Newspapers

Shame on me. I've had a lousy attitude to my newspaper work recently. I've been producing the most boring and un-creative photos, and I think I can put it down to a weird form of arrogance: I've got all the fancy gear to do any shot I want, I've learned how to do a variety of location lighting, I've been getting regular commissions, and most of the shots I do on spec are published — so I don't need to actually work at it anymore, right?

WRONG!

For the last few weeks I've been turning up to jobs and doing nothing but safe shots, quick little set-ups with on-camera lighting. I wasn't producing images that I was proud of. I didn't even like them very much. My opinion is that you should aim to make every photo good enough to go in your portfolio (if you've got one, which I don't, but in theory) but some of my recent work hasn't even been good enough for me to post here on my blog.

My own low opinion of my work has been backed up by the fact that several photos weren't published, including commissioned shots that are paid for whether they're used or not. Even some of my good photos weren't used which may be because the papers give priority to the photographers who are producing consistently good work, unlike my random efforts.

So it was time to sort myself out and get back on track!

For this weekend's Taste of Tain event, a festival of local food and drink products, I decided not to commit to doing photos for any newspapers. I wanted to use the day as a learning exercise with the freedom to take risks, knowing that I could make a mess of every shot and it wouldn't matter because I wouldn't be letting anyone down. All I needed to do was make sure I got at least one safe shot of every group so I could give them free copies as a thank-you for letting me practice on them.

That was the plan. It turned out that one paper did ask for a photo late on Friday afternoon so I had to get at least one good shot. And I'm pleased to say that I got lots of good shots. In fact, everything that I tried worked well. Some ideas worked better than others, but every photo looked like the work of the professional that I'm meant to be, not the lazy amateur that I've been for the last few weeks.

Here are two of my favourites…

This first one used an orange-gelled flash behind the subjects and a bare flash to frame right. The flash behind the subjects was required to separate them from the background. I gelled it orange to warm the image up a bit.

The woman in the black top had said that she didn't want to be in the photo, then at the last second decided that she did. With more time I'd have moved the orange flash to put more light on her shoulders for better separation, but I had to get the shot. This was all done in front of an audience, with a video camera on us the whole time, showing what we were doing on a huge TV screen. Pressure!

As noted in the caption, this next photo wasn't staged, despite how it may appear. There had been a few kids on the bicycle before this boy and I noticed that they often looked back at the blender, so I positioned myself by the blender hoping to get a shot like this. By pure chance the boy's mother stood in the perfect position, one of the men held the cup out, and the other man reached up to hold the blender. Couldn't have set the shot up better if I'd tried! Lighting was a single flash over to the left and I used a fast shutter speed to over-power the ambient as I wanted to lose the distracting background of people gathered around.

Here are a couple of other ideas that I tried with the bike and blender.

The first one illustrates why it was difficult to get a good photo from the front — to get the blender in frame I had to chop people's left arms off to avoid an ugly background to frame right.

The second one shows an idea that made for some interesting photos, and solved the problem of the ugly background, but didn't tell the story of what was happening.

Finally here are a couple of other group shots.

There are way too many people in the first one, and that's the next thing I need to get to grips with: Choosing an appropriate number of people to make a good story-telling image. I need to keep in mind that my responsibility is to the newspaper, not to the people who want to be in the photo. See that boy at the front? He just wandered in! I had no idea who he was. Sloppy.
The second one is a typical local newspaper photo: Members of a gardening club with some of the flowers they have grown. Previously I might have lined them all up behind the stall with some flowers in the foreground. But by keeping some of the people at the back and some at the front, with a few flowers in the middle-ground, the composition makes for a more interesting image with some depth. 

We had our village gala today which happens at the harbour so most of the events are somehow connected to water: Sandcastle competition, swimming and diving, raft race, etc. I've photographed this event twice before and both times it was great fun but afterwards I felt I could have done more.

So this year I had three goals: Get the shots for the local newspapers, get pictures of as many participants as possible for the village newsletter, and look for something abstract and eye-catching that could — if it's a strong enough image — make its way into one of the nationals. (In this case, aiming for the P&J.)

Here's what I came up with. This first image is from the diving competition, showing an upside-down view of someone's legs which are also reflected in silhouette.

This is a young boy who really wanted to take part in the diving competition but he couldn't quite convince himself to do it. Can't blame him!

And finally this one shows one of the diving-for-plates contestants swimming back to the surface. I'm not 100% sure but I think this might have been the lad who won the competition, which is a stroke of luck as very few of these underwater shots worked. It's so difficult to focus on people while they're beneath the surface.

For any local folks reading, I'll post the usual selection of photos from the day once the papers have had chance to use them.

It's been a good week in the newspapers for the Sellers family with Reuben in the P&J on Monday and then Lorelei and Evangeline in the North Star today.

Four pics of mine in the Ross-shire Journal this week, including this shot of the Portmahomack gala girls as the top pic on the front page. Very pleased that this got such a good show. I was totally upfront about trying to top the usual gala girls pic so the front page will do nicely, thank you!

Also inside the paper, this pic of the sandcastle competition from the gala:

Tucked out of the way in a corner of page 2 is the best newspaper photo I've ever done, showing the first Harry Potter customers at Tain Bookshop. Now I KNOW that most people won't think much of this pic, in fact I'm guessing that a lot of people will think it's rubbish. But I know what *I* like and this is the kind of photo that I've been aspiring to for the last four years. Lighting, set-up, composition and narrative, I just think it's all great! Should have had something more obviously Potterish in the frame so it's far from perfect, but it's certainly the newspaper photo I've been most satisfied with. Gotta top it now! (The composition was originally inspired by the first pic in this set by Michael Zamora, modified a bit to get the woman's face in view, then modified a lot to get the two kids into the frame.)

There's a theory that getting loads of kids into a photo sells more copies of the paper. But unfortunately it also guarantees a lousy photo. So respect to the editors of both the local papers (North Star and Ross-shire Journal) who over the last year have started to prioritise photo quality over quantity of kids. This was the big group photo I went to get at the launch of a play park in Invergordon:

But while I was hanging around I spotted a load of kids on a big swing so I went and took a few shots of them. Now one paranoia-induced rule I have on jobs like this is that I'll only do the pic I'm there to do, because the last thing you want is some over-protective parent getting upset about you taking a pic of their kid. But this shot was too good to miss and indeed it's the one that ran in the paper. Much better than the big group. The only thing that lets it down is that the weather was overcast and most of the kids were wearing pale clothes so even with flash I couldn't get the colours to pop at all. No worries though, it ran in black & white.

I did try a more interesting variation on the big group shot and the result was sort of okay-ish but it's obviously not everything it could have been so I didn't even put it into the paper, didn't want to risk it being used.

Neither of these Inver F.C. team pics made it in. No big surprise. After a great season they'd just won the Seaboard Cup but most of the players couldn't be bothered lining up for a team shot so these were the best we got.