Archive for October, 2008
Monday morning front page
Mon Oct 27th - 11:08am
Always nice to start the week with a photo on the front of the Press & Journal. This one shows some utterly pointless vandalism at a cathedral. There's another photo inside too but I haven't seen the paper yet so I don't know which one.
Two proud front pages
Fri Oct 24th - 11:08am
I've got a couple of front pages today — nothing new there, ha! — but these ones are extra sweet because of the effort involved in producing the pictures.
This picture for the Ross-shire Journal had the potential to be very boring, with a couple of guys from ScotRail coming to look at some war murals at Invergordon train station. So I decided to take a gamble and not feature the war murals at all, instead going for this quirky shot of them queueing at a painted-on ticket office. Now of course I then did some safe shots featuring the war murals, but I thought this was the best picture and thankfully the editor agreed so it's now beaming out at people from hundreds of newsstands around Ross-shire.
Some of the alternative frames:
And this one on the front of today's P&J was done in challenging circumstances, to put it politely. The lady in the picture didn't want to do anything unusual or interesting, and I was very limited in how much I could move the stone around, so backgrounds were a serious problem. I tried a few weird angles and then just kept plugging away until she got bored and relaxed a bit, at which point I got this frame. Not perfect, but better than I was expecting.
Alternative frames, shot from above to use the floor as a background. The over-the-shoulder shot was a good idea that I'll recycle at some point in future.
Purrr
Mon Oct 20th - 11:09pm
Tigers are taller, thinner and more camera-shy than I expected. But I'm persistent. Or should that be purrrsistent…
First concert review for the Press & Journal
Mon Oct 20th - 10:17pm
I did my first concert review for the Press & Journal on Saturday night, published today in the Inverness edition. It was a review of the Calum Stewart, Lauren MacColl and Andy May concert at the Old Brewery in Cromarty. Naturally I did the photographs too and here's how it all came together in the paper:
Click here to read the review online. And a spooky bit of trivia: While queueing to buy the paper, I looked around and guess who was behind me… Calum!
As well as the (very difficult) live photos I did some set-up ones too. For the group shot I had the location set and the lights in place an hour before the musicians even arrived, but I was never 100% convinced that the idea was going to work. A few minutes before we were going to do the picture, I asked three girls to help me test the idea and it looked awful, really bland and formulaic, so I pulled the whole lot down and quickly re-set a couple of yards along the corridor where I could shoot straight down from a high balcony. This was the result:
After the concert I also did some individual portraits of Calum, as he was the star of the show. Here are a couple of favourites:
Both of those portraits were done backstage in a cluttered room with pictures on the walls, using this simple technique to produce the professional studio look.
Update: Just in case anyone's interested, here's what the first idea for the group shot would have looked like. Doesn't really grab your attention, does it?
Hay bales in Balblair field
Sun Oct 19th - 5:47am
They don't come along often, but one of my favourite jobs is when I get to make the long trek round to Cromarty to photograph a concert at the Old Brewery. That's what I did yesterday, with a quick stop on the way for this Balblair landscape…
HDR composite from 6 exposures.
Portmahomack and Tarbat Ness landscapes
Sat Oct 18th - 12:14am
Once in a blue moon (or an orange sunset) I do still do the occasional landscape. Here's one from Friday evening in Portmahomack:
And an hour later, over at Tarbat Ness but without the lighthouse:
Both pictures were HDR composites, using 7 and 6 exposures respectively.
One light, one minute, one goal: Variety
Thu Oct 9th - 12:43am
I'll be doing a lot of sports team photos this year for increased coverage of school sports, and the goal I've set myself is to make every one of them different. For most of them I'll be using a single off-camera flash and I'll only have a minute or so to do each picture. But I'm sick of seeing the same old team line-up shots in every paper so I think it's important to strive for originality.
The first two were done yesterday. Now admit it, if these were on a page with a dozen standard line-up shots, you'd look at these first, wouldn't you?
