Archive for April, 2007
High key family portrait
Sun Apr 29th - 8:57pm
This was a birthday present for a friend, a portrait of her children. She knew I'd be doing a picture for her but she'd guessed that it would be just her younger son, so it was still a bit of a surprise. Even got a few tears out of her. Job done!
Gretna up, County down
Sat Apr 28th - 11:48pm
Commiserations to Ross County on dropping to the Second Division, but congratulations to Gretna on promotion to the Scottish Premier League after a nail-biting 3-2 victory at Victoria Park.
The company I was doing the photos for today was only interested in Ross County players so I mostly stayed out of the way after the match. The other photographers needed the Gretna celebration pics for whatever papers or agencies they were working for, so I didn't want to make their jobs any more difficult by diving into the scrum. Instead I took the opportunity to see if I could get any decent pics by shooting from off to one side, or from down low, up high, etc. I really like the one shown above. Don't know why, it just works for me.
Reproducing and restoring old photos
Sat Apr 28th - 12:23am
Restoring old photos isn't particularly difficult. It can take hours and hours and hours of intricate work but if you're competent with Photoshop then you can soon figure out how to repair all the rips, stains and blemishes.
But reproducing and restoring these old photos presented three quite different challenges: Firstly, they were behind glass and they couldn't be removed from the frames. Secondly, the print of the man was warped. Thirdly, the picture of the man was slightly out-of-focus.
The easy part of the job was that the prints were large and good quality. This made it a lot easier to get them onto the computer, which I did by photographing them with a 1Ds and a 24-70 f/2.8L lens at 50mm. You reproduce artwork at 50mm because it's the approximate focal length of the human eye. I stopped the lens down a touch to avoid any loss of quality from shooting wide open.
But how do you photograph a print through glass without reflections?
It's simple with hindsight but it took me a little while to figure it out. I propped the picture up on a chair and set-up a flash slightly in front of it but way up high and right over at the other side of the room. I angled the flash straight at the front of the frame. The idea was to have the light hitting the glass at a very sharp angle, and from far away to minimise fall-off across the surface of the print. Test shots revealed that the frame was casting a shadow onto the picture so I moved the flash forward until the shadow stopped being a problem. With a single light source coming from a known angle it was then a simple matter of taking the photo with a polarizer to cancel out any reflections. I also knew the temperature of the flash so I could get the white balance perfect, which is necessary for reproducing sepia-toned pictures even when they'll be converted to black & white.
That was the photo of the woman done. But as the photo of the man was warped, the paper was actually casting shadows onto itself! I eventually solved that problem by bringing the flash over to right in front of the picture, up high, angled straight down. The frame was lying on its side and the light was going along the ripples in the paper. This was an amazingly effective solution and I didn't need to spend a single second in processing to fix the warping. Neat, eh?
It was fairly simple from then on. Each picture took about 4 hours of work to remove all of the blemishes, which involved several thousand manual edits right down to the pixel level. The fading of the prints, and shooting through glass, required multiple tone curves to put a bit of contrast back into the pictures. And the picture of the man took another hour or so to fix the focus, or at least to force it as much as I could using multiple USM passes of decreasing radius.
The finished pictures were printed around 11"x17" on fine-art paper and they looked great. Throughout the processing I had made a point of NOT comparing them to the original prints, but when I finally did compare them I was more than satisfied that I'd done the job right.
Quick pub portrait
Mon Apr 23rd - 3:24am
This is an ultra-quick portrait I did of Billy, who you could describe as our local colourful character. After I'd done the football club's player-of-the-year photos on Saturday night, Billy and I were chatting and he leaned forward and put his hand up to his mouth. I asked him if he'd mind staying exactly how he was while I took a photo of him, and this is what I came up with.
Considering that I usually take upwards of half an hour to light a portrait and I did this in 10 seconds with one hand-held flash, I think it's pretty good. I don't expect Billy will have a computer so I'll give him a print.
Balintore F.C. player-of-the-year awards
Mon Apr 23rd - 2:46am
Congratulations to James Skinner and Graeme Davis who were named player-of-the-year and young player-of-the-year at the Balintore football club dinner on Saturday.
This first picture shows club sponsor Les Clark of Port Services Invergordon, James, Graeme, and club chair Jean MacKenzie. The combination of the low ceiling and my tendency to shoot from a low angle made them look about 8-feet tall. I do need to stop taking these wide angle people pictures from such a low perspective, it's becoming a bad habit.
And here we have just Graeme and James.
