Archive for March, 2008
Tip: Using light stands outside
Sun Mar 30th - 12:52am
One subject that regularly comes up on photography forums is, what do you do if you want to use a light stand outside in windy conditions? Even with just a flash on top — no umbrella — those things will get blown over in no time. And usually the less-than-helpful answer is either that you need to use a tripod (not tall enough) or have an assistant to hold the light stand (not practical for most of us).
Surprisingly I've never seen this idea suggested: Tent pegs. Nearly every outside shot I do is on grass, or could be done on grass if I wanted, so why not fasten the legs of the light stand to the ground using tent pegs?
Now we all know that buying made-for-purpose products can prove expensive so rather than go shopping for tent pegs I went to the local hardware store and bought some large screw-in hooks. They cost 88p each. I chose the ones with the biggest hook ends to make it easier to yank them back out of the ground when I'm done.
Here are a few pictures, done with my mum's point-and-shoot because I didn't have my own camera with me at the time…
Update: Ha! Just been checking the price of tent pegs online and you can buy packs of 10 for about £2. So on this occasion the made-for-purpose product is in fact cheaper than the cheapskate hardware store alternative.
The Job From Heaven
Tue Mar 25th - 10:02pm
After telling you about The Job From Hell the other day I thought I should balance that out by telling you about one that went really well.
Today I had the pleasure of photographing Maureen Mackay and Iain Nesbitt, a couple who will be going to Everest base camp in November to raise money for a children's charity. I called Maureen yesterday to confirm a time for the photo and it was obvious from the start that this was going to be a good shoot: I was going to ask if the two of them would be willing to put their climbing gear on for the photo, but Maureen suggested it first. I was going to ask if there were any steep hills or mountains nearby, but Maureen already had somewhere in mind. And would we be pushed for time? No, no rush at all. I do love going in to a shoot knowing that the people I'm photographing are enthusiastic to get the job done right.
So this afternoon we met at the arranged time, had a coffee and a chat, then drove three miles to the Cat's Back and spent about 10 freezing cold minutes on two different set-ups. Back to Maureen's place for another coffee and the end result of the perfect shoot was a pretty nice photo…
It’s time to get Nice
Mon Mar 24th - 8:03pm
Nice is a new online photography magazine (a "glorified blog" according to its creator) launching today. It promises to approach its topics from a "mostly positive" point of view. From the site's intro:
At Nice our focus falls on the motivation, the idea, the process that leads up to making a photograph rather than taking it. It’s a place to find stories related to photography from a different point of view. Photo tech tips, how-to’s, photography videos, interviews, behind the scenes, advice, opinions, and photography equipment, books, and video reviews – it’s all right here. We’ll try and keep the complaining to a minimum.
I'm not sure what the thinking is behind the positive / no-complaining angle, as photography sites aren't generally seen as being negative, are they? In fact the blog you're reading right now is probably about as negative as it gets, seeing as I often write about the 'down' side of the profession, but I'd like to think I do it in a positive way. (I hope it comes across like that?) But anyway, head over to Nice (lovely presentation by the way) for some feel-good advice and tutorials, but don't forget to come back here for the usual whingeing and negativity. Apparently. 
Taking one flash + HDR to the next level
Mon Mar 24th - 5:21pm
The other day I mentioned Ferrell McCollough's idea of combining single-flash exposures into one HDR image. His sample image was encouraging as a proof of concept, but have a look at the new example he has created, which is one of the most painting-like photos I've ever seen. I do hope Ferrell runs with this concept and gets it established as his own idea, before someone else does.
The Job From Hell
Sun Mar 23rd - 10:00pm
When readers of tomorrow's Press & Journal see this photo, or one of the others from the piping and drumming course at Carbisdale Castle, they'll have no idea how much effort went in to making it…
If you do photos for newspapers then you'll meet lots of random people at random locations doing random things. And you'll encounter lots of random attitudes. Most people are polite, co-operative and enthusiastic; some are embarrassed, nervous or shy; and occasionally there are the ones that are downright rude and discourteous.
