Last Friday night I did a photo shoot for singer-songwriters Samantha Marais and Henry Dingle who will be touring together this autumn. They chose a pub (Kingsdown Wine Vaults in Bristol) as the location, to get the warm, cosy feel of an old fashioned pub.

I didn't use flash on this because it would have annoyed all the other people using the pub. Instead I used my LitePanels MicroLight LED light, which I normally use for video. I only need a bit of light to separate Sam and Henry from the background, make it clear they were the subject.

I spent most of this past weekend at the Bristol Harbour Festival - seemed like a good place to video live events, what with music, theatre and even circus acts spread around the harbour area. In the end I stayed mainly in Castle Park because the acrobats in the circus area were great to watch and even better to video, especially the aerials as they have much cleaner backgrounds - no crowds of people in the sky :) One advantage of going both Saturday and Sunday was that I could shoot the same acts from different angle, then combine those to make it look like I'd shot the act with more than one camera. Luckily the weather was quite similar on both days so the cuts aren't obvious.

On Saturday evening I moved over to the Amphitheatre to shoot a band I know, "Something of the Night". Hopefully I'll be doing a proper music video with them sometime.

Went to Womad at Charlton Park on Saturday. Wide range of music and food, with lots of colourful people. I took quite a few photos but I also shot another music video with Samantha Marais, on the steam powered carousel (part of Carter's Steam fair). I will link that as soon as we've edited it (first I have to finish editing last week's video of Memzee and the Sweetners playing live at the Canteen in Stokes Croft, Bristol).

This photo I felt summed up the spirit of Womad - a mix of ages and cultures and lots of colour. The gentlemen in the background are from the United Arab Emirates and played some great music.

Follow up to "Real Life" from which it follows on directly. Sam and I worked out the basic idea of returning to her house and getting ready for bed but to show ideas of "home", which the song is about, I suggested using shadows of childhood, parents, etc. Sam immediately saw what I had in mind and this is the result.

We filmed her coming home, having a bath and going to bed in about 4 hours one night. The shadows were filmed a few days later, in about 1 hour, at Hamilton House (because the top floor is completely empty and has a long blank wall). I edited the main video then went through adding shadows (using After Effects because I needed to mask out the people casting the shadows, and I had to make some shadows into a 3D layer).

Sam's makeup: Bex Baxter.
Shadows: Sam, Henry Dingle and Sarah Long.
Director, camera, lighting, editing and After Effects: Owen Benson (me).

Gear: Canon 5D Mark II, 24mm f/1.4 L, 50mm f/1.4, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L, Litepanels MicroPro, Steadicam Merlin, Zacuto Z-Finder.

Edited in Premiere Pro and After Effects CS5.