French Horn workshop
Wed May 28th - 10:06am
I think this is one of the best photos I've ever done! It was very simple, just one light off to the right and under-exposing the ambient, but I think it worked a treat. The subject is musician Anthony Halstead who conducted a French Horn workshop in Edderton last week. The photo ran quite large in the Press & Journal.
The workshop also gave me an opportunity to try a lighting technique that I first read about two years ago. Way back in April 2006, David Hobby (Strobist) wrote about using small strobes to light a basketball game. The key point, for me, was that he positioned the strobes to shoot over the top of the game, zoomed to 50mm. Taking fall-off in to account this created a fairly consistent covering of light.
I've photographed quite a few music workshops and I usually use ambient only. But for this one I set-up a single flash on a light stand, a few feet above the heads of the musicians, and off to one side. The ambient light was tungsten so I coloured the flash with a CTO (orange) gel.
This wide view shows the overall effect. The flash is positioned just out of view to the left of the frame.
But the magic starts happening when you zoom in. These examples show how you get different effects depending on where the light is positioned. In the first picture the light was off to the left at about 90 degrees. For the second picture it was off to the right, but beyond 90 degrees to keep this side of the people's faces in shadow. And in the other two photos it was much further around and the ambient was under-exposed by several stops to create that dramatic outline effect.
Another idea that I tried was using the flash zoomed to 105mm, close to one of the musicians and aimed directly at her. By under-exposing the ambient I was able to isolate that one person in the frame. At the time I didn't think this idea was working very well so I didn't persist with it, but it's actually quite nice so I'm going to use it in future. This was just a test shot:
JK Rowling wins child photography appeal
Wed May 7th - 10:40am
Last August I mentioned (here) that Harry Potter author JK Rowling had lost a High Court case in which she tried to ban the publication of a paparazzo's photo of her son, taken covertly, without her permission, on an Edinburgh street.
Well good news! Rowling and her husband Dr Neil Murray took the case to the Court of Appeal and won. The BBC reports:
Judge Sir Anthony Clarke said: "If a child of parents who are not in the public eye could reasonably expect not to have photographs of him published in the media, so too should the child of a famous parent.
"In our opinion, it is at least arguable that a child of 'ordinary' parents could reasonably expect that the press would not target him and publish photographs of him."
Another nail in the coffin of the paparazzi parasites. Lovely!
Good run of front pagers
Sat Apr 19th - 4:13pm
I've been having a good run of front page photos recently. I know that we're meant to be all nonchalant and super-cool about getting the front page but I love it!
(Update: Two photographs, one of a councollor and one of a police sergeant, have been removed by request. Both had been used on the front of the P&J.)
Tickets for the Kaiser Chiefs concerts on the 19th and 20th of May at the Strathpeffer Pavilion sold out at the venue within 10 minutes. Pictured are the three lucky ladies who were first in the queue: Sarah McLoughlin (front) from Warrington, who was first in line at 7am ready for the tickets to go on sale at 9am; Susan Campbell (left) from Dochcarty Farm in Dingwall, and Valerie Pearce from Scotsburn. Front page of today's P&J.
This photo of Edderton primary school kids was done for the North Star but the Edderton headmistress asked if it could go in the Northern Times as well. The NS were okay with that and it ran large on the front of the NT, which was better than the small show it got in the paper it was done for!
I'd gone to Dornoch Academy to do photos of some Ross-shire primary school kids learning about the sort of items that are confiscated by Customs. Unfortunately the booking was very last-minute and just as I got to the Academy, the bus full of Ross-shire kids was leaving. However there were some kids from Dornoch primary school on their way so I suggested the story to the Northern Times and this eye-catching shot landed on the front page.
I did this photo at the Junior Road Safety Officers conference in Inverness last Wednesday and sent it off to the Northern Times late that night. On Thursday morning I was over in Dingwall so I called in to see everyone at the Ross-shire Journal and North Star. As I walked past the printing presses I spotted the recently-printed Northern Times with this photo in pride of place at the top of the front page. There can't have been more than a couple of hours between the editor receiving the pic and it rolling off the presses!
