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.
Tip: Ambidextrous off-camera lighting
Sat Aug 2nd - 3:56pm
Cameras are designed for right-handed people. This is fine is you want to hold the camera with one hand while holding a light with the other hand, like this:
But it's a problem if you want to hold the flash to your right. This is essential to avoid your lighting becoming repetitive, and so you don't end up designing your compositions around where your flash will be held. There are a few ways to get that corded flash over to your right but I think this is the technique most of us use as it allows you to rest the camera on your shoulder for extra support:
There is another way to do it though. Believe it or not you can actually hold the camera in your left hand and operate it quite comfortably that way. When you look at this next picture you may well think it would take ages to get accustomed to it, but try it and you'll be surprised how natural it feels:
There are two ways you can hold the camera. You can see above that I was holding the lens with my thumb and index finger, and pressing the shutter button with my middle finger. This next picture shows how you can press the shutter button with your index finger while holding the grip with your thumb and other fingers:
However you do it, your thumb takes the weight of the camera and lens. Here's a close-up of the holding-the-lens technique:
And here's the holding-the-grip technique:
I got this idea from wildlife photographer Charlie Phillips. He holds the camera with his left hand for a different reason, but it occurred to me that it would be useful for giving me more control over my light positioning. I tried it, found it surprisingly easy, and now it's another technique to pull out the bag whenever necessary.
Awesome camera saves rubbish photographer
Fri Aug 1st - 5:04pm
I'm on my second 1D Mk3 now. The first one was proving to be too hit-and-miss with focus so I swapped it. The new one is actually an older serial number but so far, so good, so fingers crossed.
The incredible high-ISO performance proved itself again today with a shot that I made a real mess of, but was then able to rescue. I was doing this picture of a swimming lesson and, genius that I'm not, I decided to try it without flash. I had intended to shoot at 1/50s f/5.6 ISO 1600 but at some point I absent-mindedly changed the aperture to f/8. And to make matters worse, having metered for the general scene, I failed to realise that the place where I was going to do the picture was in fact a lot darker. Oh and to compound the problem even more I didn't check the LCD screen while doing the shot. So as the kids swam away afterwards and I finally checked the pictures, this is what I saw:
Can you imagine trying to recover an ISO 1600 image that is so under-exposed?
Well thanks to the Mk3 it was an easy save. Cranked the exposure on the raw file and added a bit of fake fill light. Job done. Almost. The instructors' purple shirts did get quite grainy so I applied some selective noise reduction, but apart from that the noise was fine and this is how the picture ended up:
The noise was certainly there, no doubt about that, but this ISO 1600 image from the Mk3, pushed about two stops, was comparable to a properly exposed ISO 800 image on the 1Ds or an ISO 1250 image on the 1D. Like most photo cock-ups this one was entirely down to the idiot behind the camera, but it's nice to know that the camera has got your back when you do make a mistake.
Here's a 100% crop from of the original image:
And here's the same crop from the finished version. Noise reduction was applied to the purple shirt but not to the skin or water.
First few days with Canon 1D Mk3
Sat Jul 19th - 2:30am
I've been using the 1D Mk3 for a few days now and there are some features that are obvious highlights. For starters the new battery technology is extraordinary. It took 2 hours to give the battery a full first charge on Wednesday afternoon, and since then the camera has shot a football match, an accident scene, a portrait for a news item, and an entire wedding. That's a total of 1,824 frames plus lots of time using the review screen, and still the battery meter is showing 26%.
(Update: Add another 686 frames from another football match, some news pics, and a couple of gala girls playing with the camera's crazy high-speed 10fps mode. The battery is still showing 7% charge.)
Secondly the ISO performance is going to make life a lot easier. Here's an ISO 800 frame from yesterday's wedding that was under-exposed by approximately one stop due to bouncing the flash off the high, dark-coloured ceiling. But I shot it in raw, pushed it one stop, and added a bit of fill light. With my previous cameras that would have produced an image that needed extra work to do selective noise reduction in the shadow areas, but with the Mk3 the noise isn't even noticeable.
Incidentally the news profile pics that I mentioned, which were done for an item in Friday's Press & Journal, have since been licensed by two national newspapers. That nice income boost means that after only three days the Mk3 is already 1/4 of the way towards paying for itself.
First few hours with Canon 1D Mk3
Thu Jul 17th - 1:55am
I'm now the happy (but broke) owner of a lovely new Canon 1D Mk3. I've been thinking of getting one for a while but with a wedding coming up on Friday I decided to take the plunge. I only had a few hours to practice with it today, just some test shots around the house and then off to photograph Tain Thistle vs Ross-shire Club. Favourite pic from the match:
Of course one of the main features of the Mk3 is its high-ISO performance and it's even better than I expected. This tree picture was shot at ISO 3200 and the blacks are immaculate, perfectly useable straight out of the camera.
Eurodam maiden voyage
Mon Jul 14th - 10:27pm
Here's a spooky picture of Holland America's new cruise ship, Eurodam, visiting Invergordon during her maiden voyage. This is a 4-frame HDR.
Update: This photo ran nice and large on the BBC web site.
Tip: Saturation on a sunny day
Sun Jul 6th - 11:23pm
This is obvious when you think about it, but it's one of those things that nobody ever tells you. How do you get bright and saturated colours on a sunny day without people squinting at the sun?
Here's an example of the problem. The easy way to avoid having people squint is to shoot in to the sun. But unless you're using some creative lighting, that means cranking up the exposure and you end up with the sky blown out and everything else looking a bit pale, like this:
If you shoot with the sun behind you then the people in the photo will be squinting. But there's an easy solution: Shoot from a low angle. This gets you saturated colours, a properly exposed sky, and because the people are looking down at you they won't have the sun in their eyes. Like this:
Here's another example. This was the first photo I used this technique for. It was an unusual choice to do a photo of badminton players outside but time constraints made it the sensible option, and the weather was so nice that it would have been a shame to have the sky blown out. At first I set the group up with the sun behind them, and I was going to under-expose the ambient and light them with flash. But then the penny dropped and I thought of shooting with the sun behind me, but from a low angle. They still squinted a bit because I didn't go low enough, but I learned how this technique could work. And then the photo ran in black & white!
