Newspapers
Skycam scores again (plus a warning against stupidity)
Fri Aug 15th - 12:40am
I've written before about my skycam technique, which I'm sure isn't original but I've never seen anyone else doing it so what the heck, I'll claim it as my own.
It came in useful again yesterday at the Tain Highland Gathering for the high jump and pole vault. Got quite a few okay-ish pics but this must rate as the best one, firstly because it's a decent composition and secondly because it captured the moment when Donald Bradley won the pole vault competition. Shame about the empty seats in the background, and that's why it won't be in the paper.
Here are a couple of good pics from the high jump. These were done in the boring old-fashioned way, ie: just holding the camera. But close enough that I got whacked a few times. All in a day's work!
Some other events, the long jump and the weight throw for distance. The final picture showing Jason Young in the caber toss event (very similar to one from the Strathpeffer games) is the one that will be in today's Press & Journal.
I've mentioned before that I like to get close to the action, and I irresponsibly encourage everyone to do so. But yesterday I did something stupid and I should mention that too as a warning to others.
While sitting very close to the hammer throw area I had a technical problem with my camera and I briefly looked away from the competitor. Next thing I knew, a hammer went off course and landed about 10 yards from me. That might sound like a good distance away but it was close enough that I actually felt it land, as well as heard it. The competitor could have easily let go of it a split second later and that would have been me dead, end of story.
So if you share my enthusiasm for getting up close to whatever event you're photographing then please remember the golden rule: Watch the danger at all times. Then if it comes your way you've at least got a chance of legging it.
That's one of my nine lives gone.
I’m a hopeless judge of my own work
Tue Aug 12th - 4:58pm
Today's P&J was a pleasant surprise.
I did some photos at an outdoors activity centre yesterday and although I got a few pictures that I thought were "sort of okay", I knew I'd done a job that was average at best. Not for lack of effort, but sometimes you just don't get the eye-catching pictures that you wanted.
Still it's the picture editor whose opinion counts, not mine, and two photos ran in the paper so I guess I scraped through…
Recent newspaper photos
Sun Aug 10th - 5:43pm
I've not been posting many of my newspaper photos recently so I thought I'd do a quick round-up of some favourites from the last few weeks. These aren't necessarily my best work and in some cases it was even a different frame that ran in the paper, but these are the ones that I like for a variety of reasons.
These first four pictures all feature Alness rock band Catching Amy. These guys were a real pleasure to work with and I think we produced some pretty good, eye-catching images. These were done for the Ross-shire Journal to promote the band's upcoming gig at the Strathpeffer Pavilion supporting Led Zeppelin tribute band Whole Lotta Led on 16 August. All four photos (and several more) were done on stage at the Pavilion, using just a black background and two lights.
The photos below are, from top left: Patricia Jamieson who appeared on TV game show Countdown (North Star); outdoor theatre company Illyria (Ross-shire Journal); Amanda Hughes, a successful motorsports competitor who was allegedly suspended from her job at a car rental company because she was typing with one hand (Press & Journal); Ewen and Lorraine Mann with their 12-metre wind turbine (North Star); Ally and Josie, this year's Dingwall gala girls (North Star); rock band Goths in Denial (Ross-shire Journal); children taking part in a pottery painting event (North Star); councillor Alasdair Rhind with unsold copies of someone else's book that he controversially gave away to exhibitors at the Tain car rally (Press & Journal); Niall Harkiss of Tain Thistle football club with an accordion that was donated as a raffle prize (Ross-shire Journal); some of the Highland dancers and musicians who performed for passengers on the Eurodam cruise ship (Ross-shire Journal); Ross County vs Crawley Town (North Star); councillor Alan Torrance at a petrol station for an article about how a tank of petrol now costs more than his first car (Press & Journal); and the first good view for many years of the old street that runs under the modern Tain high street (Press & Journal).
It’s all about news and money
Sun Aug 10th - 3:38pm
Yesterday I had to deal with one of the most frustrating situations you can ever experience in this business: Being the official photographer for an event and then having another photographer turn up.
When the organisers of a local Highland Games asked me to photograph the event this year, the first thing I did was suggest that they stick with the photographer they'd used in previous years. Now you may think that turning down work is bad for business, and in the short term you'd be right. But the code of honour that many photographers conform to is that you don't poach work from others, if for no other reason than you wouldn't like it if they poached work from you. So, in the long term, what's best for business is that if you know someone else usually covers a particular event then you don't take it away from them.
But on this occasion the event organisers specifically wanted me to cover their event as the previous photographer hadn't returned their phone calls. So I arranged to do it for two local papers and everything was looking good.
Or so I thought…
A couple of days before the event, one of the papers contacted me to say that they wouldn't be using my photos after all. The photographer who had covered the event in previous years had told the paper that he had some kind of agreement with one of the organisers, although that person insisted he did not. And to cut a long story short, the newspaper editor took the other photographer at his word, so in a single stroke he had taken work away from me and made me look like a liar. Wow.
But you play with the cards you're dealt. I had lost some sales, but I was also faced with the challenge of covering an event for a Friday paper while someone else was covering it for a Thursday paper. Knowing that the other guy's pictures would hit the street a day before mine, I had to make sure mine were unique, so as well as following the events of the day I had to keep an eye on the other photographer to see what he was getting and, more importantly, to see what he was missing.
