Archive for September, 2007
Hey Flubber! You’ve got a girl on your foot
Fri Sep 14th - 5:55pm
This photo was an instant favourite, even before I saw it on the camera's review screen. I'd already shot about a dozen good frames of this girl with Flubber the Berber Skink on her head, and then everything fell into place for this one — Flubber even looked at the camera. I was thinking, there's no way that can be as good as I think it is, then I checked the review screen and I was pretty sure I'd just got the front page of this week's Ross-shire Journal. Turns out I was right!
We still did a staged shot and I'm told that it's not as bad as I think it is, but I don't like it. To me it looks totally unnatural and boring, you don't notice Flubber unless you look for him, and I overdid the hair light. I did send it to the paper (their money, their choice) but asked them to use the close-up of the girl with Flubber, and thankfully they did.
Call me sad if you want but I had great fun that night! I got to hold all of the critters. I just wish there had been a bigger snake, I've always wanted to hold one of those huge boas. Although Maggie is from Highland Reptile Rescue there was talk of her returning with a tarantula and if that happens then hopefully I'll be able to go along then as well. For some reason I've got it into my head recently that holding a tarantula is one of those things you simply must do…
Damage to Shannon Stewart headstone
Fri Sep 14th - 5:27pm
This was an unpleasant story. One of two headstones was stolen from the grave of Shannon Stewart, an 11 year-old girl who died in 2005. The headstone was then returned with some apparently deliberate damage having been done to it.
Being the new guy on the block I usually get the lightweight photos to do, and these more emotional or sensitive stories are covered by other people. When I was asked to do this photo I decided to approach it in a strictly documentary style: Nothing arty, no fancy lighting, just simple photos to show the grave and the damage. This is the photo that ran on the front page of this week's North Star:
Here are some of the other photos that I took. Please note that I didn't stand on the grave for the top-down shot of the headstone.
This was the first time that two competing papers have requested photos of the same thing, and I'm not sure what the etiquette is in that situation. What I think most photographers do is send a few different pics to each paper, but I decided to send them all to both papers and tell them that I'd done so. In the end the story in the Ross-shire Journal ran without a photo, although I don't know if that was an editorial decision or because the North Star, which comes out a day earlier, had already used one of the photos so prominently.
Lighting set-ups, radio popping and a little news
Fri Sep 14th - 12:40am
Some links you may find useful…
- Don Giannatti of Lighting Essentials posted a set of studio lighting tutorials with set-up shots. (Well worth a good look around the rest of the site while you're there. For example have a look at this amazing example of re-touching an engagement photo.)
- A new gadget called the Radio Popper promises extension of Canon and Nikon off-camera lighting using radio instead of infra red, although the product isn't actually available yet. Be warned that you might want to skip forward in the video to cut out some of the waffle. (Thanks Phil Pereira.)
- A Little News is a blog where Alabama newspaper photographer Gary Cosby writes about his own experiences shooting for the Decatur Daily, with the ethos that a small town photographer doesn't have to be a small time photographer. (Thanks Strobist.)
Spider in the bath
Wed Sep 12th - 2:31am
What a mixed start to the week it's been. Monday night I was photographing some Brownies playing with reptiles, Tuesday night I was photographing vandalism done to the headstone on a child's grave. Quite a contrast. I'll put the photos here once the papers have used them, but in the meantime here's a charming little critter that decided to spend some time in my bath today. Make sure you click to see it large!
BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award Finalists at Blas Festival
Fri Sep 7th - 11:41pm
This is the picture that I was planning last night. Having decided against the salmon as a location I put all my eggs in one basket and gambled on this broken old fishing boat, beautiful in its ruined state and over-run with weeds.
Technically it was one of the more challenging photos I've done as I had to balance a whole lot of sunlight with not a lot of flash, while still creating some attractive portrait lighting. But the process of actually setting up the group and taking the photo was a breeze thanks to nine very professional young people and tour manager Martin Coull pulling it all together behind the scenes.
Tip: Scouting a location
Thu Sep 6th - 11:16pm
One of the best things you can do to make a location shoot go smoothly is to go and shoot it in advance without the subjects there.
It's perfectly natural to have preconceptions of how the finished shot will look, and few things will send a shoot to hell faster than the realisation that it isn't going according to plan and you can't quickly figure out a back-up shot.
Shoot the location on your own time and you'll get a clearer idea of what will or won't work, and how the location can be adapted if things change at the last minute, such as needing to fit more or fewer people into the shot, having subjects with a great variety of heights, someone in a wheelchair, etc.