But today was unique. Today presented a challenge that I never saw coming: Someone who requested publicity and then tried to sabotage it. How on earth do you handle that? How do you work with that person?
The day got off to a bad start as soon as I arrived at Carbisdale Castle to do photos on the first day of a week-long piping and drumming course. The press release had stated that the course started today but it actually starts tomorrow, so I was told immediately that there wouldn't be anything to take photos of. Now that leaves me with a big problem: The paper is running the feature tomorrow, and they've booked me for today, so by 6pm I need to send them some photos.
I quickly arranged to do a set-up photo with the organiser's son and his friend, in full Highland dress with bagpipes, and we went and did some okay-ish photos at the back of the castle.
That was when the day took a nosedive…
As soon as we'd finished doing the photos, the organiser asked if he could get some for the piping school's web site. Of course he can, I tell him, we'll work something out later. "I'll even put your name under the photos," he says. Uh-oh. I think I'd better make one thing clear, so I explain that there would be a charge for the use of the photos. He comes back with all the usual nonsense about other photographers giving him photos for free, so I explain that those guys must not be as serious as I am about doing this for a living, and if I give him free photos then I'm taking paid work away from someone else. Eventually he backs down, saying that he totally understands my point. But I didn't realise what I'd just let myself in for!
So we go and put the first photos on my laptop and they're a bit disappointing, too ordinary for my liking. There isn't one stand-out picture. One of the lads says something that gives me a great idea for something else to try, and we're just about to do it when in steps the event organiser, huffing and puffing about how the lads don't have time to do any more photos. He reels off a list of jobs for them to do and they disappear. I disappear too, off to formulate a cunning plan…
It was obvious that the event organiser was now going to make life difficult for me, so I needed to find a location where he wouldn't see me. Well hey, I'm in a castle! Hmm, lemme think. It was surprisingly easy to get the key for the tower, and I went up to see what it was like, all the way up through half a dozen flights of steps, two trap doors (really) and out on to the turret. Awesome location, awesome view, so back down the stairs to find a willing volunteer.
There was a young lad in the reception area so I asked if he was a piper, which he was. We checked with his mum if it was okay for him to put his Highland dress on for a photo, and she was nodding in agreement when our friend the event organiser butted in, talking down to me and angrily lecturing that they're all very busy preparing for registration. He starts berating me for taking up so much of his time (even though I haven't said another word to him) but fortunately the young lad's mother interrupts to say that it's fine to do the photo. The lad starts getting changed but because we're being pressurised by the event organiser I decide to do the photo from the waist up so he doesn't need to change in to his kilt.
Back up the tower! We spent about 10 minutes trying a few ideas, found one that worked well and blasted away at it. The lad did great, his mum was a huge help in making sure that his shirt and jacket were immaculate, and we went back downstairs to look at the photos on my laptop.
That, I will concede, was foolish. Because as soon as I've got the photos on the laptop screen, the event organiser appears behind me. "That doesn't look very good," he says. There's a standard response to that comment, so I ask: "Is there anything in particular that you think should have been done differently?" He points to the lad's tie, or rather his lack of tie. "That will reflect badly on the school. You can't put that in the paper. I'm telling you right now that you don't have my permission to put that in the paper."
Now I'll be the total professional right to the end, but part of that is not being a pushover so I ask the guy if we can have a chat away from everyone else. Off we go, and I tell him that I think he has become obstructive since I said he couldn't have the photos for free. Now he gets angry and starts telling me that I've been taking too long, causing him too much inconvenience, and he will complain to the paper about me. Then, his exact words: "Pack up your photo things and get out."
