That I didn't even bother with my 1DIV and similar focal length 24 L lens speaks volumes for the RX1. Add in the fast flash sync and you're laughing.And the RX1 files look even better on my new monitor. I bought a Dell U2713 HM 27" widescreen monitor this week and WOW it is excellent. It's a high spec "WQHD" screen with 2560 x 1440 pixels, which is a lot. The result is a big screen with very fine detail and vast amounts of real estate for picture editing. I hadn't realised how much my other montiors were until I plugged this thing in. Lightroom looks superb on it. I have a dual-screen video card in my PC so also run a second Eizo monitor, so I can have a really well sorted large workspace which makes editing much more pleasurable. It was also much cheaper than I expected, costing me £430 inc VAT as a refurb (though it looks brand new) from Information Technology Clear (ITC). They are well worth a look if you are after saving a bit of cash (they are £600 + carriage from Dell).