Two lights, many options
Sun Oct 5th - 4:16pm
It has been a while since I've posted any lighting set-ups so let's fix that today with four recent examples. These pictures were all done on location with either one or two lights, using a variety of techniques to produce different effects.
1: Wraparound lighting with zoom
This portrait of a martial arts champion used a large, diffused light source in front of him to frame left, with a small, hard light source behind him to frame right. The camera was set to f/16 at ISO 200 with a 1-second exposure, which under-exposed the sports hall background by about two stops. As soon as I tripped the shutter, the flashes fired to produce a correct exposure of the subject, and then I zoomed the lens to blur the ambient.
As well as producing some eye-catching results, this technique has the advantage that you can easily adjust your shutter speed to produce different results. You don't need to adjust the lights at all.
2: Wraparound lighting with camera shake
This shot to promote a rave used a large, diffused light source to frame left with a small, hard light source to frame right. Again a long exposure was used but instead of zooming, the camera was moved around to create streaks of light. We did the shot on a stage, surrounded by black curtains, with the only ambient light provided by two banks of multi-coloured disco lights.
3: Wraparound lighting with key shifting
I'm not sure how the term "key shifting" came about but it seems to be catching on as the way to describe this technique. Basically you use flash to correctly expose your subjects, and a high shutter speed to darken the ambient light, producing a moody, surreal effect. This shot used a large, diffused light source immediately behind the camera position, with a small, hard light source behind the subjects to frame right. The ambient was under-exposed by approximately one stop.
The light at the back puts a highlight around the subjects (sometimes called trim or accenting) which creates a nice 3D effect and helps to separate them from whatever you're using as a background, especially if it's dark.
4: Using distance to produce a silhouette
If I was going to teach someone about lighting then one of the first techniques I'd want them to learn is how to produce a silhouette in a small room. The reason is that this technique is based on the inverse square law, which is just a fancy way of saying that lights become less effective if you place them further away from your subject. Get the hang of this technique and you'll understand how light has a depth of field, affected by distance in the same way that the aperture setting on your lens affects the camera's depth of focus.
This picture was done in a school classroom. The photograph of Auschwitz was stuck to a white wall and a small light source was placed in front of it, lower down so it wouldn't appear in the shot. The camera was set to 1/250s, f/11 at ISO 100 which allowed no ambient light to register in the exposure. The only light would be from the flash. The two subjects then stood slightly behind the flash.
Now you might expect the light from the flash to hit the white wall and bounce around the room, eventually lighting the subjects too. And that's exactly what does happen. But the effective silhouette is produced because of the contrasting distances involved. The light from the flash only had to travel about three feet to correctly expose the wall and the Auschwitz photo. And then, yes, it travelled around the room, bouncing back off the walls and ceiling and eventually lighting the two subjects. But because the light had to bounce around for maybe 30 feet, the subjects were dozens of stops under-exposed, which for our purposes is the same as them not having any light at all.
As always, if anything I've written here has helped you learn about lighting then please try to help others learn in future. Thanks! 
Two models, two assistants, and a wee bit o’ Photoshop
Sat Oct 4th - 3:05pm
Yesterday I did a photograph to promote an archaeology festival. The festival started today so the picture was needed for today's paper, which meant setting it up ahead of time. We arranged with a local museum to do the picture on Friday, and a friend kindly lent me two of her kids, both of whom I've worked with before so I knew they would be good models.
The shoot took a lot longer than I expected because, firstly, my flash went in to some weird mode and wouldn't reset, so I couldn't use it. Then I did some ambient-only shots but they lacked impact. Eventually we ended up doing a full production shot with two studio strobes lighting the kids front and back, with the strobes held by the kids' mother and the museum chairman to stop them blowing over in the breeze. This was a team effort!
With the shoot having over-run and another booking 90 minutes later, a quick turnaround was required, which wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't like any of the pictures. I eventually selected four to send over to the picture desk, and as soon as I'd sent them I had the nagging feeling that the (deliberate) over-exposure on the kids' faces was too much. So, clock ticking, I set about re-processing all four images from the raw files.