I left my "photo things" right where they were and went to call the picture desk again. I'll admit that by this time I was getting a bit upset, as in boo-hoo, not angry. I'd done absolutely nothing to antagonise this guy and he was doing everything he could to make sure I'd be leaving without any useable pictures. I informed the photo editor of the situation, advised her of the threatened complaint, and told her I was heading home to send the few photos that I'd been able to get.
Well as I walked back to get my "photo things" I was starting to feel a whole lot like a quitter, and by the time I got back inside I'd already made my mind up that I wasn't leaving without the photo I wanted. I found the piper lad's mother again and asked her, warily, if she would be willing to have her son put on the full Highland dress so we could re-do the photo. No problem! She was quite enthusiastic about the idea. We checked with the lad himself and he was a bit bored of it all by now, but he was willing to do it, so I went to get the go-ahead from the event organiser.
NO! He point blankly refused, saying that both the boy and his mother were too busy. I knew that I was dealing with a loose canon here so I very, very delicately told him that I'd already checked with both of them and they were fine with it, but he wasn't interested in that and he refused to allow any more photos to be done.
The next angle of attack… well, let's say that by now I didn't particularly care about this guy's opinion, so I went to check with the piper lad's mother if she'd be happy for us to do the photo without the organiser's permission. And unfortunately she wasn't, as the event organiser also teaches her son and understandably she was concerned of possible repercussions.
I still wasn't willing to drop it so I thought I'd go for the sympathy vote. I went and told the organiser (truthfully) that I've only been working for the P&J for a short time and I'm worried about the career damage if I leave without any good photos.
NO! Not his problem. "You had your chance."
Packed up, loaded the car, got in, started the engine. Uh, I'm quitting again. Turned the engine off, back inside for another go…
Now I try to appeal to his better judgement. I tell him that the photo of the lad without the tie is the best photo of the day, so I expect the paper will use that one. If it's as bad as he says it is then why don't we re-do it and finish the job? Get it done right? That's best for publicity, isn't it? Uh, hello?!?
NO! "I don't need publicity, I've got a full castle!" And then with dozens of people around he raises his voice and starts repeating, "no, no, no", even spelling it out and, I kid you not, writing it in the air with his finger. Several times. I left. I was starting to get the impression that he didn't want me there…
The only other good photo idea that I could think of was to find a member of the Hong Kong police pipe band that I knew had travelled to the event. Ethically I knew that I was obliged to tell whoever I asked that they would be going against the event organiser's wishes, and for some reason I thought a policeman from Hong Kong was the most likely person to agree. And I found two of them! But they didn't have their piping uniforms with them, only casual clothes. So that was that.
And at that point I did quit. I was already an hour behind schedule and if I didn't leave then I'd miss deadline, so off I went. Defeated.
The haul from the day turned out to be not as bad as I feared. A couple of the first photos with the two pipers were acceptable…
And there was the photo I showed you earlier, an alternative frame from the one that the organiser complained about, in which you can't see that the boy isn't wearing his tie. So, job done.
But this blog is about advice. Every story should have a moral. I should be telling you that with hindsight I've realised how I could have handled the situation differently and made it work. But the best I can come up with is this: If someone asks you for free photos, just say something like "we can sort that out later". Unless you absolutely have no choice, don't mention that they'll have to pay for them!
Yes, it's a damn cheek for people to expect photographers to give free photos, and yes, it's a damn cheek for them to then sabotage your job when you say no. But I've learned the hard way today that for some people, a damn cheek is a way of life.
The whole time I was at this event today, I was either working around the organiser's mistakes, working around his interference, or trying desperately to work around his spite. And for all but the first few minutes he was treating me like a nuisance who was inconveniencing him.
How can you work alongside that attitude? The answer: You can't.
One flash + HDR = many flashes
Fri Mar 21st - 4:49pm
High Dynamic Rance enthusiast Ferrell McCollough has devised an interesting technique using flash and HDR exposure blending. He takes multiple images of a scene from a fixed position, but fires a flash from a different position each time and then combines the exposures using HDR software.