Nigg beach clean-up
Mon Apr 23rd - 2:34am
This was a fun shoot. I knew loads of the people there so it was nice to catch up with them all, and even do a tiny little bit of grunt work myself to earn my place at the midday barbecue.
However there was also a strange situation to contend with…
The organisers obviously wanted publicity as they had mailed out press releases to loads of papers, but as far as I'm aware the North Star was the only paper that sent a photographer. For some reason, one of the organisers seemed to resent me being there, especially when I asked him for some background information to file along with the photo. Even asking him for his name got a dirty look and some snappy response like "you must not have got the press release". I've really got no idea what was going on, maybe this person was just having a bad day, but it's the first time I've gone to a pre-arranged photo-op and had someone be so openly hostile.
Everyone else was lovely though! Really enjoyed this one.
21 April 2007: People of all ages joined forces with personnel from Talisman Energy to clean the beach at Nigg. Duncan Bryden of the Moray Firth Partnership's Beach Guardians programme estimated that 5 tonnes of rubbish was cleared away in a little under 2 hours. Chairman of the Nigg & Shandwick Community Council, Richard Cross said he hopes to make the beach clean an annual event. Following the clean-up everyone enjoyed a barbecue at the Nigg Ferry Hotel.
Dingwall vs Alness under-17s football
Mon Apr 23rd - 2:01am
The second youth league football cup final of last week, between the Dingwall and Alness under-17 teams, proved to be another entertaining match. Like the under-15 match this one was also played on the Ross County pitch at Victoria Park and it was as good as any professional game I've seen there.
The large turnout of spectators was treated to a very balanced and skillful game that went to extra time and looked set to go to penalties, but Dingwall clinched it. And what a happy bunch they were!
The team photo should be in next week's Ross-shire Journal.
Here's man-of-the-match Gary Urquhart with proud mum Irene.
I've sent the man-of-the-match pic to the North Star but I expect they'll use one of the action photos instead. Note in the last photo that the ball and the players' feet are motion blurred, but their faces are tack sharp. Now THAT is a football action shot! Well it's what I like to see anyway.
Tain vs Invergordon under-15s football
Wed Apr 18th - 12:50pm
I think I've said this before but I'll say it again: Photographing youth football is more fun than doing the adult games. It's skill, skill, skill all the way. Lots of passing, working together as a team, clever tackles and artful dodging!
The last two adult games I photographed were the Inverness vs Golspie cup final in the North Caley league and Saturday's Ross County vs Airdrie game. Last night I did a Ross-shire Youth League under-15s cup final between Tain and Invergordon. Of those three recent matches, last night's match was the best by far.
The game was played on Ross County's pitch at Victoria Park.
Congratulations to Tain for their 3-0 victory. Andrew Bell scored two goals and was named Man of the Match. Nicholas Mein put the third one away. The team photo should be in this week's Ross-shire Journal.
And one of these action shots should be in this week's North Star.
Doubling up: Bowling awards
Wed Apr 18th - 12:27pm
Financially it's a good idea to get a few unique photos from each event so you can offer them to different papers. Double up on the photos and you double up on the money. It's not something I've done in the past but now that I'm getting more confident and competent, it's something to consider in future.
Of course if one paper has commissioned you to do a photo then it would be unprofessional to grab a second photo for another paper, but if you're doing it on your own initiative then it's fair game.
Earlier this week I went along to a local indoor bowling club to do a picture of the prize winners in the mixed doubles competition. We started with a simple line-up of the winners and runners-up (other way round in the photo) which I thought would work well for the Ross-shire Journal as they seem to prefer these more traditional line-up photos. Lighting was about as basic as it gets: One flash on the camera, gelled to match the ambient tungsten lighting, or at least to get somewhere close.
For the North Star I had an hour to set-up another photo while the bowlers played their next game. For this shot I decided to do just the winners and position them in front of a large red curtain as a handy backdrop. Lighting set-up was a flash into silver brolly positioned to camera right, and a snooted flash to camera left, slightly behind the subjects as a rim light. If I was going to nitpick then I'd point out that the rim light didn't catch the man's arm at the left of the frame and it does get lost a bit in the darkness of the curtain, but I think it's a nice picture all the same. Chances are the paper will crop tight on the sides so it won't matter anyway.
Ross County’s Mark McCulloch red card
Sat Apr 14th - 8:48pm
Ross County supporters might be interested to see these photos. They show the clash between County's Mark McCulloch and Airdrie's David McGuire (white shirt) which ended with McGuire on the ground being treated for an apparent leg injury, and McCulloch being sent off. For the rest of the match, McGuire was booed whenever he had possession of the ball.
