Sean Fennessy | Photographer

the human light stand

I thought I’d get a bit CrAzY at a recent hotel shoot and try a new lighting technique.

Step 1: Expose the room at just below ambient and take a photo.
Step 2: Get your “assistant” to stand in the middle of the room and aim a flash (with snoot) at various points of interest. Take a range of photos.
Step 3: Insert the highlights into the ambient image.

The final image.

The opposite of the final image.

Is it cheating?

Recent stuff

Some of my shots from last years Taste Festival are being used in the branding for this years event:

In the booklet, on the website and on a big shipping container / billboard.

The graphic design for the Taste is the work of the cool dudes at Futago.

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The lineup for next month’s MONA FOMA has just been announced (Grandmaster Flash, The Dirty Three, John Cale (!) and heaps more) and a few of my images from the inaugural event earlier this year are being used.

The bottom pic is from a slick new booklet promoting the very exciting MONA complex which is currently being built in Hobart.

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Also noticed this billboard in the city this morning with my shots from another campaign I just shot with Clemenger for The Mercury.

We shot three different scenarios and I guess the others will be going up soon.

shooting a chef

Recently I was commissioned by Clemenger to take some shots for a campaign for Point Restaurant.

The brief was to take a series of dark, atmospheric portraits of the Chef de Cuisine.

Behind the scenes: Heaps of light coming in from the right, plus two snooted strobes at the back for separation on the chef and a for a small highlight on the table in the background. I also had my big reflector clamped to a stand at the left to stop any light bouncing back onto the dark side of his face.

How it appeared in press ads

Tourism Tasmania

A little while ago I spent a few days darting around the state on a shoot for Tourism Tasmania.

We didn’t have the greatest luck with the weather but we managed to pull it off by doing most of the shooting before 8am (a time of day I’m not overly familiar with!)

These were both shot in the Bay of Fires area on the east coast.

It was a bit of a challenge to shoot the sort of glossy imagery that Tourism Tasmania likes.

In the past they’ve used photographers like the super-slick George Apostolidis. I’ve got no idea how he creates such remarkably stylised images - pretty amazing really.