Archive for July, 2007
Concert photography tips
Tue Jul 31st - 7:38pm
Cincinnati freelancer Ryan Dlugosz has written up some concert photography tips. I'd question the use of primes over zooms but then compare Ryan's work to mine and I think he's the guy to listen to!
I just can't imagine shooting that Elton John concert, for example, with primes. If I'd used primes then I'd have probably gone for a 135mm on one body and a 14mm on the other, but on the day I don't think I used anything close to those two focal lengths. Changing lenses would have been practically impossible with the time restriction and so many other photogs bustling around in a small area.
Man sought over TV bottom pinch
Tue Jul 31st - 6:17pm
From the BBC web site:
Man sought over TV bottom pinch
A man who pinched the bottom of a Channel 4 News presenter during a live broadcast is being hunted by police.
Sue Turton was speaking to the camera from Oxford's flood-hit Osney Island when the man was seen on film walking past her.
Ms Turton continued her report despite the distraction. She said she did not want to pursue the matter.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3f6WMSXQNg&locale=en_US&persist_locale=1[/youtube]
The quest for an extreme macro
Tue Jul 31st - 5:43pm
A brand new blog by John Lega launched today and it kicks off with a detailed discussion of how John conceived and executed an extreme macro shot of a fly's head. Great picture and an informative read.
Inside the Associated Press
Tue Jul 31st - 10:29am
The BBC has an audio slideshow about covering conflicts for the Associated Press with commentary from two Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers and the AP's current global director of photography. It's a short and fairly lightweight piece, apparently just an appetite whetter for the new AP book Breaking News, but there are plenty of good photos included from Vietnam and Iraq. You might want to turn the photo captions on as they're turned off by default.
Improve your small-flash umbrella set-up
Mon Jul 30th - 9:33pm
A lot of us have started using umbrellas for location portraits with small camera flashes. It's nice to have that big diffused light source to soften the shadows but unfortunately the umbrella adaptors hold the flash very high, so all of your light is firing into the top half of the umbrella. And as you can see I use an external battery pack which lifts the flash even higher. 
Here's the solution. If you're carrying a light stand and umbrella with you then it's not much of a stretch to carry two light stands. Why not use one to hold your umbrella and the other to hold your flash? That way you can position the flash exactly where you want it.
In the comparison shots below, the image on the left shows light coverage with the flash on the umbrella adaptor. On the right is the light coverage with the flash on its own stand at the right height. Keep the flash a couple of feet behind the adaptor to avoid nasty shadows. Note that in the second image the flash looks higher but it's actually lower, it's just closer to where I was taking the picture from so the perspective is a bit misleading.
Alternatively you could just rubber-band / ball-bungee the flash to the stem of the umbrella. Hmm, wish I'd thought of that earlier. 
Photographing a tragedy
Mon Jul 30th - 3:58am
Dayton Daily News photographr Ty Greenlees writes about his experience of photographing an air show crash in which pilot Jim LeRoy was killed:
What it was like to photograph crash:
A dreaded scene, a sickly feeling
I quickly focused on the plane as it skidded down the runway, clicking away until it came to a rest in the grass next to runway 24R-6L. Flames shot out from under the wings and it was soon engulfed. A sickly feeling fell over me.
The wives of the pilots were crouching a car's-length away, holding each other. I felt horrible for them.
[...]
My hands were shaking as I tried to take the disk out of the camera.
The thing I never wanted to see or photograph had just happened.
Here are the photos of the crash and aftermath (thanks Wes Hope for the link) and a video of the incident shot by a spectator (thanks Doug Murray).
Strobist Lighting 102: Cooking Light (part 2)
Sun Jul 29th - 6:32pm
Here's my next attempt at the Cooking Light challenge. I tried a few objects such as an egg cup, glass and a knife but I'm getting bored of that same old "macro studio" look that we're being bombarded with every day. So instead I tried to create an image with a grander sense of scale.
If you're not familiar with the ultra-simple ethos of Strobist techniques then take a minute to think about how that image could have been made, then click here for the set-up shot. And don't forget to have a look at the discussion thread on Flickr to see all of the other photos. There is some amazing work being produced.
While playing around with various kitchen implements I also tried another technique that's as old as the hills, and just to give it a sense of purpose I knocked up this logo / advert / flyer / whatever for Lighting 102. (Hi-res version.) If you know the technique then you'll recognise it straight away but for those who don't I'll leave it as a mystery. We've got to have some secrets, right?
Having said that, these earlier attempts pretty much reveal how it was done:
Ross County vs Caledonian Thistle
Sun Jul 29th - 11:07am
Some pics from yesterday's pre-season friendly between Ross County and Caledonian Thistle at Victoria Park in Dingwall.
This was the first time in what must be over a year that I shot a football match with two cameras, one with a 70-200mm f/2.8 and one with a 300mm f/2.8 + 1.4 extender. It paid off with the shot of Andrew Barrowman scoring County's goal which I was able to get with the shorter range of the zoom.
County's new manager Dick Campbell is a photographer's dream. He stays right at the side of the pitch the whole time, frequently shouting to players and giving directions. Plus the guy just looks like your classic football hard man. (Okay, maybe not in the second pic, but usually he does.) He seems like a nice bloke too. I've briefly met him a couple of times now and he can obviously tell that I'm the new kid on the block, so he tones down the gruff. Gotta respect that.
