Kid portraits
Thu Nov 23rd - 7:10am
All of the toddler/kid portraits I've done before have been with a backdrop and full studio lighting, following the focal length 'rules' of 85mm for full-length and 135mm for close-up shots.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to photograph lots of children in someone's home and I took a very different approach, using a single hand-held flash and doing nearly every shot at 50mm. This allowed me to move around wherever the kids moved, rather than having to wait until they moved back into the position that the lights were set for. End result: Much more natural, intimate pictures, that hopefully capture each child's personality.
Some of my favourites from the day…
Shot specs:
Canon 1D • 17-40 f/4L • 40mm • 1/500s • ISO 200
Various apertures in the f/5.6 to f/11 range.
(Note: 40mm on a Canon 1D is approx 50mm equivalent.)
Lighting was a 550EX with Lightsphere (which I'm lovng by the way!) triggered by an ST-E2 wireless transmitter until it proved useless outside at which point I switched to Pocket Wizards and stayed with them for the rest of the day. For some shots I hand-held the flash, for others it was on a light stand at 45 degrees off camera axis. One huge advantage of using the 1D/550EX combination is the 1/500s sync speed. With studio strobes you're pretty much stuck at 1/125s and that's not really fast enough for the more active kids.
Stephen Hayward’s mermaid
Wed Nov 22nd - 6:40am
Stephen Hayward is creating a mermaid as part of a local art project. I wanted to get a shot of Stephen with the mermaid as a work-in-progress for the village newsletter, as well as just for my own interest.
Once the mermaid is finished there will likely be pictures of her in every newspaper around the region as part of coverage for the whole project, but I'm also interested in the micro-story, the behind-the-scenes peak at something being created in a local guy's workshop.
I'll probably give a different picture to the newsletter, something a bit more 'safe', but this one is my personal favourite. I like the informal, almost candid vibe, and whenever possible I love working in a wide ratio with the subject over to one side. Plus this was the one composition that focussed on Stephen rather than the mermaid. In these "artist with his creation" shots I do think it's good to keep the artist as the main subject, with the creation in the middle-ground. No doubt a lot of people disagree with that but you've gotta go with your instincts!
Shot specs:
Canon 1D • 17-40 f/4L • 17mm • 1/500s • f/5.6 • ISO 200
Lighting set-up was a Canon 550EX on a light stand about 45 degrees off camera axis to the left, triggered by an ST-E2 wireless transmitter. I used a Lightsphere II on the flash, pointed straight up with the inverted dome on. It may have been a better idea to use direct flash, positioned closer to Stephen, to create some light fall-off to right of frame. Would certainly be more dramatic but I think the even lighting works for this shot.
Note the subtlety of Stephen's shadow. That really demonstrates how well the Lightsphere throws light around the whole room. The shot is entirely flash lit, no ambient. (I avoid ambient whenever possible. When it comes to processing I have quite poor colour awareness so I prefer to kill the ambient and just set the white balance to 6000 Kelvin to get nice skin tones.)
Paul Taggart portrait
Mon Nov 20th - 3:45am
I've posted a version of this photograph before but it was processed on an uncalibrated monitor and I wanted to re-process it now that (hopefully) the colours will be right. I also wanted to contribute it to the Strobist group on Flickr.
This photo was from a shoot to publicise an upcoming charity exhibition of the artist's paintings. It was my first location portrait commission and although we both expected the paper to use the standard "artist posing near easel" shot, Paul was kind enough to spend 2 hours with me, allowing me the opportunity to experiment with a variety of lighting techniques, both indoors and out.
In the end the paper did of course run the easel shot, but this was my favourite picture from the day. I must thank Paul for being the perfect subject, and for tolerating countless technical hiccups at the beginning of the shoot. It is the photographer's job to put the subject at ease, but on this occasion it ended up being the other way round!
Click here to view a gallery of unprocessed shots
Shot specs:
Canon 1Ds • 70-200 f/2.8L IS • 135mm • 1/80s • f/18 • ISO 100
The reason for the crazy f/18 aperture was nothing artistic or technical, it was simply that I'd set the flash power way too high and rather than waste more of Paul's time by fine-tuning it I just dialled down the aperture a couple of stops.