I'm going to be totally honest and say that I don't like Ferrell's style of HDR as you take one look at his images and you think, "that's HDR". They're too pastel, too surreal, and there's too much luminance blotching. In my opinion — and I think this is the majority opinion nowadays — good HDR images need to be subtle but effective. The whole point of HDR is that it allows you to capture scenes that are outside your camera's limits, but you still want the image to look realistic. If you can immediately tell that it's HDR then it hasn't worked.
That said, Ferrell has published a book on the subject so obviously he has his own views on the right and wrong ways to do things. Like many aspects of photography, the best advice is probably to just learn everything, listen to everyone, and then decide for yourself what works best. That multiple-flash-HDR is certainly an intriguing concept and I guarantee I'll be stealing using it first chance I get…
iStock eyes your money
Thu Mar 20th - 2:09am
Each week since signing-up with iStockPhoto I've been receiving their e-mail tips, and I've noticed that they're becoming less focused on helpful advice and more focused on draining bank accounts. Well what a shock!
For instance, one e-mail offered a service for a "small fee" that will allow you to "re-download your carefully-crafted portfolio" in case you lose the originals of your uploaded images. The small fee ranges from $25 for less than 100 files to $75 for more than 500. Compare that to the wonderful, friendly, cuddly, fluffy Flickr, for example, where a $24.99 pro account gives you unlimited uploads and downloads. So iStock's prices are actually quite high, especially considering that they're already making money off your files.
And how about the e-mail recommending the Spyder monitor calibration system, which coincidentally iStock are now selling? Bizarrely for a product aimed at people who will be uploading files, iStock is offering it in a "special value bundle" which means you must also buy download credits. And how good is the offer? Well the Spyder3 Studio package, purchased from iStock, will set you back £383.56 which includes the obligatory £74.53 purchase of 115 download credits. But you can buy it elsewhere for £319.98 without having to buy iStock credits that you don't need.
(And incidentally, you'd be better off spending the money on a high-quality monitor and then calibrating just the gamma. Colour calibrators are a false economy, in my opinion, especially the high-priced suites with printer profilers.)
It won't come as any surprise that a microstock company would try to exploit its hard-working and under-paid contributors even more by offering them over-priced products and services and dressing them up as good value. The only surprise is that any photographers still want to join the iStock family, only to endure its special brand of domestic abuse in the hope of selling their valuable photos cheap.
Tip: Easy fill light in Photoshop
Thu Mar 20th - 12:57am
Here's an easy technique for simulating fill light in Photoshop. If you have a photo in which the darker tones are too dark, often caused by using bounce flash without bleeding enough ambient in to the exposure, then this technique can work wonders.
Here's a photo I did yesterday. This was a test shot, flash bounced off the ceiling, and I'd forgotten to drop the shutter speed to bleed in some of the ambient, so this will work nicely as an example. Notice how some parts of the frame are very dark, ie: the man's clothes, under the chairs and under the arm of the boy on the right.
The first thing to do once the image loads in Photoshop is to create a duplicate layer. Do this either by selecting the background layer (the only layer) and pressing CTRL+J for Windows users or Apple+J on the Mac, or by dragging the background layer on to the "new layer" icon. Select the duplicate layer and change its blending mode to Screen. Your layers palette will now look like this:
And your image will look like this, way too bright:
Right-click on the Screen layer, or if you're using a Mac then do whatever you do to bring up the context menu, and select Blending Options. Double-clicking on the layer icon works too. Down at the bottom right of the panel that opens you'll see two gradient bars with sliders at either end. We're interested in the white slider for the Underlying Layer gradient, but rather than moving it, to start with we want to split it. Do this by holding down the ALT key and clicking to the left of the white slider. This will allow you to move the left side of the white slider, like this:
What these sliders do is allow you to control how much of the layer is visible, based on the brightness of pixels in the original (underlying) layer. By default, all brightness levels are visible. If we moved the entire white slider towards the middle then only the darker pixels would show through. If we moved the black slider then only the brighter pixels would show through.