These front pagers are only the tip of the iceberg of course. Recently I've been doing 15-20 newspaper pictures each week so after 5 years I'm finally starting to earn a decent living from photography. Hurrah! And with spring getting up to speed, and summer approaching, there will be lots more going on and more photos to do. I'd say that 6-8 pics each day is doable, so that's the sort of number I'm looking for. The goal is still a staff position, and I'd say I've reached that level of competence, but in the meantime I'm really enjoying the freelance life.
Monuments and Sculptures of the Seaboard Villages
Sun Apr 13th - 11:59pm
A few days ago Flickr added support for hosting video files. Great! Except I don't do video. So time to learn! I borrowed a video camera and spent a few hours yesterday making a test video to learn the basics of what works and what doesn't, transferring video to the computer, editing and production, etc.
Today I made my first serious attempt and produced this 90-second effort, showing the monuments and sculptures of the Seaboard Villages where I live.
(Please be patient if the video keeps pausing. Flickr seems to be having some teething troubles with video streaming.)
[HTML1]
What you're seeing in the video:
- Hilton Stone
- Mermaid of the North
- The Salmon
- Shandwick Stone
The music is My Irish Valentine by Brobdingnagian Bards, a Texas-based Celtic folk band. Listen to more of their music here. This track is licensed for use under the Creative Commons. (Hopefully using the music as a soundtrack doesn't violate the No Derivative Works condition?)
You may wonder why I used a song with "Irish" in the title for a video featuring Scottish villages. Well the answer is that I just like it. The Bards actually do a track called The Mermaid Song which would obviously have been fitting for this video, but that track can't be used under the Creative Commons license, and anyway I wanted an instrumental track and My Irish Valentine has exactly the sort of atmosphere that I was looking for.
Things to improve next time:
- Get better at zoom-with-pan shots, and only use them when there's something moving in the scene such as water or sky, otherwise it looks like zooming on a still photo.
- Use less fixed view scenes, but without just panning or zooming for the sake of it. Parts of this video look like a slideshow of stills.
- Learn how to process video files to improve exposure and colour.
- Combine original audio with the music. The part of this video with the mermaid had good audio so it would have been nice to still hear that.
What’s that ugly creature?
Mon Apr 7th - 10:43pm
Oh it's me. But ignore me and look at that beautiful spider!
I've been wanting to hold a tarantula for ages and today I finally got my chance, at the Highland Reptile Rescue Centre in Milton, near Invergordon.
At first I was scared of the hairy little critter but I decided to just get on with it and told the owner to put it on my arm. No problem…
Then I held it in my hands. No problem…
And within about 5 minutes, any sense of fear was gone and I would have been happy to let it crawl up my arm. But it didn't want to.
Another personal goal ticked off the list thanks to this wonderful job! And thanks to Maggie at the rescue centre for taking the photos for me.
DIY contact trigger
Sun Apr 6th - 3:43pm
Many thanks to Guy Montag for making this video that shows how to make a contact trigger for a flash, although I expect you could also use it to fire a camera if you wire it up to a Pocket Wizard or similar.
Here's the YouTube version of the video, or there's a better quality version. If you try this for a shot involving high-speed capture then remember to keep your flash power as low as possible. The lower the flash power is, the shorter the flash duration will be, so you can freeze the action better to get a sharper image.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVUxKnNMW44[/youtube]
ps. Just in case you don't know, the way to use a contact trigger is to work in the dark, leave the camera's shutter open, and then do whatever you're going to do to trip the trigger. For instance if you were going to shoot an air pistol through a balloon then this is how you'd go about it:
- Set-up the balloon and pre-aim the air pistol with it mounted on something so it won't move.
- Position the contact trigger to the side of the balloon opposite the air pistol, so the pellet will pierce the balloon and then pierce the trigger.
