I seem to be taking in training material at an accelerated rate. I don’t know if I’m just trying to compensate for a lack of shooting time recently (on which subject more later) or whether I’ve just got too much disposable income at the moment, but with books, CreativeLIVE and Kelby Training and now Bert Stephani’sMotivational Light DVD, if I don’t do some cool stuff in my next shoot I’ll pretty much have to commit ritual suicide.
Anyway, Bert’s an acquaintance of mine (by which I mean that I went to one of his workshops last year and found it very cool), so I figured I should say a couple of words about the DVD, which is pitched not as a how-to for lighting, but as a why to, explaining how different types of lighting can be used to create different moods to a photograph.
The teaching style is very relaxed – never let it be said that Bert takes himself too seriously – but still nicely focussed. Whilst there’s quite a bit of time spent watching Bert shooting, he makes sure to explain why he’s shooting the way he is, and what his intentions are for each setup. The disc also includes three videos of Bert’s practice sessions – whose importance he explains using a basketball analogy, since he used to be a promising basketball player – the style of which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched his Confessions of a Photographer series on YouTube.
Having been to Bert’s workshop, I was a little concerned that I wouldn’t get as much out of the DVD as I would want to for the price, but I needn’t have worried. It’s nature as a not-a-how-to means that I learned things that I wouldn’t normally expect to learn from a photography DVD (David duChemin’s recent Vision Driven Photography workshop on CreativeLIVE falls into the same kind of category), and that alone made it worth the purchase price. The fact that the training provided is fun to watch, so that the time spent watching it flies by, helps a great deal.
I have had my backside kicked by trees this evening.
I’ve been doing some location scouting for the oft-postponed, never properly scheduled woodland shoot that I started planning months back and never got around to actually shooting. Let me tell you, woodland in summer, even late summer, is a lot harder to shoot in than it is in winter (or early spring or late autumn, for that matter).
I was scouting today at Arnside Knott, which lies about 30 minutes drive from my house. I’d been there earlier in the year when I was trying to find a suitable location for the shoot-that-never-was, and back then (early May, as I recall) it seemed the perfect place: lots of interesting, gnarly trees but at the same time plenty of light to make life easy on my tired old speedlights. Of course, I’d conveniently forgotten that trees, like most other plants, like to grow leaves and suchlike over the warmer months and so it came as a bit of a shock when my wife and I took a walk up there this evening.
No light. Well, so little as to make it very, very uncomfortable shooting, at least in the evening. At best I was getting 1/10th sec at f4, ISO 800, and even with another stop of ISO the histogram sat very firmly in he leftmost quadrant. Muddy shadows and muddier detail in those shadows. Yuck.
So, what to do? Hope do I deal with this when I’m actually shooting there (which will hopefully be soon)?
The way I see it, I’ve got three options.
Many lights, some on the background, some on the subject (I call this the Drew Gardner approach)
Shoot earlier in the day, so that there’s more ambient light
Shoot at a similar time but only in the more open spaces up on the Knott, so as to take more advantage of the ambient light
At the moment I’m more inclined to do a mix of options 1 and 2. I can’t hope for too much more ambient light earlier in the day – after all, it’s the honking great arboreal canopy that’s causing the problems in the first place – but I figure that a little more might make it’s way through, and with a couple of flashes to edge-light the background the result could be quite pleasant.
Actually, time it right and I’ll be able to try all three options. There, that’s settled then. Watch this space for news on the shoot-that-may-yet-be (though with-a-different-model-than-originally-planned).
Good, that’s resolved then. See, told you this blog was useful to me, as well as being scintillating reading for you, dear reader.
It's nice to be able to buy fresh fruit in your local supermarket, isn't it?
I recently came into possession of an iPhone 4 after my Palm Pre, which was an okay but not particularly brilliant device came to a smashy end whilst I was on holiday. Let’s just skip past the whole “you should have bought an Android phone” thing right now. I didn’t, for a whole bunch of reasons, none of which – I’m guessing – matter all that much to you.
Anyway.
