Archive for February, 2007
Regulations set to rope-in rogue ISPs
Tue Feb 13th - 7:57pm
Love it or hate it, citizen journalism is here to stay. Personally I'm ready to embrace it, so it was a happy coincidence that I stumbled upon a news story in the same week that I learned about NowPublic.com, reportedly the largest citizen journalism site and recently partnered with the Associated Press.
I'd pitched my little news story to an IT site that I used to write a lot for, and still do occasionally, but they didn't pick it up. So I figured what the hell, I'll jump into the whole citizen journalism thing head first.
It's worth noting that within two hours of the story going live on NowPublic, the ISP mentioned in the article had revised its cancellation policy and done a handbrake one-eighty. So while the point of the article was to report the new Ofcom regulations and to illustrate why they are necessary, it has accidentally shown the power of citizen journalism. For as long as reporting is done fairly and factually, does it really need the backing of the mainstream media?
View from the Links
Mon Feb 12th - 11:09pm
Once in a blue moon I do still find time to do landscape photos. Here's a view from the Links in Tain, taken this afternoon. The tide was out and I couldn't find anything nice to have in the foreground, but the clouds formed some nice leadng lines to guide the viewer's eyes towards the mountain in the distance.
The processing isn't the best and that weird bit of grey cloud needs fixing, but this was just a quick edit before bed. Click the picture to view a larger version.
Nothing in the papers! Oh the humanity!
Fri Feb 9th - 5:06pm
Turns out that I don't have any pictures in the papers this week. The one of Stephen Hayward with the Berserker is going in the North Star next week, the one from the Inver primary school bowling lesson and the shot of the Tain Academy basketball team are going in the Ross-shire Journal next week. I was a bit nonplussed to open the RSJ today and see one of Gavin's photos next to the Fiddlers Rally write-up, but I'm assured that the sound techs photo will appear at some point in future.
Tain Academy vs Broughton High School
Wed Feb 7th - 7:01pm
Congratulations to the Tain Royal Academy basketball team who were victorious this afternoon in a thrilling game against the team from Broughton High School in Edinburgh. Nothing too adventurous with this picture, just a single off-camera flash for some dramatic light and a high shutter speed to darken the background. I did think about putting a CTO flash on the floor under their hands, pointing upwards, but I wasn't sure how well it would work and in the end we didn't have time to try it.
Fingers crossed this will make it into the Ross-shire Journal this week but it will probably have to wait for next week.
7 February 2007: Tain Royal Academy basketball team was victorious against the visiting team from Broughton High School in Edinburgh. Broughton made a strong start and outclassed Tain for a good portion of the game, but a determined fight back by Tain brought the scores to 60-60 at full time. Extra time saw a resolute offence by Broughton and it appeared that Tain would be overwhelmed, but the visiting team succumbed to pressure and missed several free throws. Tain was more successful in converting their free throws and went on to secure a 67-65 final score.
Back lighting saves a difficult picture
Tue Feb 6th - 4:37am
For absolute beginners to quick location lighting, this is an example of how a simple technique can give a more professional look to an otherwise poor picture.
The children were lit by a Canon 550EX on a light stand, slightly behind me and to the left. The kids did a great job but even with them giving their best happy smiles the picture looked flat and cold. So I put another 550EX with a CTO (orange) gel on the floor behind them, angled upwards slightly, and as if by magic the picture looks warm and lively.
Is it a beautiful picture? No, far from it. But it was never going to be. We were working in a village hall, there were no good backgrounds, and something dramatic or artistic would have been inappropriate as the picture is for a fun story about kids learning to play bowls.
So I played safe and got the kids to hold bowling balls, got them squeezed in together as close as they could to hide the background as much as possible, and did my best to create some attractive lighting.
This is also a good example of how much leeway you have with back lighting. Notice that the girl on the left has caught way too much orange light on the side of her face, but still it doesn't ruin the picture. With key lighting you need to be fairly spot-on, but with back lighting you can be a bit hit-and-miss so for most shoots you should have time to throw a little strobe in at the back, even if the power setting, position and angle are just best guesses. (For this one I just took a picture of the back of the middle girl's head, checked to make sure it was over-exposed without blowing, and that was the back light done.)
Now, over the next two weeks I've got to come up with another six different photos of kids with bowling balls, one for each of the other schools in the area.