- Put a thick block of wood behind the contact trigger to catch the pellet. Make sure animals and kids are locked out of the room.
- Turn off the lights.
- Open the camera's shutter.
- Fire the pistol. While the shutter is still open the pellet will burst the balloon and then pierece the contact trigger, which will fire the flash.
- Close the camera's shutter.
And that's pretty much all there is to it. But exploding balloons have been done a million times so try to think of something new.
Tip: Using light stands outside
Sun Mar 30th - 12:52am
One subject that regularly comes up on photography forums is, what do you do if you want to use a light stand outside in windy conditions? Even with just a flash on top — no umbrella — those things will get blown over in no time. And usually the less-than-helpful answer is either that you need to use a tripod (not tall enough) or have an assistant to hold the light stand (not practical for most of us).
Surprisingly I've never seen this idea suggested: Tent pegs. Nearly every outside shot I do is on grass, or could be done on grass if I wanted, so why not fasten the legs of the light stand to the ground using tent pegs?
Now we all know that buying made-for-purpose products can prove expensive so rather than go shopping for tent pegs I went to the local hardware store and bought some large screw-in hooks. They cost 88p each. I chose the ones with the biggest hook ends to make it easier to yank them back out of the ground when I'm done.
Here are a few pictures, done with my mum's point-and-shoot because I didn't have my own camera with me at the time…
Update: Ha! Just been checking the price of tent pegs online and you can buy packs of 10 for about £2. So on this occasion the made-for-purpose product is in fact cheaper than the cheapskate hardware store alternative.
The Job From Heaven
Tue Mar 25th - 10:02pm
After telling you about The Job From Hell the other day I thought I should balance that out by telling you about one that went really well.
Today I had the pleasure of photographing Maureen Mackay and Iain Nesbitt, a couple who will be going to Everest base camp in November to raise money for a children's charity. I called Maureen yesterday to confirm a time for the photo and it was obvious from the start that this was going to be a good shoot: I was going to ask if the two of them would be willing to put their climbing gear on for the photo, but Maureen suggested it first. I was going to ask if there were any steep hills or mountains nearby, but Maureen already had somewhere in mind. And would we be pushed for time? No, no rush at all. I do love going in to a shoot knowing that the people I'm photographing are enthusiastic to get the job done right.
So this afternoon we met at the arranged time, had a coffee and a chat, then drove three miles to the Cat's Back and spent about 10 freezing cold minutes on two different set-ups. Back to Maureen's place for another coffee and the end result of the perfect shoot was a pretty nice photo…
It’s time to get Nice
Mon Mar 24th - 8:03pm
Nice is a new online photography magazine (a "glorified blog" according to its creator) launching today. It promises to approach its topics from a "mostly positive" point of view. From the site's intro:
At Nice our focus falls on the motivation, the idea, the process that leads up to making a photograph rather than taking it. It’s a place to find stories related to photography from a different point of view. Photo tech tips, how-to’s, photography videos, interviews, behind the scenes, advice, opinions, and photography equipment, books, and video reviews – it’s all right here. We’ll try and keep the complaining to a minimum.
I'm not sure what the thinking is behind the positive / no-complaining angle, as photography sites aren't generally seen as being negative, are they? In fact the blog you're reading right now is probably about as negative as it gets, seeing as I often write about the 'down' side of the profession, but I'd like to think I do it in a positive way. (I hope it comes across like that?) But anyway, head over to Nice (lovely presentation by the way) for some feel-good advice and tutorials, but don't forget to come back here for the usual whingeing and negativity. Apparently. 
Taking one flash + HDR to the next level
Mon Mar 24th - 5:21pm
The other day I mentioned Ferrell McCollough's idea of combining single-flash exposures into one HDR image. His sample image was encouraging as a proof of concept, but have a look at the new example he has created, which is one of the most painting-like photos I've ever seen. I do hope Ferrell runs with this concept and gets it established as his own idea, before someone else does.