Tomorrow I'll be doing a photograph of a group of musicians who will be performing a concert in the village hall. I originally thought of doing the photo on some large rocks near the hall but it's tricky to get a nice background at that location, so I then thought of doing it on the beach with the mermaid in the background. That opened up a world of hurt as I'd need to light the mermaid as well so I decided to use another of our local sculptures, a group of three 10-foot salmon.
I've never even taken a snapshot of the salmon before so I headed over there tonight to work out what angles work and how to light the salmon in such a way that I can set-up the lights tomorrow ready for five or six people to walk into frame, position themselves roughly where I want them, and click. I also wanted to see if it would be possible to light them using a shoot-through umbrella at ISO 100 so I'd be able to use my 1Ds which can be too grainy at higher ISO settings.
The shot I have in mind is fairly standard: Moody sky with flash-lit subjects. So the first thing to do is meter the sky. You can do this easily by putting your camera in evaluative mode (or whatever mode on your camera meters the whole frame) and then filling the frame with sky. If you're taking part in the Strobist twilight challenge then you'll be using this technique, and here's a rough guide to how the sky should look. Note that it isn't particularly dark. You don't want it to be.
Using that same exposure setting, here's a shot that shows the sky and ground. It's okay that the ground is almost black, we won't be seeing much of it in our final image. As a bonus this means that you don't have to worry too much about background objects. There are a couple of benches in this scene but in silhouette they practically disappear.
This next shot had the flash at full power through the shoot-through umbrella. Clearly not enough light so that was the umbrella straight back in the bag!
And here we have a bare flash at full power. Plenty light! Don't worry about the horrible flash look, we're going to deal with that in a moment.
Okay so why does that shot look so amateurish?
Two reasons:
- In the time it's taken to put the umbrella away the sky has darkened considerably and I haven't adjusted the shutter speed to lift it again.
- Because the flash was aimed directly at the salmon (albeit on a light stand to frame left) there's a lot of light spill on the foreground, which is typical of amateur flash-lit photos.
The first problem is a no-brainer: Drop the shutter speed. Re-meter the sky if necessary. To fix the second problem you could angle the flash upwards to feather the light at the bottom of the frame, and that's a great solution, probably the one you'll use most often. But I thought it might be a good idea to take this shot from a low angle so I lay on the floor and pointed the camera upwards. Now it doesn't matter if the flash spills on the foreground because it isn't in the frame anymore.
(Remember that the flash is in a fixed position on a light stand so I can point the camera wherever I want and the lighting won't change. That's one huge advantage of using off-camera lighting.)
Compare this shot and the previous one. The only thing that has changed is the ambient exposure (to brighten the sky) and the composition to lose the foreground. The flash didn't change at all. But look how much more 'lit' this one appears, whereas the previous one just looked like someone popped a flash.
Update: Oops, looking at the two photos again, I think I must have changed the angle of the flash a little as some of the shadows are different.
You'll have noticed that the salmon are a very dark colour so it's difficult to judge the lighting from the camera's preview screen or histogram. To make sure your flash exposure really is spot-on you can just walk into the scene and take some photos of your hand. Take a few shots at various positions, ideally where you expect people's faces to be, to make sure the light coverage is even.
By this point I'd pretty much decided that I was going to abandon this as a location for tomorrow's picture. Too many variables, too awkward a composition, and if the sky is overcast then the shot will be a dud.
But while you're there it can't hurt to try a different composition. Sometimes the best angle doesn't occur to you until you actually see it on the camera screen. So I re-set the light around at the side of the salmon, re-metered the sky, and the result was a boring side-on view but with potential for using the salmon as a background rather than an element in the picture.
Again, check your flash coverage to make sure it's even:
And it's not a bad idea to go and stand in the scene for some test shots, just to get a feel for what effect the composition will have on the subjects. (Yes, more dorky pictures of myself on the web. Good job I'm not vain, eh?)
Conclusion? No, there are better locations. But tonight wasn't a waste of time. I'd prefer to decide against this location tonight rather than tomorrow when the subjects are wondering why the bozo with the camera is starting to panic.
Princess Anne visits Alness
Wed Sep 5th - 1:35pm
I wonder what had just been said that provoked this reaction?
Low-angle football
Sun Sep 2nd - 6:06pm
I've mentioned before that I was inspired by Peter Read Miller to try photographing football from a low-angle, as he recommended doing for American football.
