Author: David

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News

‘I probably won’t hit you, but just in case . . . ‘ – Photographing snowkiting for a magazine

A piece I wrote and photographed for New Mexico Magazine has appeared in the December issue – and getting the shots was a bit more intrepid than the work I normally do.

Back in March, I went up to a snowy field beside the Brazos Pass in northern New Mexico to talk to and photograph Stuart Penny, who teaches snowkiting – a fast-growing and exciting winter sport.

The snow was really deep – one step the crust on top would support you, but the next you’d be post-holing up to your crotch in the white stuff.

Stuart was teaching a class, and I hung out for a while watching him instruct his pupils on how to harness the wind to have them zooming across the the snow.

When the class was over, we talked about the sort of shots I wanted and how to get them. I wanted some wide establishing shots to show what the sport was about (both in landscape and portrait formats to give the designers options when it came to layout), some close-up portraits and then some shots of him in the air.

I’d not shot snowkiting before, so beforehand I’d checked online to see what other photographers were doing with it. This gave me a sense of some of the issues I’d face, and helped me visualize what I’d be looking for. One of the ideas I liked was getting the kiter in the air with the sun in the shot, too (shown here in the upper of my two beautiful sketches).

One question was that for the activity to make sense to people who’d not seen it before (like most of the New Mexico Magazine readers), I needed to show the ground, Stuart and the kite – shown in the lower of the two sketches.

Shots of him in the air without the ground or the kite would work well as supplementary images, but wouldn’t tell the whole story. I knew that this piece was likely to run only on one page (two if the images were good enough), so the establishing shots and portraits were the must-haves.

So with all this preparation, Stuart and I quickly came up with a plan. Based on the direction of the winds, he showed me how he’d go aways a little, turn around and then come straight at me. He said he’d stay on the ground for a couple of passes, before going round again and getting airborne.

‘I aim to go straight over your head,’ he said calmly. ‘I probably won’t hit you, but just in case, be ready to get out of the way quickly.’

This could be a problem, as running wasn’t an option. I figured if I had to, I could just fold myself over face down in the snow.

Stuart nailed his passes, and as he flew over my head I racked my 24-105mm lens as wide as I could and kept shooting (click on any of following images for a larger versions).

The snow acted as a great reflector throwing light up into his face, so even with the sun behind him, the images worked well.

Not a normal day at the office for me, but one I greatly enjoyed.

Here’s what that sketch of a snowkiter airborne with the sun turned into:

And I like this one with Stuart looking at us with snow coming off the back of his board.

And finally, the man on the ground:

The text of the article is here.

And you can learn more about Stuart on his site.

Categories
Articles Moore Consulting Photography

New Article and Photos for New Mexico Magazine

A piece I wrote and photographed for New Mexico Magazine has appeared in the December issue.

Back in March, I went up to Brazos Pass in northern New Mexico to talk to Stuart Penny, who teaches snowkiting — a fast-growing and exciting winter sport. I also photographed him in action.

I really enjoy the combination of writing and shooting a story — it lends a coherence to the finished work, as you can make sure to communicate in both media the key points you’re trying to get across, and use one type to illuminate the other.

In the past, I’ve written for New Mexico Magazine (like when they sent me on a cattle drive), or photographed for them (like this photograph of the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market), but this is the first time they’ve run a ‘words and pictures by’ story from me.

You can read the story on the magazine’s site.

And here’s more detail on how I got the shots (from my photography blog).

Categories
Children's portraits

Photographing older children – a girl and her dogs

Shooting older children can be more tricky in some ways than, say, preschoolers – the older kids are more self-conscious and (wisely) more suspicious of a bloke with a funny accent showing up with a bag of cameras.

It’s my job to try and make people feel comfortable, which I do in a number of ways. Some of it is just personality, and I talk to children pretty much as I’d talk to adults, which seems to go down well whatever age they are. I also start slowly, learning a little more about the girl or boy, and assessing their temperament.

I tend to meet them where I find them – if they’re quiet and subdued, I’ll be quieter and smaller in my gestures and suggestions. If they’re energetic and full of beans, I’ll be running around with them in no time.

Here are some images from a shoot earlier this year, where the subject Heather (I’m not using her real name, at her parents’ request) tolerated me very graciously. She’s funny and open, and loves dogs – we got on well.

Shot in her yard in the early morning, we picked spots where the angled light would be attractive but not too harsh, and I used a reflector both to bounce light up into her face when she was backlit, or to diffuse some of the harsher light in other spots.

