Portraits
Kingussie High School seniors portraits
Sat Dec 19th - 6:16pm
Lots of fun on Thursday night, doing the seniors portraits at the Kingussie High School Christmas dance. This was quite different from when I used to do the portraits at Tain Royal Academy, where most of the students were photographed individually, with a few couples and some groups at the end. The students at Kingussie mostly wanted to be photographed in groups doing dramatic, silly and funny poses, so that's what we did and I think I can safely say that everyone enjoyed themselves! Here's a tiny selection of photos:
BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician Award Finalists at Blas Festival
Fri Sep 7th - 11:41pm
This is the picture that I was planning last night. Having decided against the salmon as a location I put all my eggs in one basket and gambled on this broken old fishing boat, beautiful in its ruined state and over-run with weeds.
Technically it was one of the more challenging photos I've done as I had to balance a whole lot of sunlight with not a lot of flash, while still creating some attractive portrait lighting. But the process of actually setting up the group and taking the photo was a breeze thanks to nine very professional young people and tour manager Martin Coull pulling it all together behind the scenes.
Tip: How to perfectly focus a self-portrait
Thu Aug 30th - 2:16am
Please excuse the poor quality model in this photograph but this is a tip about self-portraits so it's all I've got to work with.
It's a fact of life for photographers that we sometimes have to take pictures of ourselves. Often it's just for practice when we're learning a new lighting technique so it doesn't have to be a good photo, but secretly I think we all hope it will be, so we want it to be correctly focused. If all the planets fall into line and you somehow get that one photo of yourself looking like Tom Cruise then you want it to be sharp in the right places, and that means getting your eyes in focus.
If you use standard auto-focus then chances are the camera will focus on the end of your nose, more than a centimetre forward from your eyes. Sometimes it will focus on the bridge of your nose but that's still about half a centimetre forward from your eyes. It could possibly focus on your mouth but that's almost certainly going to be further forward or back than your eyes, depending on the angle of your head. What you can be sure the camera will not focus on is your eyes.
So how do you solve this problem?
There are two well-known but shoddy techniques that you can try:
- Use a small aperture for a large depth of field so your whole face will be in focus. But depth of field is an artistic choice so if you want a shallow DOF then you should use a shallow DOF. Using a deep DOF solves one problem by creating another. Bad idea.
- Trial and error. Auto-focus the camera then take a few photos, move forward a little and take some more, more forward again and take some more, maybe move back a bit and take some more, etc. But you know from doing portrait sessions with other people that you might take 100 frames to get the one you want, so what if your one good frame of yourself is one of the 90% that aren't properly focussed? Bad idea.
The solution is incredibly simple. It occurred to me when I was doing a self-portrait a couple of days ago for the latest Strobist lighting challenge. Before you scroll down, please take a moment to see if you can figure it out, otherwise you'll kick yourself when I tell you!
Here's a clue: Show the camera what you want it to focus on.
Before I tell you the secret, I'll prove that it works. Here's a close-up from the photo at the top of this post. It was taken at 70mm with the aperture set to f/3.5 so the usable depth of field was only a few millimetres. As you can see, though, my eye is perfectly sharp and my eyelashes are perfectly sharp, but my eyebrow and the bridge of my nose are out of focus. Perfect.
Okay so here's how you do it…
Although the portrait is brightly lit, the room was totally dark. The photo was lit by flash but the camera needed to focus in ambient light, which was non-existent — it could have hunted for focus all day and it would never have found it.
So I held a small torch next to my eye and then used a cable release to auto-focus the camera. The only thing visible in the room was the bulb of the torch and the part of my eye that it was illuminating, so that was what the camera focussed on. Then I moved the torch away and took the photo. Result!
The white background… uh, wait for it… that was a piece of foam board leaning on my back with one corner stuck down the back of my trousers to hold it up! How's that for an improvised background?!
Beauty lighting with one flash
Fri Aug 17th - 9:30pm
This image is the result of an experiment that I think worked quite well.
For months I've been promising / threatening Joyce that I'd do a 'proper' portrait of her, but circumstances have conspired against us. Today I only had my 1Ds and a single flash with me, a terrible combination for doing a portrait, but I decided to give it a go and see what I could produce. Always up for a challenge!
We did some shots using dramatic lighting with lots of shadows, not at all flattering, especially for a woman, so I decided to try a variant of beauty lighting. When I say "variant" I mean that I made it up on the spot and it isn't traditional beauty lighting in any sense of the word, but it worked so I'll call it whatever I want! 
We did the shot in the café at the village hall where Joyce works. The background is the blackboard that they write the day's specials on. The single flash was positioned behind Joyce and it served two purposes: To light up the back of her hair and hands, and to bounce some light back onto the blackboard.
The main light was just ambient, which meant I had to use ISO 400 (not desirable on a 1Ds due to shadow noise) and a stupidly low 1/13s shutter speed. (Normally for a quick location shot like this I'd be working with two flashes and a 1D at 1/500s.) Out of 37 photos there were maybe half a dozen that weren't ruined by motion blur, but they were still quite blurry. By pure fluke, this was the best frame and it was the sharpest of the lot.
The 'pose' with the glasses was just an idea to solve a problem: Joyce loves to pose and she's good at it, but she always puts her head down which exaggerates her nose. When I told her not to pose she looked uncomfortable. So I gave her something to do with her glasses and the result looks fairly natural.
This is how the shot was set-up. Click to see it with notes:
Conclusion of a masterpiece
Tue Aug 7th - 2:08am
Yeah that's right, I said masterpiece!
