Archive for June, 2008
With age comes cowardice
Sat Jun 28th - 6:03pm
Usually I want to be closer to the action than people will let me go, but I must admit that on this occasion I took another couple of steps back. And I'm glad I did! Still closer than the safety people though. This was very warm…
Mind you I think it was warmer for this guy…
And this photo, from another stunt, could have been a spectacular shot of a guy on fire. But where he's lying in the photo is exactly where I was standing a second earlier, so you can imagine why I moved back.
Another superb Tain Gala! The organisers surpass themselves every year. They even arranged good weather for today. I'll post some of the 'proper' photos once the paper's had chance to use them, or not.
Point-and-shoot strikes again!
Thu Jun 26th - 11:47pm
My little point-and-shoot has produced another couple of front page photos for this week's Ross-shire Journal. This time it was for a story about a piece of falling brick that nearly killed a pedestrian and resulted in a busy road being closed.
What's great about these little cameras is that they don't arouse much suspicion. Turn up with a whopping DSLR and people are immediately on guard because they assume the pictures are going to end up in print somewhere. With a point-and-shoot you're just another onlooker.
The close-up shot of the brick was obtained simply by putting on a high-vis jacket, walking confidently on to the site and asking where the brick was. Naturally they asked why I wanted a photo of it so I told them it was "to have a record of the incident", which was perfectly true. As I was doing the photo someone did ask me outright who I worked for so I stalled for a few seconds while I made sure I got some useable shots, then casually said that I do photos for the paper. I expected that to get me thrown off the site immediately but it didn't, leaving me with time to position the Coke bottle next to the brick to give some sense of scale.
We exist!
Thu Jun 19th - 11:37pm
One for local readers: If you've ever looked for our part of the world on Google's satellite maps then you'll have found little more than a load of blur. But not anymore! Now you can zoom in almost all the way. For example here's the closest you can get to the Memorial Hall in Balintore. You can get an even better view of Inverness, for example here's part of the Eastgate Centre.
Remember you can click + drag those maps to look around.
The best camera…?
Fri Jun 13th - 4:01pm
I've got cameras costing from £1,000 to £5,000 but the best camera is always the one you've got with you at the time.
A couple of months ago I bought a point-and-shoot (Panasonic DMC-TZ5) to live in my jacket pocket so I don't need to carry a bulky DSLR around with me all the time. Last week, purely by chance, I 'snapped' a confrontation between a forestry worker and a trespassing motorcyclist, and the photo was used for the top story on the front page of this week's Ross-shire Journal.
The photo was done on full auto mode. Literally point-and-shoot.
And this isn't the first time the TZ5 has earned its keep. Shortly after getting it I had an unusual request from a company in the south of England, to do some photos of houses on a nearby estate, up here in the north of Scotland. To avoid attracting too much attention with a big DSLR, I did the photos with the TZ5. As a matter of principle I told the client that I'd done them with a point-and-shoot, and I explained why, and they were happy with the quality so it's all good.
The TZ5 was bought for fun with no intention of making money from it, but is is now nearly 1/3 of the way towards paying for itself.
Motivated lighting and bounce flash tips
Tue Jun 10th - 10:50pm
Two lighting links that you may find interesting:
- David Hobby (Strobist) posted a picture on Flickr of a contortionist in a locker. The ensuing discussion covered what David calls "motivated lighting", ie: lighting for a reason, rather than just for the sake of it.
- New Jersey wedding photographer Neil van Niekerk's guide to natural looking flash includes some great examples of using bounce flash in churches. After reading his guide I went around the house taking photos with the flash on camera but pointed directly behind me and the results were astounding. There's a lot more good stuff in Neil's guide but for that one tip alone I owe him a huge debt of thanks.
The secret of better group shots
Mon Jun 9th - 10:26pm
I was going to pompously describe this as the secret to perfect group shots but let's back off from that and admit from the start that the technique doesn't work perfectly. But what this technique does do, consistently, is get almost everyone in a large group to look at the camera and smile. Or at least appear to be smiling.
First, the proof. Here are the last five group photos I've done. You'll spot one or two kids here and there with their eyes closed, or looking away, but for the most part we've got lots of happy faces looking straight at the camera…
So how does the technique work? Well like all the best tricks it's incredibly simple and very easy. You don't even need any extra equipment.