Chase Jarvis is fond of saying “the best camera is the one that’s with you,” and it’s becoming an oft-echoed phrase across the industry. He even produced a book of iPhone-shot images based on – and named after – that principle. And the book spawned an iPhone app, which I’m now trying out (along with Camera Plus Pro, which belongs in a post of its own).
Sunflower at night
The great thing about the Best Camera app is that it lets me produce an image that’s close to the one in my head. It might not always be the exact image that I wanted, but – rather like my experiment in shooting film (which I need to blog about sooner rather than later) – the restriction helps to free me from the need to try and perfect something – and the frustration that comes with not being able to get something perfect in camera.
All of which is bringing me in a rather rambly fashion to a simple but crucial point: I’m not shooting enough. Seriously, I’m not. Since I came back from holiday three weeks ago I’ve barely shot a frame with an SLR of any sort. And that’s not a nice feeling. It itches, a bit like when I’ve let my beard grow too long. I need to be shooting; it’s what I do.
Dear interwebs, I need your help. I’m looking for photographic subjects in the north Lancashire area (though if you’re outside that area, give me shout anyway). If you fit into one of the categories below, get in touch with me. If someone you know fits into one of these categories, ask them to get in touch with me. I’m looking to build up my portfolio and produce some brilliant images as I do so.
I’m looking to shoot the following:
Couples
Individuals; adults and young adults alike (age 16 and upwards)
Bands
Solo artists
Anyone who might be interested in an editorial portrait (authors, artists and so on)
Most site issues should be resolved now, including the IE8 weirdness. Please drop me a comment or an email if not.
Anyway, moving on.
I’m a big fan of online training for photographers. I guess that’s mostly because I’m a work-from-homer, and I live in the back of beyond, so getting to training courses and seminars isn’t all that easy (nor is it cheap, though Calumet offer some fantastic seminars for very good prices). I’ve had a Kelby Training membership for some time now, which has allowed me access to training from people like Joe McNally and Jay Maisel, and is a fantastic resource. But I’ve been absolutely blow away by CreativeLIVE, not only in terms of what it has to offer, but also in terms of just how cool what they’re doing is.
If you’re not familiar with CreativeLIVE, here’s how it works: It’s the brainchild of Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson. The idea behind it (their tagline is “democratising the creative revolution”) is that all their courses are streamed live on the internet for free. You don’t have to pay to watch their events; they’re uStreamed to the entire world.
Of course, you can’t do that kind of thing without trying to make some money, and the way that the CreativeLIVE team make their money is to offer the courses for download, too. There’s a discount for purchases made before the end of the course, so for example Zack‘s studio lighting workshop was $79 if you bought it before it finished or $129 afterwards. You get HD and iPod-sized video files as part of your purchase, with no DRM. So far I’ve bought Zack’s course, as well as David duChemin‘s “Vision Driven Photography” course and the only-just started Jasmine Star wedding photography course.
Not only has the quality of the videos been amazing but the quality of the instructors blows me away. I’ve watched Zack’s course two or three times now (I’m watching David duChemin’s right now as I type this) and I’ve already learned tonnes from watching Jasmine’s first day of broadcasting.
For me, CreativeLIVE is edging it over Kelby Training for me at the moment for N reasons:
The courses are big, multi-day events, that attract thousands of views from around the web. And of course, questions are asked in the CL chatroom and on twitter, and are answered brilliantly by the instructors.
I can actually download these videos. I can have them on my hard drive or my phone and can watch them at leisure. Doing a shoot and want to try out something that Zack talked about? Call up the video on my phone to remind me of the details. No connection needed. And because they’re DRM-free, the videos feel like mine.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Kelby Training is a fantastic resource – Jay Maisel’s walk through NYC with Scott Kelby is something I’ve watched several times – but I wish I could download the videos rather than just have them held on the server.
If you’re new to the place, you might notice a few changes. New theme, slideshow on the frontpage and, yes, dear reader, I’ve finally migrated back to WordPress after three years of using Frabjous. Why? Well, all sorts of reasons really, but the main one was that I was fed up with having to spend time hacking into Frabjous features that already exist in WordPress.