Based on my results from this match (which I'm happy with) and my results from previous matches (which I wasn't happy with) here's what I'd suggest for covering a football match with a two-camera set-up:
- Sit about 1/3 of the way along one side of the pitch. If you're looking for photos of one particular team then sit closer to the opposing team's goal.
- Use the camera with your long lens to cover the further half of the pitch, and the distant side of the nearer half. You'll have good range for the opposing team's goals and you'll have the players in 'your' team facing you.
- When the action comes into the near half, switch to the cam with your zoom. Most of the action you care about in this half will be around the goals.
What would make this set-up really good would be if the zooms had focus-stop buttons on them like the long teles, but you can get around that by using the camera's AE-lock button for focus (which a lot of football shooters do anyway) or you can switch to one-shot focus mode which is what I ended up doing.
Here's a rough illustration of the set-up described above:
Also for about 10 minutes at the end of this match I tried something that I've been meaning to do for ages but kept forgetting. I switched from using only the centre focus point to using all 45 focus points, basically putting the camera into full do-all-the-focusing-for-me mode. Results were encouraging. Yes there was a lot of focus jumping when the action was far away, but you need to balance that with the advantage of shooting much closer action because you don't need to keep the middle of the frame over one player. I'm a sucker for in-your-face action so I'll probably try shooting this way for at least one half of the match next time.
Here's a sample frame. Lousy shot of course but it's just an extreme example to illustrate the point. The players were 15-20 feet away from me at an effective focal length of 546mm. If I'd been using the centre focus point (marked 'X') it may have snapped the focus onto the background at this point. Now imagine if a split second later the players had moved closer together and the ball had bounced up into frame. That would have been a great shot and I'd have missed it. There's definitely a case to be made for using auto-select focusing.
Hospital library images
Fri Jul 27th - 8:05pm
No, not images of a hospital library. Images of generic hospital scenes for use in news reports about the emergency services when individual people, such as accident victims, aren't being identified. (Examples: one, two, three, four, five.)
I thought of doing this a few weeks ago but never got around to it. Then this week a friend was going for a check-up at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. I was going with her and I knew I'd be hanging around for a couple of hours, so I called the hospital and asked for permission to go round taking photos. I already knew the rules, which are just common sense: Don't get in anyone's way, clear off if someone tells you to, and no pictures of patients. Not a problem. A very helpful communications officer (thanks Erin!) said she'd clear it with security for me to do exterior photos of the hospital, and she'd accompany me around some inside areas.
The shoot only presented one real challenge, and it was nothing major: People being polite! It's the nature of the beast with these photos that you want people to walk across the frame, because it helps to convey activity. But people constantly stopped to wait for me to finish the shot, and I couldn't ask them to walk through the shot because that would be a set-up, not ethically acceptable for photos that may be presented as factual. Still I got most of the shots I wanted.
I'd have liked to do some illustrative shots on a ward or in an operating theatre but one step at a time. The hospital was being very co-operative after just two hours notice so I didn't want to ask for anything beyond what had been offered.
Ross-shire Journal pics this week
Fri Jul 27th - 4:53pm
Four pics of mine in the Ross-shire Journal this week, including this shot of the Portmahomack gala girls as the top pic on the front page. Very pleased that this got such a good show. I was totally upfront about trying to top the usual gala girls pic so the front page will do nicely, thank you!
Also inside the paper, this pic of the sandcastle competition from the gala:
Tucked out of the way in a corner of page 2 is the best newspaper photo I've ever done, showing the first Harry Potter customers at Tain Bookshop. Now I KNOW that most people won't think much of this pic, in fact I'm guessing that a lot of people will think it's rubbish. But I know what *I* like and this is the kind of photo that I've been aspiring to for the last four years. Lighting, set-up, composition and narrative, I just think it's all great! Should have had something more obviously Potterish in the frame so it's far from perfect, but it's certainly the newspaper photo I've been most satisfied with. Gotta top it now! (The composition was originally inspired by the first pic in this set by Michael Zamora, modified a bit to get the woman's face in view, then modified a lot to get the two kids into the frame.)
There's a theory that getting loads of kids into a photo sells more copies of the paper. But unfortunately it also guarantees a lousy photo. So respect to the editors of both the local papers (North Star and Ross-shire Journal) who over the last year have started to prioritise photo quality over quantity of kids. This was the big group photo I went to get at the launch of a play park in Invergordon:
But while I was hanging around I spotted a load of kids on a big swing so I went and took a few shots of them. Now one paranoia-induced rule I have on jobs like this is that I'll only do the pic I'm there to do, because the last thing you want is some over-protective parent getting upset about you taking a pic of their kid. But this shot was too good to miss and indeed it's the one that ran in the paper. Much better than the big group. The only thing that lets it down is that the weather was overcast and most of the kids were wearing pale clothes so even with flash I couldn't get the colours to pop at all. No worries though, it ran in black & white.
I did try a more interesting variation on the big group shot and the result was sort of okay-ish but it's obviously not everything it could have been so I didn't even put it into the paper, didn't want to risk it being used.
Neither of these Inver F.C. team pics made it in. No big surprise. After a great season they'd just won the Seaboard Cup but most of the players couldn't be bothered lining up for a team shot so these were the best we got.