I got stains on the knees of my trousers from kneeling down to capture Heather playing with her dogs, but only an idiot wears light trousers to a photoshoot, so I got what I deserved.

I was talking to Heather throughout the whole shoot, and a couple of times she had this great look as she thought about the silly question I’d just asked her. I was very glad I caught it:

The dogs were friendly and keen to play, so I spent a little time getting their portraits too.

After seeing the photographs, Heather’s mum said, ‘you have a wonderful way of making people feel comfortable, especially children. [Heather] was very open with you and that was reflected in the photos.’

I couldn’t wish for better feedback.

Categories
Creativity Tips/Tutorials

How I learned to get out my own way and shoot more

Why do we why find it so hard to do the things we know we should do? I don’t even mean exercising or eating the right things here – I’m just thinking about taking photographs.

As keen photographers of whatever stripe, you’d think we’d be out the whole time firing off shot after shot, especially now there’s no immediate cost to shooting one more digital image.

But I’ve found that unless I have a paying job, the cameras might stay in their bag from one week to the next. And the longer this goes on, the more grumpy I get.

So I came up with a two-fold plan to counteract this. The first stage was to buy the Olympus EPL-2 (part of the PEN series) and the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens and leave them in my laptop bag, so I’d always have a camera with me.

This stage wasn’t completely necessary, but I did leave the big lad at home more than I’d bring it, unless I was going out to shoot something specific.

The second step was to set myself a challenge to post eight images every week to a new Tumblr site I set up, called 8 Days a Week. A photo project was born

I thought that I’d be likely to fail if I made myself shoot every day, but I still wanted to make taking photographs into a habit, so delivering eight images every Monday seemed reasonable. That way, if there were three or four good shots from one day, and none for a couple of days, my system was flexible enough to deal with it.

I’m into my fourth week now, and it’s amazing what a feeling of obligation can do for you, even if it’s self-imposed. Our dog comes to the office with us most days, so I grab the camera while she’s getting her lunchtime walk, and at other times too I’m looking for images in a way I wasn’t before.

No Pressure

Most of the time I’m not thinking about whether the images are good or not, I’m just getting them in the camera, and I’ll worry about quality later. That way, there’s no pressure on me to produce – I can just follow my nose.

And coming up with only 8 images each week that I’ll be sharing with the world doesn’t seem that frightening.

Often it seems I don’t have the willpower to make myself do things when my internal resistance tells me that I have to work or that there’s no point taking these stupid shots anyway.

But I am a creature of habit, and if I can persuade myself that I’m just messing around anyway, I can sneak in some shooting before the resistance knows what’s happening. That, and it’s fun.

You can see all three weeks’ work here, or on the Clearing the Vision Facebook page

Do you have routines or customs that get you out shooting when you otherwise wouldn’t? Let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear them.

Categories
Children's portraits Tips/Tutorials

Telling richer stories – a hybrid video/stills approach to children’s photography

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what children’s photography is actually about. You’d think it has a simple answer – it’s about taking photos of kids (duh).

That’s what we do, but that’s not why we do it, whether we’re professionals or taking photographs of our own children. Clients of mine say they want the photographs for a number of reasons – for holiday cards, to send to the grandparents, to mark a birthday, but I think what they really want is to tell the story of their child at a particular time in their life, and (even more importantly) to show how much they love them.

That’s certainly why I do an annual photo session with my own daughter every Fall (here are some images from 2009’s session). We use the same place – our kind neighbor’s lovely garden – and over time these images will build up to an ongoing record of her as she grows and changes.

We want her to look good in the photographs, of course, but more, we want to look authentically like her which is a little different. When I’m showing clients the photographs from their sessions, I can sometimes predict the images they’re going to love, but just as often they see in some of them something about their child that I can’t see (because I don’t know them well enough). It might be a facial expression (‘that’s so him’) or an activity, but it’s something that means more to them than I could have predicted.

Which is why I don’t shoot in a studio and pose the children – I want them to be really them, not to be little models for the afternoon, so they look like themselves when the images come off the camera.

Deepening the Experience

If parents want to tell the story of their child, then still images are definitely one excellent way.

But I’ve also been looking at incorporating video into the mix too. So for this year’s shoot with my daughter, I asked her a few questions on camera, and edited her answers together with some stills.