But there’s more to it than that. It’s time for me to stop being the developer who can hold a camera and start being the photographer who happens to be a software developer, too. Migrating to WordPress, which gives me so many more options for customisation and expansion, is the perfect watershed for beginning again.
Of course, all the blog archives will remain available; they’re a large chunk of my online life, so I’m not getting rid of it any time soon. There are still a few things that I need to add to the site, and I’ll announce those as they go up. In the mean time, please let me know if you spot anything that’s gone a bit hinky, please let me know.
Update, 00:42, August 26th:
So, after some teething trouble, I think we’re getting going now. I’ve done some really heavy caching and pushed the static content to Amazon’s CloudFront service to get the site going at a decent speed (massive kudos to the creators of W3TC, here). Hopefully it shouldn’t be like browsing a website whose pages are being delivered by carrier pigeon.
Unfortunately, the site is rendering very oddly in IE8. I can’t figure it out right now – I’m open to help on this front. I’ll try and do some more digging on that point tomorrow.
Behold Crystal, she of the room full of mirrors. We decided to do something a bit strange.
Anyway, just a short note to say I’m going to be Not Blogging for the next couple of weeks (I know, nothing new, but I thought I’d say anyway). My Awesome Wife and I are going to be vacationing in the wilds of the Norfolk Broads, where I’ll mostly be shooting film.
I have on my desk, dear readers, a new toy. It’s a Nikon fm2n, manufactured some time in the early eighties. Yes, that’s right, dear readers: it shoots film.
Why on earth have I bought myself a film camera? When I managed to grab it from eBay for the princely sum of one hundred of your finest British pounds, I knew exactly why I wanted it: I wanted the simplicity of a manual camera, something that forced me to think harder about the image that I was trying to produce. Now, with it sat on my desk without any film in it (I’m heading into town later to pick up some Ilford HP4), I find myself wondering if I’m not just distracting myself from learning more about my craft.
Not long after I’d bought it, a blog post on the Marketing Essentials blog made me think about whether it had been a good idea after all. It included the following quote from Cort Anderson:
They talk about the experience of shooting with the cameras and shooting film. If I want a film experience I can dig out a 128 mb card to shoot on and wait a week to look at the images. If I want the toy camera look I can slap on my Lens Baby or hit one of a gazillion different Filters/Actions in Photoshop. It feels like I am going against the trend by wanting to take what I do and get better at it. I want to best at what I shoot and print.
So, as I sit here navel-gazing whilst some tests run (I’m working today in order to take Wednesday off for a shoot) I find myself wondering I’m not just trying to follow in the footsteps of Bert Stephani, Pieter van Impe et. al.? Film’s definitely not dead, but wouldn’t I be better honing my craft as a photographer rather than picking up a film camera and all the associated expenses that go with it?
I don’t know the answer yet; I guess I need to shoot a roll of film first before I come anywhere near knowing. I’ve never shot film (on an SLR) before, and I’ve never used an entirely manual camera before either; I’d like to at least find out whether I like it or not.
I’m sat in the business centre of a Prague hotel at the moment, where I’m staying for the week for a work conference. Since I had a bit of coding downtime I decided that I’d better finish editing and uploading the last of my shoots from the London road trip, which was only a couple of weeks back but which feels like it was forever-and-a-day ago.
I’ve known Kat and Evan for three years or so; we met (and they met each other) at the Canonical AllHands conference in November 2007. They’re a beautiful, fun couple, and I enjoyed shooting them immensely.
As we were moving from one pose to another, I spotted the sun as it disappeared behind the trees in Battersea park. Since I’d already made a thing of sun flare in my previous shoot. I thought I’d give it a shot here, too. Got this first (once again, I don’t complain when the muses are on my side):
Threw up a shoot through umbrella and an SB-900, 1/4 power, and kept the ISO up to keep all the levels balanced (I could have dropped it down, probably, but I didn’t worry too much about the noise).
I had a brilliant time with two brilliant subjects. I wish we’d had more time, and I can’t wait to do it again. I’ve put a few more of the images up on Flickr.