For this technique we want to create a smooth blend, affecting only the darker parts of the image, so drag the left half of the white slider over to the black side of the gradient. Then move the other half of the white slider towards the middle.
While dragging the slider your image will be updated in real time so you can see how the changes are affecting it. Drag the slider as far as it needs to go, like this:
And here's the result. Much nicer!
Yuri Arcurs on Microstock: Investment UP, income DOWN
Sun Mar 16th - 5:59pm
Yuri Arcurs describes himself as "the world’s top selling microstock photographer", but even he is now taking a negative view of the business. In a message on Microstockgroup.com he says that he has spent over $40,000 in three months of 60-hour weeks, producing over 2,000 of what he considers to be his highest quality images. Yet the only change in his income has been a 5% drop.
As usual when talking about microstock, let's have a quick look at the sickeningly exploitative maths: $40,000 to produce 2,000 images means an average per-image production cost of $20. Each sale as microstock would earn anything from $0.10 to $1 or maybe even a bit more if Yuri is on the highest commission rate, but still he's going to need to sell every photo around 20 times just to break even. And if that happens — if he only breaks even — then in the process he'll have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for the microstock agencies.
How hard are you willing to work to buy someone else a Veyron?
By the way I forgot to mention at the time that I was featured in Professional Photographer magazine last November, in an article about microstock. I'd written several times on the subject (here, here and here) so the reporter interviewed me to represent the "against" side of the argument.
All-purpose PC sync / hot shoe adaptor
Sun Mar 16th - 5:09pm
If you want to use Canon flashes with radio triggers, and you don't want to fork out for the new version of the 580EX which has a PC socket, then you need to use a PC-to-hot-shoe adapter. The ones that most people use are those made by Kaiser and Hama, but they both suffer from the same huge design flaw: The PC cord is hardwired in to the adaptor. That's fine for a while, but inevitably the cord will be tugged once too often and you'll end up with this:
(The scratches along the side of the hot shoe are a result of my feeble attempts to prise it open so I could solder the thing back together. Yes I know there are screws on top! But they're those ultra-tiny ones and I don't have a screwdriver that small.)
After my Kaiser adaptor broke, and then my Vivitar 285HV broke, I was left without any way of firing a portable flash with Pocket Wizards. This didn't matter much at the time because most jobs were inside so I could use my studio strobes, but as the weather gets nicer there are more and more outside photos to do. So I set about finding a couple of hot shoe adaptors. But the Kaiser and Hama units are £10 each and I didn't want to throw away another twenty quid on something that I know is going to break sooner or later.
Then I found this little beauty…
The box describes it as a "Sonia all purpose hot shoe (3 piece kit)". I don't think any photo stores or web sites sell them and the guy I bought them from on eBay (here) only had two left, both of which are now safely ensconced in my camera bag. But if you can find them then I'd say they're the ideal solution. I paid the same price for my two as I'd have paid for a couple of Kaiser or Hama units.
Left to right in the photo: Dual purpose hot shoe adapter. You can either plug a PC cord in to it and use the adaptor to fire a flash, which is the use that we're interested in, or you can use it to convert a camera's hot shoe to a PC socket, for cameras that don't have one.
In the middle is a standard male-to-male PC cord, easy and cheap to replace if it gets damaged. And on the right is an adaptor that gives the hot shoe a female screw thread, for mounting on a tripod or light stand in the usual way.
My only criticism of this adaptor, and it's a minor one, is that the plugs on both ends of the PC cord were a very tight fit to start with. But after just a week they have already slackened off, while still holding firmly. Just be careful not to damage the plugs or the sockets because you will have to use a good bit of pressure at first.
So overall I'd say that if you need to give your flashes a PC socket then these are the adaptors you should be looking for. They're worth the search.