Modesty aside, I really do think this is my finest photograph to date. I've posted it before (here) but that version was, with hindsight, badly processed. This is the full-on 20+ hour processing job ready for printing at A2. Seeing it small on a computer screen can't do it justice. I printed it at 13" x 19" yesterday and it was jaw-droppingly beautiful. I can only imagine how good the A2 print will be.
The goal throughout the processing was subtlety, quite the opposite of how I originally envisioned the picture, and this final version is silky smooth and understated. When I first processed it I wanted to emphasise the dramatic lighting. But I realised that the best way to present this picture is to keep everything subdued and allow its strongest aspect, the composition, to shine through. On screen it doesn't hit you over the head in the same way that the original version did, but on paper it's… dare I say awesome?
And for good measure, here's the final version of the other portrait from the same session. I have to say that I think this picture looks quite poor on screen, and even the A5 test prints looked cheap. But it was processed to look good when viewed as a large print and at 13" x 19" it looks amazing. You don't even want to know how long this one took to process. Heck I don't even want to think about it. Way too long.
Portmahomack gala girls with cross-lighting
Sun Jul 22nd - 9:51am
The current buzz word in location portraiture is cross-lighting, or wrap-around lighting as it is sometimes known. The technique is famously used in a very stylised way by Los Angeles commercial photographer Dave Hill and in a more natural way by New Zealand portrait photographer Brent Williamson.
There are several ways to achieve cross-lighting but the set-up that is fashionable at the moment has the sun behind the subject and over to one side, and an ambient-balanced flash in front of the subject and over to the other side. The sun and the flash need to be directly opposite each other.
A few weeks ago I was taking photos of children on a school trip and without intending to I used cross-lighting on some of the photos. They were really good! So I've been looking for an opportunity to try a proper cross-lighting set-up and this photo of the Portmahomack gala girls was ideal.
Usually with a photo like this you achieve separation by using a shallow depth of field to throw the background way out of focus. But I wanted the scenery to be a part of the picture — out of focus, yes, but still recognisable. Another option is to under-expose the background but that produces a more moody and dramatic image that wasn't appropriate for a summer gala. So the picture was crying out for cross-lighting which allows you to keep the exposure nice and bright and the background as sharp as you want.
I hope the other newspaper photographers around here won't mind me saying that the usual close-up shots of gala girls are becoming tiresome, especially when some of them suffer from ugly backgrounds. I'd like to think that this photo raises the bar a little and from now on the papers might push for more creativity and variety in gala girl shots. (Beautiful scenery + beautiful girls = no excuses.) That said, I do know that this picture isn't perfect. I shot it from too far away and I didn't spot that the little girl's sash was folded.
Thanks to the gala organisers for helping to get the shoot done on a fairly tight schedule, and thanks to the girls for getting dressed up especially for the photo!
Family portrait with a 1-year old
Wed Jul 18th - 2:27am
We had planned for a couple of weeks to do this family portrait of five children out on the beach, but with the unpredictable weather we decided the night before to play safe and go for studio shots.
This turned out to be a great way of doing it because we effectively had two shoots going on at the same time: When the 1-year old felt like co-operating we could do pictures of the whole group, and while he had better things to do elsewhere we could get on with pictures of the older kids. This broke things up nicely and the 3-hour shoot breezed past without anyone getting bored. (These pics aren't in order and I bet you can't tell which ones were done at the end of the shoot.)
The 4th pic, with the girl touching the boy's head, was a candid moment between set-ups, not posed. Not surprisingly that's the shot that got the most "awww!" noises from the parents and grandparents when they saw it. Sweet, eh?
Lighting info:
I changed my usual studio set-up for these shots. Normally I shoot with one softbox to camera left, up high, pointing down. This time I had the softbox at adult head height, pointed directly at the upright of the background. This created a fairly even field of light from front to back so the kids didn't have to be exactly in the right position. I also put a very low-power strobe with silver brolly over to camera right, about 3 f-stops darker than the main light. That little bit of fill kept everything bright and clean to achieve the (sort of) high-key look we wanted. I think I'll go back to using a fill light for all studio shoots from now on.
Large family portrait in country house
Fri Jun 22nd - 10:20pm
About a year ago, shortly before I started doing photography full-time, I applied for a job as a waiter at Glenmorangie House. I didn't get that job, but last week I was up at the house in a different role, doing a portrait of a family who were there to celebrate their mother's 80th birthday.
From the moment I was booked I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve with this photograph. It couldn't be just a picture of the family, it had to be a picture of them with some part of the house or gardens as a background. The location had to be subtle, but it had to be there. I arrived two hours early with nearly every piece of camera and lighting equipment I own, and after scouting every conceivable location I decided to do the picture on the patio. The background would be the gardens and the sky which, I hoped, would be a nice warm colour at sunset when we would be doing the photograph.
As a back-up, in case it rained, I had also decided that we could do a nice set-up in the morning room of the house. And that's where we ended up doing it. By the time we were going to do the photo outside it was too cold, too windy and too grey, so I quickly set-up in the morning room and then the family came through. Two minutes later we were done and the picture is much better than it would have been if we'd done it outside.
Low key family portraits
Mon May 14th - 1:25am
Some photography blogs teach you about lighting, some about business, some will teach you different disciplines, etc. My reason for starting this blog was to encourage other want-to-be photographers by writing about my own start in the business. Documenting my own successes and failures would hopefully help other people achieve those successes faster and avoid the failures.
But sometimes I just like showing you pictures that I'm really proud of, without any need for commentary. I'll let these speak for themselves…
High key family portrait
Sun Apr 29th - 8:57pm
This was a birthday present for a friend, a portrait of her children. She knew I'd be doing a picture for her but she'd guessed that it would be just her younger son, so it was still a bit of a surprise. Even got a few tears out of her. Job done!
