Newspapers
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 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.
Feathering: It’s like off-camera lighting… but faster
Mon Sep 29th - 2:56am
I've mentioned before (here) about using light feathering to create an even coverage of light on subjects that aren't equidistant to the light source. The example I gave before used off-camera lighting, but for reasons of working speed I nearly always use on-camera flash nowadays.
One of the major problems with using on-camera flash for editorial work is that a lot of your pictures will have some people close to the camera and others further away. You can often do okay with just flashing the people at the front, but sometimes that's not good enough. This is when light feathering can help.
Consider these two pictures:
In the first picture, the boy at the front is about three feet from the camera. The woman at the back is about eight feet away. But everyone was lit equally by simply turning the flash to the right. By angling the flash like that, the girl and the woman got a good blast of light from the centre of the beam while the boy in the white top got some softer light and the boy at the front got the very edge of the beam which is softest of all. The end result is that they all got roughly the same amount of light. To prove the point, here's another unedited frame when the flash didn't fire:
For the picture of the two men with the plane, the flash was angled to the right and also upwards. The man at the back got the main blast of light while the man at the front got the soft edge of the light. The reason for angling the flash upwards was to avoid getting too much light on the white paintwork of the plane, which would have over-exposed it. Again, here's a frame without the flash:
It can take a few attempts to get the hang of light feathering in this way but then it's a technique that will help you countless times. News pictures require interesting compositions, and interesting compositions nearly always require layering of subjects. With feathering you can layer your subjects and still light them evenly so it's an essential technique to master.
Police raid in Balintore
Thu Sep 25th - 11:32am
It was all jolly exciting in Balintore last night with armed police and dog handlers responding to reports of a gun being fired in a residential street. I wish I could have got closer to the action to get the real heavy pics, but the police asked me to stay behind their cordon. I do like this pic though…
24 September 2008: Police officers respond to an incident in Balintore in which a firearm was allegedly discharged outside a Spar shop, according to local sources. It was later confirmed that the alleged incident involved an air rifle.
Megapixels? No. We’re talking GIGApixels!
Thu Sep 25th - 1:48am
Unless plans change at the last second as they frequently do, this week's edition of the all-singing, all-dancing Ross-shire Journal will feature a panoramic view of Dingwall and the surrounding area taken from the top of the Macdonald Monument last Saturday during Doors Open Day.
At the time, that was the largest panorama I'd ever created, weighing in at around 53 megapixels. If you click the thumbnail to view the larger version then what you'll see is still only about 5% the resolution of the full version.
It took a fair bit of work to stitch that panorama together as it was created from a series of 17mm vertical frames, so there was considerable wide angle distortion. It's preferable to create panoramas from telephoto images, and that's exactly what I did for this next image which is a proof-of-concept for a much larger project. This image isn't meant to be of any great interest or artistic value, it's only an illustration of what can be achieved. This one is 137 megapixels but that's small compared to where the project is heading, which will be in the gigapixel range.
When you click through to the larger version of that one, what you'll be seeing is less than 2% the resolution of the full version.
Straight angles have become odd angles
Fri Sep 19th - 8:05pm
For as long as I can remember I've shot mostly off-angle. Nearly every shot I do is from high up, low down, camera twisted, etc. It's an effective way to make pictures more interesting and to give them more impact. It's also a useful composition tool, allowing you to fit pretty much any shape in to the standard 3×2 aspect ratio.
But last month I met an awesome photographer. And I don't use the word 'awesome' lightly. Gordon Lennox, staffer with the Press & Journal, showed me some of his favourite photos from his own portfolio, and some of the ones that impressed me the most were done from a distance, long lens, and dead straight. Since then I've been experimenting whenever possible with that style of shooting.
One thing I've quickly learned is that straight-on telephoto shots lend themselves best to minimalist compositions. When you shoot off-angle there's a tendency to fill the frame with as much detail as possible, and for newspaper work that's often the point of doing it. But sometimes it's nice to limit the amount of detail and cut the image down to the basics.
For example, one key aspect of a story about fishing ganseys (jumpers) was that each region has a different style of knitting pattern. The museum had two boards full of different patterns, so we stuck the boards to a wall and I asked a member of a local knitting group to just stand and look at them. Instinctively, if you wanted a photo showing 18 different styles of knitting pattern, you might expect the photo to be very busy because you'll be packing a lot of information in there. But I think this minimalist photo conveys the same message, even with lots of negative space:
Similarly for a story about school pupils preparing for a visit to Auschwitz, this sombre silhouette shows two pupils looking at a photograph from last year's visit.