Lighting set-up was a Bowens 1000DX with silver brolly positioned about six feet in front of Paul, a foot above his eyeline, triggered by Pocket Wizards. Aperture was set for the strobe, shutter speed for the sky. With hindsight I should have gone up to 1/160s and under-exposed the ambient by another stop to bring out some drama in the brickwork.
Balintore vs Dornoch
Sat Nov 18th - 10:51pm
I think I was lucky to get any decent photos from last week's Balintore vs Dornoch match. Seemed I was always in the wrong place to catch the action during the first part of the match while the weather was nice, and from then on there was so much rain on the lens that it was like shooting through cling film. (On the plus side I've been re-assured again that these sealed Canon bodies/lenses really can take a lot of rain!) In the end there were four photos that I was happy with and two were used, one each in the North Star and the Northern Times.
More photo books
Sat Nov 18th - 10:23pm
I found a few more links to UK photo book printers on this page so I had a look at them this evening. Not good news…
- Treasure Your Pics: Same software as Yophoto so the same limitations.
- My Publisher: Only allows built-in page layouts, little customisation available. Won't allow certain photos to be manually placed (without any explanation of why) but the auto-build feature will place them.
- Taste Photo Book: More or less the same as My Photo Book from the previous list, appears to be the same software and the same company operating under a different brand.
- Foto Book: Same software as Yophoto but with the addition of a grid for aligning objects. Would have been a great feature if objects would snap to the grid but without that it's not much better than guessing. The software locked up on my desktop PC as it seemed to be eternally accessing the hard drive, presumably scanning directories for pictures, and of course there are a lot of them. I installed it on my laptop and it worked fine.
After getting the Foto Book software to work on my laptop I went back and tried the Bonusprint software from the previous list and it did work, but (getting repetitive here) it's the same as the Yophoto software but with the addition of the useless non-snapping grid.
The quest continues…
Photo books in the UK
Sat Nov 18th - 2:35am
I don't think photo books have replaced traditional albums in the UK to anything like the extent that they have in the US, but at least there are a few companies here doing them now. I spent a few hours tonight checking out the seven services that I could find and surprise surprise they're not very impressive…
- Yophoto: I think these are the big guys in the States but their software is horribly limited. For example there doesn't appear to be any way to align elements on the page, no grid snapping, the font selection box is buggy to the point of being unuseable… need I go on? Good selection of book sizes and styles at very reasonable prices but I can't imagine ever being able to create an attractive book using their frustratingly basic software. According to the documentation, when you transmit your order the book is sent as a PDF file, so why not allow people to create the PDF file in a different package with better features?
- Album Factory: Uses the same software as Yophoto so suffers from the same limitations. Slightly better selection of book sizes and styles but that's a moot point considering the weak software.
- My Photo Book: Instead of using native Windows software you design your book in a Macromedia application. I could only find square and portrait-orientation books, nothing landscape. Placement is pretty much limited to placing pictures and text on the page using a tiny preview, so little chance of accurate positioning or intricate design.
- Bonusprint: I had high hopes for this service as Bonusprint served me well for two years before I started doing all of my own printing. They may be "uncool" because they're mainstream but the bottom line is that they're reliable and their prints are good quality and reasonably priced. The software download is considerably larger than those from the other services I tried so I was expecting an all-singing all-dancing page layout application. But no, it just crashes. Doesn't even get to the title screen. (WinXP with service pack 2 and all updates.)
- PhotoBox: Uses a web-based application which immediately strikes me as a bad idea. Slow and discourages experimentation. Very basic layout tools, even more limited than the others.
- Foto Insight: The best of a bad bunch. The software has more advanced features such as arbitrary rotation of pictures, and at least the text editor works, but still there's no sign of basic features such as alignment or grid snapping, so no way to judge positioning other than best guess.
- Jessops/Snapfish: Jessops book printing is done by Snapfish which uses another web-based interface. This is the most limited of all as it appears you can only place pictures and text in pre-determined positions, so useless for anything creative.
This is a relatively new market but the trend is already being set: Basic features for undemanding customers. Not good! Several of these companies would have a winning service if only their software had a few extra basic features, crucially a way to accurately align page elements.
The companies I tried were thrown up by a Google search for "photo book" and they're the only ones listed for the UK. So where do you go if you want to design a photo book, not just drag-n-drop images and text and then line them up approximately?
