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Early morning order
Hotel Albuquerque, Sunday morning.
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Starting out as a Strobist
I’m a natural light guy. Or have been until now.
Hugely unimpressed by almost all uses of on-camera flash, and fascinated by the challenge of capturing the quality of real light in my scenes, I used to swear I’d never use a flash.
And for most of my work – on location children’s portraits – that works well, most of the time.
I choose the right time of day, and a good location in possible, and chase after the kids always trying to maximise the catch-lights in their eyes, and get some flattering natural light falling across their faces.
But sometimes that’s just not possible.
A little flash light bounced off a nearby wall or ceiling might open up their shadowy face and cut the chance for motion blur. Or used outside, it could open up some opportunities to work with the sun to get some good effects.
I think there’s a pattern here. When you’ve figured it all out for me, can you let me know? Save me having to read the books.
Today’s iPhone shot
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New audio slideshow – No Posing, No Costumes
Just finished a quick audio slideshow which outlines my approach to children’s portrait photography.
It’s called ‘No Posing, No Costumes’, and it will eventually live in an expanded part of the Services section of the site, but I wanted to post it now, while it was still hot from the Soundslides Export.
I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to share/link and all that.
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Big day in Northern New Mexico
So off we went to Salman Ranch south of Mora for some raspberry picking (see below). Many raspberries were both picked at eaten.
And thence to Victory Ranch a little further north – home to over 200 alpacas and llamas. Including this little dude and his mother – he was born prematurely a couple of days again, and he’s being bottle fed as he’s not strong enough to suckle yet.
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Interesting Photo project – Help-portrait
I like this idea. Photographers donate their time, expertise and prints around the holiday season, to give portraits to people who wouldn’t otherwise get them.
It looks like a grassroots kind of thing, with a loose central structure and real local organization. And amateurs and pros of all stripes are invited to take part.
I could certainly see how shooting and printing some children’s or babies’ portraits would be a really nice holiday gift for some folks.
I’ve just subscribed to the mailing list, so I’ll let you know if we get stuff going in Santa Fe. There are a lot of pro and serious amateur photographers around, so let’s see what we can do, shall we?
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Liking the look of mpixpro.com
I’ve just signed up for mpixpro.com, having been a very satisfied customer of their prosumer mpix.com printing service.
I’m impressed so far. They offer a ood range of products (including prints on fine art paper, and some funky looking acrylic prints).
Their site seems to be set up so that you can direct clients there to see all the product and print options, but without showing the prices. That way, if you’re adding markup (which you should be as a pro shooter), your clients won’t see that, but they can make informed choices about what they’d like.
Mpixpro also provide white-label PDFs which describe the different product types. If you put them on your own site, it would give clients lots of useful information without getting the in way of your own branding and service. Nice.
The calibration prints are on the way, but if they’re as spot-on as my previous mpix jobs have been, I think I might have found my new printing home, after much shopping around. Turns out it’s the big brother of the place I already loved.