Thanks to the wraparound lighting I was able to use the high-contrast processing technique that has been made famous by Dave Hill. The final pictures looked much nicer than the originals, being slightly surreal with a strong 3D effect.
In the end there was one picture that I really liked and that was the one that appeared in today's Press & Journal. It ran large, about five times the size of the accompanying article, so I guess the picture editor liked it too.
Here are a couple of the alternative frames. There was another okay-ish frame that was very similar to the one shown above, but not as good.
And for comparison, here's the published photo without the processing:
The only thing you can control is you
Thu Oct 2nd - 1:08am
Guaranteed: Most news shoots won't go as planned. Locations will change at the last minute, extra people will turn up and others won't arrive, outside shots will be driven inside by bad weather, elaborate 15-minute shots will become 60-second quickies, kids will cry, equipment will fail, etc, etc. If it's outside your direct control then you can't count on it, but you need to be ready to deal with it.
A lot of that "dealing with it" will only come with experience, but hopefully the example I'm going to give today will illustrate how a few simple tricks can help overcome some fairly major obstacles.
I was meant to be photographing a film-maker and a writer at a small independent studio. This should immediately put ideas in your head for how you might do the shot: You've got two people so you can have foreground and background interest. You'll have the studio setting with props like lights and cameras, to immediately convey the idea of film-making. This should be a fairly easy shot, so you can put all of your effort in to making it as dramatic and interesting as possible.
But… I arrived at the location to find the studio locked and the film-maker apologising that the writer couldn't make it. So we're stood there on an industrual estate, on a gloomy, overcast day, missing 50% of the subjects and 100% of the location. Not good. But somehow the picture needs to get done.
Almost always, when you're working in a location with ugly backgrounds, the first thing you're going to do is look up and look down. What is the sky like and what is the ground like? If you can get low enough or get high enough then the sky or the ground can be your background. You can light people from behind to cast shadows in front of them, which can make a wet tarmac road look amazing. You can under-expose the sky to create a perfectly smooth, dramatic backdrop. Pretty much the only limit is your own imagination. And if you hit that limit then just try random things and see what happens.
The next trick is focal length. Shoot wide or long. Wide can help to keep the subject dominant in the frame while making background objects and buildings appear small and far away. Shooting telephoto can help to blur an ugly background, or you can keep distractions out of the frame entirely. As a general rule, the more extreme the angle, whether it's wide or long, the more eye-catching the photo will be. I usually shoot at 17mm or 200mm. Work the extremes.
And of course, the most effective solution of all: Lighting. If you can light the subject then the shot gets easier. If you can light the background, and it's appropriate to do so, then the shot gets easier again. Remember that lighting the subject can usually let you turn the background black, which is effectively two levels of lighting that you can control using only one light.
Time to put my money where my mouth is and show you what I came up with from the film-maker shoot. The darker shots were all lit with a single flash. Note that in the first one there's a mess of trees and buildings in the background, but you don't really notice them because the wide angle takes your attention straight to the camera and then up the leading line to the subject's face. In the last photo, the 'safety' shot, the background was a mess of ugly buildings, car tyres and junk metal, but with a shallow depth of field and a careful telephoto shooting angle, the viewer would never know that any of that stuff was there.
One more quick example on the same theme. A couple of weeks ago I was meant to be getting a picture of a drama workshop where a group of kids were making props and costumes for an upcoming play. When I arrived they had nothing. So I had to find an interesting picture of a group of kids in a school hall with no props and about 30 seconds to do the shot so no time for interesting lighting.
That's pretty much my definition of a nightmare shot, especially the extreme time limitation. But by taking the photo from the top of an 8-foot ladder, using the floor as a background, and getting the kids and the drama teacher to "just do something with your hands", I got a shot that wasn't too bad.
The point of showing you that drama workshop picture is this: I think the film-maker pictures are very good but I don't consider the workshop picture to be good at all. However I do consider it to be the best that was possible with the time and location limit. I hate coming away from a job with a picture that I don't like and a feeling that I failed, but I came away from that workshop with a picture that I didn't like and a feeling that I had succeeded.