If you're serious about producing a photo book that people will be proud to own and want to show everyone then you need decent layout software, or at least the option to do the layout in a DTP package. Suggestions gratefully received!
Lightsphere II
Sat Nov 18th - 1:26am
I've been observing a self-imposed ban on buying any new camera gear for a few months now, but yesterday I caved in and ordered Gary Fong's Lightsphere II diffuser for a wedding next week.
I've had my eye on one for a while now and after trying various other diffusion methods I came to the conclusion that, short of attaching a brolly to my flash or lugging a strobe around, the LSII will be the best way to light portraits when I've got to do a gazillion of them in one day with unpredictable backgrounds and ceilings.
The importer assures me that I'll have it in the first half of next week. I'll post some test shots when it arrives. I'm really hoping that I'll have it in time for some portraits of children that I'm doing next week but at least I can strobe those if it doesn't arrive in time.
Another year, another site
Tue Nov 14th - 12:17pm
Well it's been a bit more than a year, more like 18 months, but as usual I got bored of the old site so here we go with a new format and a new design. There's a new focus this time as well. I'll continue to post my landscape, newspaper and event photos so the site should still be of interest to local people, but now I want to make things more informative for other photographers, especially those who do newspaper work.
Over the last three years I've learned most of what I know from people posting guides and tutorials on the Internet, so I want to give something back. I'm only a jobbing shutter monkey, still with a lot to learn myself, but there are some things that I'm getting quite good at, especially lighting, so I'd like to help some new photographers in the way that others helped me.
So what you'll be seeing here from now on is pretty much the same as you were seeing before, only with more technical details and advice on how to achieve certain lighting effects.
I'll also do something that not enough photographers do, which is to post galleries of the "not quite good enough" shots from photo sessions. I find it enormously helpful to see the pictures that other photographers produce before they get the shot they want, so I'm happy to let people see my getting-there shots as well as the finished product. But when you look at any of these galleries, please do remember that the shots are unprocessed and are provided only as a curiosity. There will be a lot of rubbish shots with bad lighting and poor colours, but the point is to show what works and what doesn't.
Occasionally I'll post some processing tutorials.
Anyway I hope you find something of interest at the site, whether you're just visiting to see the latest local photos or you're here to pick up a few tips and tricks. Each update has a comments section so feel free to leave feedback or ask questions.
The previous version of the site can still be viewed: Click here
Remembrance Day in Fearn
Mon Nov 13th - 6:13am
I was asked to look out for any Remembrance Day events in the area. The closest war memorial is in Fearn and the location lent itself well to a wide shot of the whole crowd. There were a couple of kids wearing their grandfather's medals so we did some posed shots of them at the end, as I liked the idea of connecting young people to an historical event. Thanks to William, Rory and Kyle (and Rory and Kyle's mother) for taking time out of their day to do the shot.
(click the wide view for a larger version)
Paul Keating environmental portrait
Fri Nov 10th - 11:55am
Portrait of a local landscape photographer, Paul Keating.
Paul lives just along the street from me. We're in a small village (actually three small villages all linked together) in the Scottish Highlands. Over the last year or so Paul has had great success selling prints of his landscape pictures in a local shop, so I suggested to the village newsletter that we should do a profile of him: Basically a lightweight local-interest article / interview along the lines of "meet the man behind the pictures".
Paul's landscapes mostly feature the sea so we spent about half an hour on the beach today doing an environmental portrait for the front page lede. We did lots of shots on the rocks and out on a pier, and just for once the main shot worked out exactly how I had intended so that's the one I think we'll use. It was one of the last shots we did as all of the other ones required better light so I did those first.
Click here to view a gallery of unprocessed shots
Shot specs:
Canon 1D • 17-40 f/4L • 1/500s • 17mm • f/9 • ISO 200
Lighting was a Canon 550EX on a light stand at approx 75 degrees to the left, about six feet away from Paul and a foot above his eyeline, triggered by an ST-E2 wireless transmitter. Everything was chimp metered, manual settings.
For the camera spotters, Paul's camera is a Canon 5D with grip and 17-40 f/4L.
Visit Paul's web site: Scottish Impressions