This museum exhibition was, to be polite about it, not as photographically exciting as we were lead to be believed. But by making the picture about a local artist who kindly agreed to come and pose for me, the posters and TV screen became secondary elements. I'm sure I'll re-use this idea in future: When the thing I'm intending to photograph isn't visually exciting, find a person to be the main element in the photo and allow the other things to merely fill in the gaps.
Finally, this image of a sports centre coordinator is wide angle but I'll include it here because it illustrates how you can have an interesting perspective without twisting the camera. I actually climbed up the weights machine and hung over the top of it, with the back of my head flat against the ceiling, to get this unusual angle looking straight down at her. The angle serves no purpose in the story, it was done purely to create an unusual image that will grab people's attention. If there are four pictures on a page, all by different people, then I want mine to be the one that you look at first. And last.
Tain Youth Forum 3rd Birthday
Thu Aug 21st - 10:52pm
How strange. This is one of those photos that I thought would be held for weeks and then tucked away on a black & white page somewhere in the depths of the paper.
But no, less than 24 hours after I did the picture it's on the front of this week's Ross-shire Journal, presumably because it's a happy and colourful photo to brighten up a front page of somewhat downbeat stories. (And it's nice to have a happy story about Tain after something horrible that happened last week.)
Yes the cake was meant to be central but I'd been shifting the girls around for long enough and they were way past bored so it was time to snap the pic and be done.
Good jobs done good
Thu Aug 21st - 10:46pm
I've mentioned before that there's a certain style of photo that I really like, the ones where you bring one or more people in to the foreground and have others in the background. That layering of people gives the photo some depth and makes it infinitely more interesting and eye-catching than having everyone bunched together in a group. It's a technique that Bobby Nelson uses to great effect, and it's one of the reasons why I consider him the best photographer in the region.
Obviously you can't use this technique with every photo. For example a picture of a prizegiving would look ridiculous if you had the winner in the foreground and the person giving the prize in the background. Similarly with group shots everyone is usually 'equal' in the picture so in most cases it doesn't make sense to have some of them separated at the front. And seeing as most of the photos I do for the local papers are either prizegivings or group shots of some sort, I don't get much opportunity to use this technique with the photos I do for them, whereas I've frequently used it for my Press & Journal photos.
Anyway the whole point of mentioning this is that that I've done a few pics in this style recently, all of which I really like. These are the sort of photos that I used to look at and think, I wish I could do pictures like that. So it's nice to know that I can! These are all in this week's Ross-shire Journal apart from the pic of the two guys with the strike sign as there were two photos done for the same story and it's the picture of the guys in the hi-vis vests that was used.
Whole Lotta Led @ Strathpeffer Pavilion
Sun Aug 17th - 1:36pm
The term "covers band" may conjure up images of naffness but Whole Lotta Led make the point of being Led Zeppelin soundalikes, not lookalikes. They give you a 2-hour experience of a Zeppelin concert without any silly wigs or oversized flares. And jolly good they are too, not just because they play the songs so well, but because they clearly love doing it.
I was at their concert in the Strathpeffer Pavilion last night to photograph the local support act, Catching Amy, but I'd asked Whole Lotta Led in advance if it would be okay to stay and photograph their set too, which they kindly agreed to let me do. This was the first concert I've photographed for several years so I wanted to have a go for practice, as well as giving the Mk3 a proper test in a low-light environment.
Here are my two favourite pictures from the night:
And here's a quick selection of others that grabbed my attention:
I'd suggested to the North Star that I could get a picture of some local folks at the concert, and on the night I decided to amp that up a bit by getting about 30 of them and both bands as well. If I was to do the same thing again I'd go for a more creative set-up and probably make the bands more prominent (they're at the back in this photo) but what I'm really trying to get to grips with nowadays is working quickly so that's what I did. Getting two bands and a big group of concert-goers all in one place at the same time was a decent achievement in itself, although unfortunately we didn't have the Whole Lotta Led guitarist as in true rock-and-roll fashion he'd wandered off and nobody knew where he was.