The real value is not so much in her answers (though these will be nice to have in a few years’ time), but in watching her answer them. Hearing her voice, seeing how she moves – these are the things that bring her to life. The video elements, together with the stills, tell a richer story about her than the stills alone.

Not Hard to Do

This approach is something you can do easily – I shot the video on my Canon 5D II, using an external microphone (that wasn’t quite close enough to my daughter), but you could use any number of video shooting devices for it – iPhone, Flip, whatever. So long as it’s locked down on a tripod or something else similarly stable, you’ll be fine.

As with still photography, look for a spot where the light is relatively even and where the subject will looking out from shade to a brighter area, to get some catchlights that will make their eyes twinkle.

I edited it on iMovie on my Mac, using a free music track sourced from the great Vimeo music library.

I thought about stripping out the voice track and running her answers over some more photographs, but her facial expressions and reactions to the questions were so good that I just kept the audio and video together for the answers, and ducked the level of the audio track up for the photographs, and down for the video.

The grandparents completely loved it, and Fionnuala enjoyed the video session too. Definitely something to do for next year too. I’ll still be taking any number of still images, but I’m happy with the way the impromptu video session came out.

And if you’ve got some examples of a similar hybrid approach you’ve made yourself or seen elsewhere, I’d love to take a look at them.

 

Categories
Moore Consulting Photography

Rio Grande School uses photography to make their case

Good photography is crucial for school websites and other communications, but having worked with several schools on website projects, a common mistake I see is for the schools to think that any kind of photographs will work, so long as they include children.

Often there’s a big difference between what the images shows, and what the image says. It might show some students having fun on a project, but if it’s a poor quality image what it might actually say is more cluttered and confusing.

People are bombarded by mediocre images all the time, but the rarer good images still make an impact. The day in the life project (the link goes to my other site) I shot at Gentle Nudge preschool shows this well.

So when Rio Grande School in Santa Fe asked me to take some photographs for a mailer advertising a 7th Grade options evening, I was pleased to help. Even something as apparently simple as a postcard can communicate quality and trustworthiness if it’s done correctly, and communicate lack of care if it’s not.

The brief was to show some of the older children at work at Rio Grande (an elementary school), as these would be the kids whose futures would be explored at the meeting. The room where I was shooting was pretty dark and a little cramped, but I was pleased to deliver some high-quality shots, including the one the school and designer selected for the card that shows a couple of the children engaged and committed in their learning.

The visual busyness in the background is downplayed by being out of focus, and the composition highlights the girl, who has attractive catchlights (the white twinkles) in her eyes. She’s placed to the right of the frame to give her eyes some room to look into, and the papers she’s holding give some balance to the framing.

The boy in the shot helps fill the middle ground, and the focus of his attention underlines the girl’s — they’re both looking in the same direction.

It would have been easy to take some bad images in this tight space (and believe me, I did), but I think this one works well, and does a good job on the finished card.

If you’re interested in photography for your organization, I’d love to talk to you.

Categories
Mirrorless cameras News Reviews

Is There a Mirrorless Camera in Your Future?

The good folks at the monstrously successful Digital Photography School website have been kind enough to publish another of my articles. When I say successful, how does 713,000 subscribers sound?

This time, I look at the pros and cons of mirrorless cameras. The article begins:

Up until recently, there were two main paths you could take when choosing a digital camera. As we know, point and shoots offer affordability, small size and convenience, but the trade-offs are limited manual options and constrained image quality.

You can read the rest of the analysis over at Digital Photography School.

Categories
Mirrorless cameras Reviews

I can see clearly now – Olympus VF-2 Viewfinder Review

To update my last post on the subject, my experience with the Olympus PEN E-PL2 micro 4/3rds camera is going well. Perhaps the first thing to note is that I always have it in my bag, which is one of the main objectives.

I’ve taken it with me on a lunchtime dog walk, and have got into the habit of sticking it in jacket pockets when heading out the door without a bag. The excellent Panasonic LUMIX G 20mm f/1.7 lens is small enough that it makes the whole thing pocketable.

One things that was limiting my enjoyment, however, was the lack of a viewfinder.