Hmm, I wonder if any of the kids can juggle…
Fiddlers Rally
Sun Feb 4th - 9:36pm
Yesterday I had the pleasure of photographing the 13th Gizzen Briggs Fiddlers Rally at the Duthac Centre in Tain, and just like last year I took pictures throughout the whole day, from set-up to performance.
Here are a couple of posed photos that I did for the local papers. This one features Ross MacLeod, Matthew Kitchen and Keilan Ross who between them handled the sound for the concert.
And here we have this year's special guests. (Update: I've been asked to remove their names to avoid this image coming up in Google as it was being used on posters without my permission to promote gigs.)
I've also posted a set of 220 photos from the day, but please keep in mind that they are unprocessed. You'll find ones that are blurry, not perfectly focussed, too bright, too dark, ugly colours, etc. There's no way that I could go through them all and process them so it's either the unprocessed versions or nothing!
Probably best to view them in a slideshow. There's a bit of a bug in the Flickr slideshow software which can leave you with the thumbnails covering half the picture, so if that happens to you then try moving the mouse over the picture for a few seconds and then off to the side, that seems to fix it.
Click here to view the slideshow
Alternatively there's the standard image gallery:
Click here to view the gallery
You'll notice that there are hardly any pictures from the second half of the concert, no posed picture of Katie Rush the conductor, and no pictures of Katie's violin solo.
Unfortunately due to several last-minute schedule changes I had to spend most of the second half away from the concert, setting up shots with the special guests in their dressing room. I resent not being able to cover the concert to the extent I had planned to, but I needed the shot of the special guests and that meant having to work around their schedule. It also meant that Katie couldn't be in the picture which was a shame as it was a big night for her, but ultimately I'm just the photographer and I couldn't force the special guests to fit in with everyone else.
Stephen Hayward’s Berserker
Fri Feb 2nd - 8:39am
Taking another step forward here, I think. I already had a plan for how to do this shot of Stephen and the Berserker, and even though it didn't work at first I stuck with it and I think we got a good, strong, memorable image.
When the first few attempts didn't look good, my instinctive cowardice and fear of failure kicked in and told me to abandon the idea and go for a safe shot. But I was convinced that this shot would work and after a lot of trial and error we got it eventually. I did a few safety shots too of course but this is the one I'll be sending to the paper. Thanks to Stephen for sticking with it!
1 February 2007: Stephen Hayward of Hilton near Tain confronts his latest creation, an 8-foot reconstruction of the Berserker from the Lewis chess set. The character famously bites on his shield to represent the crazed fighting style of Norse warriors. The Berserker will soon join Stephen's wood carving of the King from the Lewis chess set on the isle of Uig off the west coast of Scotland.
First basketball / swimming
Fri Feb 2nd - 8:19am
Yesterday I had my first opportunity to practice shooting basketball and swimming, covering a Tain Academy senior boys basketball game, and later a Tain Swimming Club training session. And I did okay for a first attempt!
The main thing I learned about shooting basketball is not to forget that you're using a sync lead for your main strobe! I've never used a sync lead before but I had to yesterday as I was using my wireless triggers for a remote camera. Just after the game had started I had to dash over to adjust the slave strobe and I forgot that the camera I was holding was wired to the main strobe. So down it came, a 6-foot drop onto an unforgiving gym floor. The reflector got squished but amazingly the strobe worked fine for the rest of the game.
I also learned that it's true what they say about basketball remotes: You're very unlikely to get a good shot. I'll admit that I was a bit arrogant and expected to get maybe half a dozen winners, but no, not a single one. Total rubbish.
Anyway, shooting basketball is as much fun as I expected, so I want to do a lot more of it. Next chance I'll get is next week when I've been invited back to cover an inter-schools game.
Swimming was harder than I expected. It had never occurred to me that the biggest challenge would be focussing as, of course, swimmers are under the water a lot of the time so you can't focus track them. I got the hang of it though. You can cheat and shoot from the side of the pool, prefocussed on a certain lane. But I did do some head-on shots too and it's just a matter of precisely following the water disturbance and then locking on as soon as the person's head comes out of the water.
I had to shoot at ISO 3200 to get 1/500s at f/2.8 so the image quality was lousy. I did a custom white balance with the Expodisc but I still had to do a bit of colour correction in processing.
And I've just realised that I haven't included any of the more dramatic head-on shots in this little set. Ah well, I think these were the best shots from the session.