I tried it again yesterday for a full game and I now think this is definitely worth pursuing. It's going to be tricky to do it in bad weather because you have to lie down, so if you see me turning up at a football game in leathers then it will be for purely practical reasons!
The ideal camera position is around 10 inches off the ground. Any lower than that and the grass in the foreground becomes a blurry mush.
I find that shots from this angle are best presented in a wide format. No doubt they'll be cropped in the newspaper but at least I can post the wide versions here. What would really make one of these shots work would be if the action happened with lots of other players around, to fill the wide frame. Having some stadium seating in the background wouldn't hurt either.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the best action for this angle is very close to you, so you've got to be ready to grab the shot and then get out of the way.
Taste of Tain + career review!
Sun Sep 2nd - 4:42pm
Shame on me. I've had a lousy attitude to my newspaper work recently. I've been producing the most boring and un-creative photos, and I think I can put it down to a weird form of arrogance: I've got all the fancy gear to do any shot I want, I've learned how to do a variety of location lighting, I've been getting regular commissions, and most of the shots I do on spec are published — so I don't need to actually work at it anymore, right?
WRONG!
For the last few weeks I've been turning up to jobs and doing nothing but safe shots, quick little set-ups with on-camera lighting. I wasn't producing images that I was proud of. I didn't even like them very much. My opinion is that you should aim to make every photo good enough to go in your portfolio (if you've got one, which I don't, but in theory) but some of my recent work hasn't even been good enough for me to post here on my blog.
My own low opinion of my work has been backed up by the fact that several photos weren't published, including commissioned shots that are paid for whether they're used or not. Even some of my good photos weren't used which may be because the papers give priority to the photographers who are producing consistently good work, unlike my random efforts.
So it was time to sort myself out and get back on track!
For this weekend's Taste of Tain event, a festival of local food and drink products, I decided not to commit to doing photos for any newspapers. I wanted to use the day as a learning exercise with the freedom to take risks, knowing that I could make a mess of every shot and it wouldn't matter because I wouldn't be letting anyone down. All I needed to do was make sure I got at least one safe shot of every group so I could give them free copies as a thank-you for letting me practice on them.
That was the plan. It turned out that one paper did ask for a photo late on Friday afternoon so I had to get at least one good shot. And I'm pleased to say that I got lots of good shots. In fact, everything that I tried worked well. Some ideas worked better than others, but every photo looked like the work of the professional that I'm meant to be, not the lazy amateur that I've been for the last few weeks.
Here are two of my favourites…
This first one used an orange-gelled flash behind the subjects and a bare flash to frame right. The flash behind the subjects was required to separate them from the background. I gelled it orange to warm the image up a bit.
The woman in the black top had said that she didn't want to be in the photo, then at the last second decided that she did. With more time I'd have moved the orange flash to put more light on her shoulders for better separation, but I had to get the shot. This was all done in front of an audience, with a video camera on us the whole time, showing what we were doing on a huge TV screen. Pressure!
As noted in the caption, this next photo wasn't staged, despite how it may appear. There had been a few kids on the bicycle before this boy and I noticed that they often looked back at the blender, so I positioned myself by the blender hoping to get a shot like this. By pure chance the boy's mother stood in the perfect position, one of the men held the cup out, and the other man reached up to hold the blender. Couldn't have set the shot up better if I'd tried! Lighting was a single flash over to the left and I used a fast shutter speed to over-power the ambient as I wanted to lose the distracting background of people gathered around.
Here are a couple of other ideas that I tried with the bike and blender.
The first one illustrates why it was difficult to get a good photo from the front — to get the blender in frame I had to chop people's left arms off to avoid an ugly background to frame right.
The second one shows an idea that made for some interesting photos, and solved the problem of the ugly background, but didn't tell the story of what was happening.
Finally here are a couple of other group shots.
There are way too many people in the first one, and that's the next thing I need to get to grips with: Choosing an appropriate number of people to make a good story-telling image. I need to keep in mind that my responsibility is to the newspaper, not to the people who want to be in the photo. See that boy at the front? He just wandered in! I had no idea who he was. Sloppy.
The second one is a typical local newspaper photo: Members of a gardening club with some of the flowers they have grown. Previously I might have lined them all up behind the stall with some flowers in the foreground. But by keeping some of the people at the back and some at the front, with a few flowers in the middle-ground, the composition makes for a more interesting image with some depth.