The key was to approach the day from a 'news' angle, rather than just going round and snapping everything and anything. So, for example, while the other guy was happy to get big group shots with lots of competitors, I waited until after each event to get pictures of the winners and runners-up. The weather in the morning was atrocious so I got a photo relevant to that, showing the three drenched organisers of the cancelled children's games. (If you can't get a photo of something happening then get a photo of it not happening!) I committed a lot of time to doing action photos from the heavy throwing competition which is the hardest event to get good pictures from, and in doing so I caught one of the stories of the day, that being the only successful caber toss. And I got exclusive photos of the big trophy presentations in the early evening, after the other photographer had left.
In other words I did better news coverage…
If you're ever faced with a similar situation then there's something else you need to consider, and of course that's the loss of income. You can remedy that by pushing for extra print sales if you're so inclined, but I'm only interested in news sales so what I did on this occasion was get photos of people from outside the area and offer the photos to their respective local newspapers. I got several exclusive photos of big prize winners from other areas of Scotland, and some from overseas.
The advice you should take away from this blog post is simple: If you ever feel tempted to poach work from another photographer then please don't do it. It hurts us all and in the long run it will hurt you.
But if someone poaches work from you then you need to just take it on the chin, stay focused, and rise to the challenge: Do a better job and sell more photos.
At the end of the day this business is all about news and money, so if you keep those two goals in mind then you'll do okay. Hopefully.
The bad job gone good
Fri Aug 8th - 6:52pm
There are some types of job that usually go well, and some that will predictably go badly. Today's jobs got mixed up.
The first one involved a big group of kids who had been cleaning up a housing estate, and we did the picture with them gathered around a skip, complete with the usual props like wheelbarrows and rubbish grabbers. These pictures can quickly go to hell but this time the whole thing went like clockwork. Got a nice picture, interesting composition, everyone looking at the camera, plenty of smiles, etc. Very happy with that.
Then I had a job that I'd suggested to the paper myself because I thought there would be a wealth of good photo opportunities. It was an Indiana Jones-themed archaeology event at a museum.
Before I arrived I had been warned that there was nothing even vaguely Indiana Jones about the event, it would just be kids digging in a sandpit. What I hadn't been told was that it was a very small sandpit and a lot of kids. Tricky.
It quickly became evident that I wouldn't be getting any decent candid shots. And with lots of people gathered around a small area at the back of a museum, it would be tricky to stunt any shots because of ugly backgrounds.
Well it's at times like this that you fall back on lighting and composition techniques. For example you can light the subject and leave the background dark. You can shoot from a low angle and use the sky as a background. You can use layering to guide the viewer's eye around the image, which lets you get away with using a plain, boring background. You can even use perspective tricks to make foreground objects appear larger than life, so they cover parts of the background.
It was thanks to these techniques, and the patience of the kids and parents who stayed behind after the event to let me do the photos, that I turned in a pretty decent set of imagee. Here's a selection:
Incidentally I was so low down in that last photo that I had to dig a hole in the sand to push the camera into. I came away with sand in my teeth!
Two great days out of two good weeks
Thu Aug 7th - 12:32am
Call me sad if you want but I live to do news photos. This is my passion. And the last two weeks have been really good with lots to do and a nice mix of subjects.
Okay so we're only talking about local-interest stories and the usual school holiday activity pics, which I'm sure many photogs would find boring and "beneath them", but I like this sort of work. And I'm every bit as committed to doing a good job as any of the high-flyers heading out to Beijing to cover the Olympics.
For some photographers the career goal is to be exceptional, to be the guy who makes the 'wow' photos. But strange as it might sound that isn't my goal. My goal is to be what you might call solid. I want to be Mr Reliable that newspapers can send out to any job, knowing that I'll produce a well-composed, well-lit, relevant and interesting picture. Over the last two weeks, and especially this week, I've been making huge leaps towards achieving that goal. No idea why, I haven't consciously changed anything about the way I work, I just seem to be improving and producing solid work from every job. Hopefully this trend will continue.
Here are some of my photos from the last couple of days…
The poorly whale of Avoch Bay
Tue Aug 5th - 1:51am
This could become a big news story over the next couple of days but for some reason it didn't get much attention today. There were plenty of wildlife enthusiasts and other photographers there, but I think me and Gordon Lennox from the P&J were the only news guys who turned up.
Anyway the story is that a 45-foot sperm whale spent the day swimming in circles around Avoch Bay on the Black Isle, possibly disorientated and almost certainly ill.
The major challenge in photographing something like this is the tremendous distance you're dealing with. And even if you can somehow get a long-enough focal length then you're still left with the problem of reduced visibility simply because there's so much air between the subject and the camera.
This shot was taken with a 300mm lens with stacked 2x and 1.4x teleconverters, on a 1.3x crop body, producing an effective focal length of 1092mm. That's approximately 22 times the focal length of human vision which may sound like a lot but for a job like this it really isn't very powerful at all. For reference, the Kessock Bridge in the background is 7 miles away. Lousy quality picture, but probably the best that anyone could have got under the circumstances.
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.
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.
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.