For me, shooting using the LCD wasn’t working for several reasons:

  • shaky arms: If you’re trying to get things composed precisely, then having the camera out at arm’s length makes it hard to make subtle adjustments. With the camera jammed into your face, that fine control is easier.
  • bad eyes: The screen’s pretty good even in bright sun, but when you’re looking at it from a distance, then most things in your field of view aren’t the screen, making it harder to see all the details you’d get with a viewfinder
  • missing focus: I tend to use the center focus point, and then recompose the image when I’ve got focus. I do this on all my cameras, partly out of habit, but mainly because I don’t trust the camera to know what I want to focus on, and I’m quicker with focus-and-recompose than I would be trying to select a particular focus point. This is much harder to do on an LCD screen
  • force of habit: I’ve been looking through viewfinders for a long time. I like it in there.

The obvious solution was the the Olympus VF-2 electronic viewfinder, but at $230 or so, it isn’t cheap, and it does add to the bulk of the camera. So, is it worth it?

It definitely adds a decided lump to the top of the camera.

Like watching a movie

It’s an electronic viewfinder so what you see is exactly what the lens is seeing (as with an SLR) but it achieves this not by using mirrors but by containing a small screen inside the eyepiece. Genius.

In some ways it’s actually better than the optical viewfinder on a DSLR. Firstly, it more accurately shows depth of field without having to use a depth of field preview buttons (which I find never work that well anyway). Secondly, if you’ve chosen any of the Art Modes on the camera (I’m fond of the grainy black and white), the viewfinder image shows you what you’re actually going to get. So the black and white image shows as black and white.


There is an option to display the shot you’ve just taken in the viewfinder as well, but I find that gets in the way of taking the next shot, as you obviously can’t see the live view while the replay is showing. I either set the camera to replay the last image on the main LCD (like DSLRs can do), or just switch off the replay feature entirely.You can also set it to show a range of standard information alongside the image you’re composing – aperture, ISO, shutter speed, composition grid, battery life . . .

And for extra fun, the eyepiece tilts upwards for composing in awkward situations (or pretending you’re a submarine commander with a periscope).

Sturdy enough

Other reviewers have reported that since the viewfinder doesn’t actually lock (it just slides into the socket above the screen and into the flash hotshoe) it can be knocked off when you’re carrying the camera around.

It certainly could be a more solid connection (the newer but lower-spec Olympus VF-3 has a locking mechanism), but I’ve not had a problem with it yet.

Recommended, with a but

Even though it does make the camera a little bit more chunky, I like the viewfinder a lot, to the point where I haven’t taken it off the camera since it arrived.

For me, it increases the chances that I’ll get the shot I’m after, and makes the process of shooting it more enjoyable.

It’s worth noting though, that by the time you’ve bought the camera (my EPL2 was reduced because the EP3 and EPL3 had just been released), a fast prime and the viewfinder, you’re up near Fujifilm X100 territory.

The Fuji has a 35mm equivalent f/2 lens, a viewfinder that can switch between being optical and electronic, and looks like it came from the set of Mad Men. The PENs are smaller and more flexible (with the option of using interchangeable lenses, including mounts for some legacy option), but the Fuji’s sensor is larger, and it’s getting a lot of love.

I’m happy with my choice, but if you think you’re going to want the viewfinder for sure, then you might want to consider the Fuji or the Sony NEXs as well, before making your decision.

Categories
Tips/Tutorials

The Curse of the Thumbnail

How many new images did you look at today? How many of those were on websites, or on a tablet or iPhone? Probably too many to count, I’d guess.

A few years ago we consumed our photographs mostly in physical form – a few on TV or in movies but the vast majority in newspapers, books, magazines and billboards. And most of these we saw at a pretty good size.

Now, we get most of our images through the internet, and a lot of them we see are very small, at least initially. This is the curse of the thumbnail.

Read Simple

When we look at a page of thumbnails, some are obviously easier to ‘read’ at a small size than others. The simpler the image, the more it makes sense to us when we can’t see much detail. So simple images with tight crops, strong contrast and bold colors stand out. More complex composition and subtle palettes tend to get lost at this size.

Here’s a page from Flickr’s Explore section recently – my grab is reduce from actual size, so the effect is even greater, but which images are the most immediately compelling? For me, it’s the doll and the railway tracks. I can clearly discern what they’re about.

Some make almost no sense at all seen at this size – the bottom right dusty mechanical thing, for example.

So we gravitate towards the images we think we understand. This is a natural response when we don’t have enough detail to work out what we’re looking at – nobody likes to be confused.

When we click on the thumbnail we can understand, there’s often not that much more to explore when we get to the larger version. Being a simple image isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if that’s what you wanted to say and the image achieves this, then that’s fine.

