Author: rob

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En Vacaciones

Although I take photos for a living, I still enjoy taking holiday pics. There is always the expectation of finding a new way to capture a much-photographed location: whether it’s just because you have a fresh, unique eye for something (?) or just because you get lucky with something unique occurring when you happen to be in location.

Valencia was a mix of both: the last weekend of the Fellas (a mad festival of sculpture, parades and very loud firecrackers); and these very modern buildings waiting (begging) to be photographed.

The Fellas is pretty hard to capture and like a lot of things you need to be in amongst everything and I was on holiday, I did capture some of the artwork. The trick here is to find a different view of things (and try to exclude a much of the clutter as possible).

I do have a grá for slightly abstract photos of modern buildings (especially with nice blue skies) – and especially in black and white. It goes way back to shooting the Grandstand in Epsom with black and white film and a polariod + red filter combo to make the sky go black.

And although I’m sure these buildings have been shot a million times, and maybe in better conditions and with more time (much fewer people for a start!), I did have fun.

Looking around at what other people were doing, there are a few teaching points:

  • I used a wider angle lens (on the Nikon 1). This exaggerated and emphasized some of angles and perspectives of the buildings.
  • I didn’t always try to eliminate the people – they are part of the landscape in a busy tourist attraction like this.
  • Look up, squat down
  • Look for abstract details: shapes, colours and structure. Isolate them (I also had a longer lens with me)
  • Think about contrast – and possible options for black and white images with high contrast.
  • MOST OF ALL: keep your eyes and mind open. I particularly like this letter-box photo viewing between the bridge shadows and rather than waiting for the people to clear out I like the people in there as silhouettes (especially the two taking photos). Also I think I as the only one to spot the reflection in the water in front of the building at the side. The other water features may be been intended as reflection pools but it was too breezy that day apart from around the side.

Anyway, here’s the edited highlights:

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Please leave a message

…or text

If you call me and I don’t pick up, please leave a message or text me.

I’m getting loads of cold calls from Overseas Call Centres which cloak their VPN call using random Irish mobile numbers. If you call these back, you get that random person’s number who hasn’t got a clue what’s going on because they never called you. I’ve had some of those calls (and made a few), it’s very confusing. So in general I’m now not calling back missed calls from unknown numbers unless there’s a message or a text.

I got four missed calls yesterday in a row. New business or time wasters?

These calls are really annoying and a massive waste of everyone’s time but don’t see what can be done, if you block the number you risk blocking a real person who might one day need to call you. And I’m sure they use a different number each time.

What boggles the mind most is that these companies say that they are ‘Marketing Experts’ but not only do they not understand GDPR but they are actually loosing me business if a new client calls but doesn’t leave a message.

So please call me if you think I can help. If I’m with a client I won’t pick up so please leave a message and I’ll call you back. Or just drop a text.

If you are a Company cold calling with a cloaked VPN. Please stop calling me.

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Back to the Beach

Harbour View, Co Cork

It can sometimes be a tough decision whether an image will work better in black and white or colour. Certainly many of the images in this session worked well in colour: a cold, clear winter’s day with the sun low on the horizon produced deep blue skies and high contrast on all that sand and wood texture.

But as the sun dipped lower, at this angle the colour drained from the image and inspired by some more Minimalist Photography, I dropped the colour out of the image and I kind of like it.

I use Lightroom to do the conversion, then work on the contrast and tonal separation.

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The Best Camera…

…is the one in your hand

Church Bay, Co Cork, at Twilight. Roches Point Lighthouse on the horizon

After an afternoon thing in Crosshaven, we decided to go to the beach since we were so close. And I got lost going to Myrtleville and ended up at Church Bay. Which was lucky actually because as the sun set we got this lovely view of Roches Point with some interesting foreground beachyness.

It wasn’t a photo thing that afternoon but I had tossed the small camera (my trusty Nikon J5) in the car just in case and that’s all I had. It was dark enough to start trying some longer exposures (even with the J5’s minimum 160 ISO) but of course I had no tripod in the car. So I pushed the VR to it’s (limited) limits. Then I found some rocks to perch the camera on.

I quite like this. Around 2s exposure and just sharp enough.

It would undoubtedly be improved by 1) a tripod to get a more secure and flexible viewpoint 2) a camera/lens combination that produce a sharper images and maybe a nice star highlight on the Lighthouse. But I didn’t have all that that day. And although I might indeed take the time to go back with all that stuff, I also might not. And the I might not get such a clear evening. With the tide at the same point. So it’s always worth trying to do your best with what you have.

