James Kesler is a local magician and writer – I’ve known him for many years from my days as a restaurant magician. He showed me some great pictures taken by Maurice Seymour and wanted to recreate the look. We spent the morning researching the images and putting together a lighting setup in the studio to recreate as closely as possible the studio ‘hot’ lights that Seymour would have used.

The continous lights employed by Seymour were not as powerful as the studio strobes we use today, so he was forced to use a high aperture setting on his camera – this would result in a shallow depth of field. This is more obvious on some of his work where the subjects face would be in sharp focus and the clothing and hair would not.

Instead of going for f4 we finally decided to use f11 and soften the depth of field in Photoshop afterwards.

James was delighted with the results, and so was I.

You’d think as a closet [Are you sure about that? - Ed] computer geek I’d be all over YouTube – ’tis not the case.

Only today did I find something worth posting – a movie clip I thought I’d lost – my first test run of the laser harp I threw together in my basement a while back…

Hmmm… Looks like the audio and video have dropped out of sync a bit after uploading, but there y’go…