It was while doing the photo on the golf course that the lightbulb came on. (I mean that figuratively. It isn't an actual light bulb that comes on to grab everyone's attention.) There were a few guys at the back who were deliberately hiding behind other people, and a couple of guys talking to each other. It was starting to get a bit frustrating so eventually I lowered the camera and just stared at one of the chatterboxes until he shut up and looked at me.
Then I said to the group: "All I need is for you all to look at me for five seconds." And immediately someone started counting: 1… 2…
Suddenly the group was perfect. Everyone joined in counting outloud, all of them looking at the camera. The guys who were chatting were now counting. Even the guys who had been hiding stepped in to view. I snapped away.
After five seconds I said thank you and that was that. Almost perfect.
So for every group shot I do now I ask them to count to 10. Sometimes I push that to 20. But even if you went as far as 30 you'd still get the close-to-perfect shot much faster than you usually would.
Feathering = two lights for the price of one
Fri Jun 6th - 4:07pm
This is one of those things that I think we all know in theory, but rarely use in practice. So I thought this example might show that feathering is as much a valid light modifier as umbrellas and snoots.
All three people in this photo were lit using one light:
My first attempt at lighting the photo involved trying to position a light stand to frame right, roughly equidistant to all three men. But that meant standing it in a lake and despite prolonged efforts it just wasn't happening.
The only other place I could sensibly position the light stand was behind me. So that's what I did. But that meant it was a lot closer to the guy in the foreground than it was to the guys in the background, so light fall-off was going to be a problem.
To explain:
Suppose I set the light correctly for the guy in the foreground at f/11. The guys in the background were about three times further away so they'd only be getting enough light for an f/2.8 exposure. Or something like that! My knowledge of the inverse square law is a bit shaky but the bottom line is that they wouldn't be getting enough light. Nowhere near enough.
The way I decided to work around this was to set the flash power for the guys in the background, but then turn the flash away to the right. There was still a good chunk of the beam hitting the guys in the background but the guy in the foreground was only getting a thin sliver from the side of the beam.
End result: Everyone got an equal amount of light.
Here's roughly how the set-up was arranged:
Feathering is a technique that you should keep stored away in the back of your mind, like the gadget in your gear bag that you hardly ever use but when you need it, you really need it. As illustrated by this example, feathering can allow you to get a shot that would otherwise be impossible to light.
Good week… and a bad week
Fri Jun 6th - 3:50pm
This has been a strange week. For a start I've been ill, and therefore very tired, but I've been missing sleep because the cat has been ill too. So I've been a bit of a zombie. And I've also managed to have three complaints made against me, coincidentally all by council people.
First, the positive: It's been a busy week and I've produced a lot of photos that I'm happy with. Thursday was a high point as the three papers I do most work for all had my photos on their front pages:
But the week started on a negative, with a complaint from a councillor who I photographed for a newspaper a couple of months ago. She was furious that I had shown the photo here, on my blog, when I didn't have permission to do so. Unfortunately her complaint was hollow because I did actually have 'permission', not that I need it as I'm freelance so I own the copyright. Anyway this councillor demanded that I remove the photo or she would "contact the Scottish newspapers", which I assume was her way of blackmailing me with a threat of career damage. Naturally I didn't remove the photo. (Someone else asked for their photo to be removed a few days later and I did so immediately. They asked politely. Update: And I've now removed the councillor's photo.)
The next complaint was from another councillor. I turned up to do a pre-arranged photo and he informed me that he had double-booked himself so he could only stay for a few minutes. That would have been okay apart from the fact that he was camera shy, so it took ages to get even one decent shot without him staring off into the distance or looking at the ground. Just as I was starting to get some useable pics he announced that he had to go, and if I tried to keep him any longer then he would complain to the newspaper. So off he went. And then complained anyway.
And from the bizarre to the ridiculous: Yesterday I was scouting a location to do a newspaper photo, and there were some council workmen cutting the grass. Today someone from the council complained to a different paper that I'd been hanging around the workmen, dangerously close, and trying to take photos of them. Never mind the fact that I hadn't gone anywhere near them and didn't even have my camera with me at the time! They wouldn't have even known I was a photographer until they saw me doing the photo for the paper about half an hour later.
Hopefully next week won't be quite so weird…