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Headshot Season

Portable Professional Headshot set up in action

It seems to have been a week of Professional Profile Images – or Headshots as a lot of people call them (although that always sounds way to FPS for my liking).

I’ve had everything for an individual profile image for a speaker profile, to 30-odd staff profiles, student profiles for UCC and a ‘quick headshot’ at a corporate event.

Thankfully over the years I’ve perfected both the technical set up for nice professional images on-site and the technique of getting them done quickly and painlessly for all concerned.

The thing is, no one really wants to be sitting in front of a camera. Even when they understand how important it is to get the right image for their personal profile.

None of us are really comfortable with the idea – and that’s where a lot of my work comes in. It’s up to me to make the whole process comfortable so that people can get relaxed, confident, trusting-looking photos that represent them professionally.

And although most people come in the room and say ‘I hate having my photo taken’ I’m glad to say they all leave saying ‘that way better than I expected’ and they are delighted with their finished photos in the end!

Another day, another room, a similar set-up for professional profile images

While most people opt for a neutral background, there are options in terms of a natural 80% white or the 100% full or 255 white background. But the screen here also filps for a back or darker grey background and it can be lit for a gradient too depending on your choice of styling.

The Full White creates a ‘float’ on a white website background which is (was) contemporary. The 80% white is probably more natural and more flattering.

I do also like to use the business as backdrop – it provides a little more context – but more on that in another post…

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Gibbous

A student on my evening class asked about taking pictures of the moon. It’s a facinating subject and I think it’s become current with a prominent mobile phone Ad boasting the ability to take amazing moon photos.

I’ve never really dabbled but I know the theory, and my course notes have been updated with the following about taking photos of the moon:

  • It’s very far away so it is very small. We often think it’s larger than it looks as our brains have the ability to ‘focus’ on the details of small things. But to the camera it’s small. You are going to need a long lens (or a telescope)
  • It’s very bright, especially in the night sky so balancing the detail of the moon and anything lit with ambient light (or moonlight) on earth is tricky.
  • It’s moving faster than you think. So if you are going for long exposures to balance out the ambient darkness then you can’t go too long before the moon itself will blur as it moves.
  • Most of the stunning moon images you see on the internet are
    • Double Exposures
    • Dramatically enhanced in Photoshop
    • Just pure fake (two images mixed: one of the landscape and a completely different photo of the moon taken with a completely different lens – and maybe not even at the same time).

Having recently finally acquired a long telephoto lens (the Sigma 150-600 Sport) I decided that I should really try and see just how hard it is to take a nice photo of the moon. And this weekend I was in the garden and notice a nice Gibbous Moon by twilight. Now I didn’t have a tripod at home so this is hand-held, so I had to tweak up the ISO and turn on the OS to keep it steady but I think it’s quite nice.

However, this isn’t just the a long lens shot:

  • Taken at 600mm
  • With a x1.4 teleconverter
  • On a crop sensor camera (Nikon D500) – which is worth another x1.5
  • And finally cropped about 50%
  • Equivalent focal length, over 2000mm! Or around x40 magnification

Now this isn’t my specialist field. I do understand that the ‘large’ moons that we see on the horizon appear bigger partly because the light travels through more atmosphere (also making it less clear) but my understanding is that a lot of this is still pretty perceived so I stick by my belief that most of those dramatic moon-rise photos are faked!

So the question remains, how does a mobile phone, with it’s tiny sensor and lens package create stunning photos of the moon? It warrants more research but I read something that seems to suggest that the AI in the phone recognises that the moon is in the photo and ‘intelligently’ blends in stock or reference moon photos to your scene to make the moon look great. Don’t hold me to it, but it makes more sense than it being better than all the tech I used to create this simple image.

Now I’m off to find a landscape to paste this beauty in to…

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Old Fish

The New Year brings a time to generally sort things out. I’ve fixed up the web site a bit so it’s all WordPress now and works better on mobile devices (still more to do on the content). It’s also the time of year when I think I need to do more personal work. Previous projects include Shooting Nana which in time has become something that I’m very happy I took the time to do.

So far this year I haven’t come up with anything significant for a personal project but the urge to take some more photos has had me outside with some unusual and unused combinations of cameras and lenses. Just to try out, maybe learn something, add a few strings to my bow.

I’ve always been a fan of the Fisheye lens. I have an old 16mm f3.5 manual lens from the early 70s and it’s served me well when the fad has taken me over the years.