But what if the photographer wanted to say something that took a bit more explaining? By jumping on the thumbnails of the simpler images, we’re often missing fantastic images.

Here’s a grab from my Flickr contacts recently:

From this selection, I might choose one of the concert images to look at larger. But I’d be tempted to skip over the black and white one second from the left on the top row,  because I can’t make it out at that size. Which would be a shame, as it’s a fantastic night time view of Mount Rushmore.

Similarly this is one of my favorite images from this summer (in thumbnail format):

Taken at my daughter’s ‘wizarding camp’ (they made their own cloaks, hats, spell books, wands and rings), it just doesn’t read well as a thumbnail.

But viewed large (as it is below), there’s enough detail for your eye to move around the shot, with the face of the girl on the right being the key element, contrasting with the ordered lines of the rest of the kids facing the other way. Compositionally, it’s not brilliant, but it rewards spending a little time with it.

If you’re as good as Jeff Ascough, however, with great composition that balances elements and leads the eye, seeing patterns as people move through a wedding, then your images really shine under careful examination of large versions. But seen among a bunch of other thumbnails, you might pass over them.

Trouble begins at home

To counter this, photographers are increasingly displaying their images as large as they can online. 1000 pixels wide is not uncommon in photo blogs (such as one of my new favourites Shoot Tokyo), and portfolios often include full-screen slideshow options.

The increasingly popular photosharing site 500px uses much larger thumbnails than Flickr (which has a real whiff of a dead man walking at the moment). But as long as there are web pages, there’ll be small online images, which do some of our images a disservice.

But the problem starts before the images even make it to the computer. We’re all so used to reviewing our images first using the small LCDs on the back of our digital cameras, and these have the same drawbacks as online thumbnails. Simple close-ups read better at that size than more complex compositions.

We like the reassurance that we’re on the right lines as we shoot, but when we respond positively to images that look good on the back of a camera, we (subconsciously I’m sure for most of us) gravitate towards taking those type of shots in the first place.

Think wide and deep

When I started shooting portraits, my first response was definitely like this – get in tight to the face, blur the background and be done with it. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, except if it’s your only approach.

Now I consciously try and look for compositions that show more of the subject and more of their environment. These often take more time to frame correctly – there’s a thin line between distracting clutter and evocative surroundings – and of course the subject’s face is smaller in the frame.

It’s harder to tell if these are working just by looking at the LCD after I’ve taken the image, but of course photographers for decades didn’t have this luxury and had to wait until they got back to the darkroom to see what they’d got. They had to see the shot in their mind before they made the image, rather than just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing that it looked like immediately afterwards.

We would do well to follow this approach. Slowing down when we shoot, visualizing shots in advance, instead of being led solely by the instant feedback from the LCD. We should start thinking a little wider in our compositions, and a little deeper when it comes to evaluating both our images, and other people’s when we see them online. Let’s lift the curse of the thumbnail.

Categories
Moore Consulting

New version of New Mexico Community Foundation site

We’re delighted to announce a new version of the site for the New Mexico Community Foundation.

Four years ago we worked on an earlier redesign of the site and we’ve maintained and updated the site in the meantime.

But with a new CEO and changing priorities, it was time for a major overhaul. Working with Eric Griego of Firestik Studio, we helped the NMCF identify their key audiences and objectives, and translate that into a structure for the new site that would be easy to navigate and expandable.

Firestik worked on the look and feel, with input from me on best-practice and practicalities, and I built out the infrastructure of the site, including a homepage slideshow, video and social media elements and online donations.

A key challenge was satisfying the different audiences for the site, including potential donors, professional advisors and potential grant-seekers working in other non-profits. Each group has different expectations, different levels of experience with non-profit processes, and uses different vocabulary.

Another key requirement was to show the excellent work the NMCF is involved in across the state, so the Impact section includes case studies and examples of the NMCF in action. Freelance writers Carmella Padilla and Megan Fleming worked on these stories and gathering and fine-tuning the rest of the content.

Excellent photography from Don Usner is used throughout the site.

This is an excellent example of the team approach that works well in larger projects, and underlines the importance of using high-quality writing and photography. Too often well-structured, well-designed sites are let down by poor photographs and hastily-written content.

The result of all our efforts is an attractive, well-written and easy to use site that elegantly satisfies a range of audiences, and drives involvement in the work of the Foundation in a number of ways.

Site address: nmcf.org