So I put it on my usual work camera (the D850) and took it for a spin on Sunday. The results were … underwhelming. I loved this lens. I love the weird and simplistic point of view. But it looks kinda dull on the D850. I’m not sure if it’s picked up some fungus or the newer, higher resolution sensor is just showing it up for what it is or maybe the subject and lighting just didn’t suit it.

Railway Bridge Fisheye. The intention was to show the unusual construction of this bridge over the old railway: the way that the stones are laid radially with the arch and then slope into the arch underside

More testing required and it may be time to look for a more modern replacement – even though I don’t use it that much (and hardly at all professionally). There are a few new Fisheye being made for the mirrorless cameras that look interesting.

So I went back today with the rectilinear wide-angle. These are more complex (and expensive) wideangle lenses which try to correct for the natural distortion that a simple lens like the fisheye creates.

Again the aim here is to try and bring out the unusual structure of the bridge by using the extreme wide angle to exaggerate the geometry.

Railway Bridge at 14mm, fully corrected. The wide angle gets you in to the arch and shows up the shape while the rectilinear lens hold the horizontal lines as straight as possible. The black and white conversion brings your attention to the geometry of the stone work.

Hopefully it’s easy to see the different characteristics of these two lenses. Although the are very similar focal lengths, their rendering is quite different. The Nikon 14-24f2.8 has done a far better job of rendering the details and contrast of the image (in fact this was taken on the Z6 as an experiment and to take advantage of the maximum dynamic range).

I still like the Fisheye. I might put it back on the D700 and do some more testing before replacing my 16mm f3.5 AI-converted lens (which is nearly as old as I am!)

Freshwater Steps. The glory days of the 16f3.5 fisheye: paired with the Nikon F4e
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Work in Progress

I’m in the process of migrating the whole of my web site to WordPress.

And I’m doing it live, in phases so it might look a bit weird over the next few weeks. Please bear with me, it’s getting there. But there were sections that looked pants on your phone and I need to fix that.

So the main site is now be hosted on WordPress. I am steadily moving all the old content over to new pages and a new Gallery plug in. I then need to refresh some of the content – especially the images which go back some years now (but still look good!)

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Gentle Reminders

A reminder of how things were once

I’ve been sending out a few reminders to families who had sessions but not ordered prints.

I’ve never really done that before. I never want to put people under pressure. In fact I try to turn around a proof gallery as quickly as possible and then leave it to clients to come back to me. As with most things in life, everyone is different: some people come back straight away and want it sorted; for by far the majority of people with young families, life takes over and they put it to one side, fully intending to come back it. And in fairness most people do get around to it sooner or later.

Christmas is usually a trigger. Or the anniversary of the event. Or the next child’s communion or confirmation.

And look, I know what it’s like. You should see my ‘to do’ list. So I really don’t mind, as long as they eventually do come back. The one thing I don’t like is lovely pictures taken and forgotten forever.

But I do think that for some people, if they leave it too long, they are reluctant to come back to me for the sake for pure embarrassment. Please don’t feel that way.

So if you are one of the lucky clients who got an email this week, I hope you don’t think I’m nagging or badgering or trying to make a sale. I haven’t sent out reminders before because I don’t want to come across as pushy.

I just got that ‘disc full’ warning and had to kick off my periodic archive process: moving files from my working drive to the archive drive. Generally I keep images not yet printed handy on the working drive so I came across a number of sessions not yet printed.

But every session is kept on archive. It’s a time-consuming process but one which I think is vital for a professional service. Your images are always available, whenever you need to come back to them. Going back to 2008.

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Small and wide

What kit do you take on holiday? Do you just go with the phone and try to do justice with the semi-wide angle and reasonable image quality? Do you bring ‘all the gear’ and have to deal with getting on as hand luggage and lugging it around all the time?

I think I’ve finally hit on the best compromise (for me, for general holiday stuff anyway): I picked up the wide angle lens for my trusty, compact Nikon J5. It’s a very capable 1″ sensor and a pretty neat lens. The camera community never really loved the Nikon 1 series but neither had they anything bad to say about the image quality (or the focusing system – which was pretty ahead of itself). The biggest issue was price – and the second hand market has resolved that one!

So I pretty much took all my holiday snaps with this one combination. I’m a lover of the wide angles anyway and it suits most scenic work and it gives a different perspective to the standard views of most well-known places.

Nikon J5 + 6.7-13mm – the happy walk-around. Image straight out of camera